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Django 1.0 has been released. Congratulations, guys! Check out the release notes for details of the (substantial) changes.

Adobe will be announcing CS4 on September 23rd (note: not releasing it, announcing it). You can register to view a webcast previewing CS4 on that day.

Pacman in YUI. Kris Cieslak has recreated Pacman entirely in JavaScript, using YUI.

As pretty much everyone has seen, Google Chrome is out now. I have to say, for a beta, it's in pretty good shape, and the reaction so far seems to be very positive. CNet reports that Google Chrome's JavaScript performance beats everything else - perhaps not a surprise given that the new V8 JavaScript VM is such an important part of this new browser. There has been lots of speculation as to why Google should want to release a browser: this opinion piece in Popular Mechanics is a good summary. Unlike the rest of us, lucky ol' Walt Mossberg has been playing with Chrome for a week; his is a pretty good write up. Finally, for the paranoid, Google's Matt Cutts attempts answer the most common objections to Chrome.

Google has posted some more info about Chrome on its blog. Apparently the comic book (which I posted about yesterday; you can check the comic out for yourself here) was released a little too early: the beta will be available soon. Early reaction has ranged from very positive to tinfoil hattery; personally I think we'll have to wait and see.

It looks like Google have been releasing details of their open source browser (based on WebKit) in comic-book form. Apparently, it includes its own JavaScript VM to help speed up scripts, and include Gears.

ppk has posted a roundup of improvements in DOM and CSS support in IE8 beta 2. In summary, Microsoft has made significant improvements in this beta, which shows commendable commitment to standards support in IE.

WolfenFlickr3D. Brilliant - a JavaScript Wolfenstein3D/Flickr mashup.

IE8 beta 2 has been released. For the curious, ppk has updated his CSS compatibility tables - looks like they will be going after full CSS 2.1 compliance.

Target has settled for $6 million in the American National Federation for the Blind's class action lawsuit over the inaccessibility of its site. This case has been going for years (since at least early 2006, I believe) and is an important one, because Target is such a big retailer. It's pleasing that Target have finally settled, but I agree with Bruce Lawson, the amount does seem quite small and the terms of the settlement could encourage companies like Target to consider accessibility as a matter of compliance, rather than considering the needs of people.

A great post from Mike McDerment on lesson learned at Freshbooks: 7 ways I've almost killed FreshBooks

Ubiquity is a new experiment from Mozilla Labs. It is effectively an extensible command-line interface for Firefox. For example, if you're typing an email with an address in it and want to insert a map, you just select the address, issue the "map" command and click "Insert map into page". This is only a 0.1 release, but it's extensible so it will be interesting to see how far this can go.

Aaron Swartz has written a great piece on how to launch software. Rather than going for the Hollywood Launch approach, as advocated by 37 Signals, Aaron's advocating what he calls the Gmail Launch (a soft launch).

Google Suggest is being rolled out to the google.com homepage. The project, which has been around since 2004 and provides as-you-type search suggestions has already been available through quite a few applications, such as Google Labs, the Firefox search box, and Google toolbar - Google have finally decided to make it available by default from the main search box.

Amazon have made available a new service called Elastic Block Store (EBS). These are basically persistent storage volumes you can use with EC2; a very useful addition (via). There's also a fairly detailed explanation on the RightScale blog.

Yahoo! Buzz, a digg-like social news site, is now open to the public - previously only a limited number of publishers could submit stories. Top stories are featured on the Yahoo! homepage, which should mean lots of traffic for publishers with stories that make it to the top of the pile.

The parties at FOWA are going to be bigger and better than ever. We are so pleased to have the support of Media Temple , official party sponsors of FOWA. They will be kicking things off on 9th Oct at Fox, and these guys know how to throw a party! Then the FOWA wrap party/Digg meetup follows Diggnation on the last day. Join the Digg gang, our fabulous speakers and, of course, the Carsonites at Fox to finish FOWA with a bang!

MobileCrunch have posted a video walk-through of the new Android emulator.

Two one-day Carson Workshops coming up in the UK: How to build Django web apps, presented by none other than Jeff Croft, in London on September 8th, and Learn how to build Symfony apps, presented by Carsonified's own awesome lead developer, Elliott Kember, in Bath on September 18th.

Check out some photos of Ryan's head shave on flickr - the live video and impromptu Q & A session went really well. Special thanks go to the totally awesome Matt Mullenweg who donated Â£1000. The total raised so far stands at Â£1,462, but it's not too late to donate - all proceeds go to accessibility charity, AbilityNet.

Flex Camp London is a free community-run event for anyone interested in Flex. It will be held on August 28.

Ryan Carson will be shaving his head for charity live on the ustream.tv today to raise money for AbilityNet, a charity that helps disabled adults and children to use the Web. Donate here.

From today, Twitter will no longer deliver outbound tweets from its UK number. They've figured out that the cost per user is a crazy $1000/year (and that's with the service capped at 250 SMS per week). This change does not affect Twitter SMS users in the US, Canada and India.

Archaeologist from Dipity is a neat visualization tool that lets you plot a timeline of Digg posts for any keyword. For example, here's Vitamin articles that have featured on Digg from the past couple of years

The first preview release of YUI 3.0 is now available for you to have a play with (note that this is not even a beta-quality release yet, so expect bugs) . It's not backwards-compatible with 2.x, with the first beta expected in December.

Scripting Enabled is a free 2-day accessibility hacking event (comprising a conference and hack day) in London on the 19th & 20th September. Check it out if you're interested in helping to make the Web a more accessible place.

Hi everyone! I'm Simon, and I'm Vitamin's new editor. Over the next few weeks, I'll be looking to publish more articles on the site, and there will probably be a few other changes too. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, ideas, or would like to write an article, please feel free to get in touch with me at editor@thinkvitamin.com.

Our friends at NMK have released details of idesign-08.

idesign 08 will showcase the best and most innovative work in the field and feature keynote speakers at the top of the profession. The programme is designed to be inspirational, informative and challenging. You will be a better interactive designer by the end of the day - or better able to understand the designers who work with you!

Early Bird Rates: Admission to the conference, the exhibition and portfolio clinic is currently available for just Â£60 (Â£50 for concessions). This price will rise in August, so don't delay.

Full details http://www.nmk.co.uk/event/2008/7/22/idesign-08

FOWA Expo 2008 is back in London 8th - 10th October.

If you would like to book and recieve a 15% discount please use this promo code when registering FOWA-VIT, http://london2008.futureofwebapps.com/book

You might have noticed Vitamin hasn't been very busy the last month or so. No worries, there'll be an article tomorrow, but it will be my last as Editor of Vitamin. I've really enjoyed working on the site this past year and I know Ryan and Co. will do just fine without me. Thanks to all the brilliant authors I got to meet and the great readers for all their feedback and support. If you'd like to keep up with my future projects — for whatever reason — feel free to subscribe to my personal site, I promise it's 1-post/month frequency won't overflow your inbox.

Calling all geeks from the west of England (and beyond) - come to BathCamp, this September 13. With talks, free beer and super schwag it looks set to be an awesome day. Sign up now as places are limited.

Peldi Guilizzoni's Profitable, in 3 weeks! goes into great detail about how, after just launching his one-man software company Balsamiq, he's already broken.

Lessons of YCombinator: Things I'd do differently after 2 startups is a good writeup by the founder of RescueTime about what he's done right and wrong, like "we didn’t get distracted", "we launched" and "we were different".

Paul Boag, host of the popular web focussed podcast Boag World has recently released the first chapter of his upcoming book, "The website owners manual", as a free downloadable PDF.

The book is aimed at website managers and tells them everything they need to know about running a successful website. It also acts as the perfect guide for web designers on how to educate and communicate effectively with clients so that they clearly understand their role in the project.

Buying the book now also allows you early access to new chapters as they are written as well as receiving a full copy of the book when published. You can also interact with the author to ask questions, provide feedback and shape the final manuscript on the author forum.

Full details are available at http://www.boagworld.com/websiteownersmanual/

If you work on the web you most likely treat yourself to a well designed t-shirt every now and again. I know I do. That's why I've been enjoying Rumplo lately, it's a great way to quickly browse for fantastic new tees, like this one or this one.

Don't quit your day job is a nice piece from Forbes about successful, profitable businesses started by people on the side when they still had full-time jobs.

We have reached the final day of Matt Week, ahhhhhhhhh! The Carsonified office is buzzing with excitement. The aim of the day is to launch Matt by 5.30pm. Pre-launch drinks are starting at 5.00pm, hooray I think we all need a beer! I asked Keir if he thought Matt would be up and running by 5.30pm and was very confident it would be. Although when I asked Elliott he said "I'll tell you at 5.30".

Mike who has been glued to his chair all week, said things were going really well! But it is midday so anything could happen between now and 5.30pm. Tune into Matt at 5.30pm to see if we have done it.

Mean while Matts PR team have created a buzz over the waves with people twittering about Matt and also blogging. Ryan has got an interview with the local paper tomorrow, to tell his experince of this past week! We have also got onto Digg, with the awesome time lapse video :)

The tension is too much will we do it, I hope so!

Until 5.30pm - The Carsonified Team

Where has this week gone, eek!! We have hit the end of day three already. I must admit the atmosphere in the office today has been a lot less jokey and a bit more tense as everyone is working away like busy beavers.

Keir and Elliott were behind schedule from yesterday, but their aim for today was to create a live working dev version of Matt. How did they get with this huge task? They had not quite got there, but were very close. Keir was pleased at the progress and said "We have completed the functionality, intergrating templates and are now looking into schedule's for tweeting". When asked the struggles of the day keir replied, "form intergration were a problem due to the lack of Django knowledge". So it seemed a day of getting there heads down had paid off, welldone guys.

Mike was also a bit behind from yesterday, his task of the day was to produce finished templates for the site, and web app templates in HTML. Mike had actually almost achieved this and was very pleased with the results, which is fantastic. The biggest hold back for him was the lack of time to be creative with the whole project.

Matts PR team had made great progress with the local press getting them involved. Ryan is going to writing about this experince for TechCrunch tomorrow. A few peeps will be joining us for the launch. Brilliant!

All in all a very busy day, but the progress is great, after yesterdays set backs we have caughtup and it looks like Matt could launch on time, fingers and toes crossed.

Until tomorrow - The Carsonified team

I missed this the first time around but The paper version of the web is a great collection of early UI sketches from Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr and more.

Well we are nearing the end of day 2 for the Matt app.

So just how are the Carsonified team getting along with this 4 day challenge of building a web app?

Today Mike the designer was given the target to finish the home page and 1 application page. You'll be pleased to now he completed the home page for Matt, hooray for Mike! But he hasn't managed to complete 1 application page by today eek, but Mike said "I spent more time on the design than allocated for the home page, but I really feel it's worth it". But will it be worth it, if we do not finish the design by Thursday?

On the developer side Keir and Elliott were given the task of completing a working version of Matt. Have they completed their challenge of the day? No. But don't panic they are nearly there and are pretty confident that they will have a working version tomorrow! Go on boys! When I asked them the problems they encountered today Elliott said "There were issues with the setups, earlier today, but now we are making progress and tying up the last bits together".

With copy and Marketing everything is going swimmingly, although we are looking for some press to come along to the launch, we have sent out e-mails and made calls just awaiting to here back, fingers crossed.
Until tomorrow......Carsonified team :)

Adrian Holovaty's startup EveryBlock has expanded their hyperlocal news coverage to include Charlotte (which is neat since I live just an hour away) and Philadelphia.

Welcome to Matt week This week the whole Carsonified team are rising to the challenge of building a web application called Matt, in just four days. We are going to launch this on Thursday 3rd July ahhhhhh. The whole office has switched off their phone and e-mail, and each have a part to play in building this web app. Matt is going to help Twitter users to manage their posting to multiple accounts. The application is being built in the Django framework because it is fun and exciting (and Natasha likes the name). The whole development process is being documented in a variety of media and can be followed on Matt We are giving the 2 developers and the designer deadlines for each day, this is not only a fun team building experience, but it is interesting to see if our designer can rush his creative flare and our developers can learn a new code in one week, can the Matt PR team market this web appliaction in a week?? Hmmm only time will tell. By the end of day 2 Elliott and Keir (the developers) target is to produce a working version of Matt, will they do it? Mike (the designer) target is to complete the home page design, and 1 application page. I shall share with you, at the end of the day if they have achieved these tasks and what have been the biggest hurdles etc of the day! Carsonified team :)

Some parallels can definitely be made between this article about the Wii making money off every console they sell (as compared to Sony losing 3 billion USD on the PS3) and web companies like 37signals (as compared to, say, Ning).

A great quote from Fast Company's interview with FriendFeed's Bret Taylor from a couple weeks back: "Natural word of mouth marketing only comes if you’re constantly improving your product, addressing people’s concerns, and getting real usage and feedback." I'd never thought about word of mouth being so connected to iterative development before, but it makes sense.

The website is down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude.

Need a golden ratio calculation, like, now? Golden Ratio Calculator to the rescue.

Postmortem is a post by Jonathan Tang at Diary of a Failed Startup that takes a deeper, behind-the-curtain look at the reasons for a startup's failure (in this case the startup is GameClay, a self funded startup Tang started a year-and-a-half ago).

This is actually a "top 10"-type article worth reading. John Osher, serial entrepeneur and inventor of the SpinBrush, wrote 17 mistakes startups make, a list of "everything I'd done wrong and [had] seen other entrepreneurs do wrong."

We’re currently looking for a really talented Editor/Publisher for ThinkVitamin.com

We are looking for a person who loves their words to look after Carsonified’s award winning Online magazine Vitamin.

The role requires you to commission brilliant writers, from around the globe. Edit copy. Manage the revenue. You would also have great input into the structure and content of the magazine.

Preferably you would have a passion for the web and a knowledge of web designers, developers and entrepreneurs.

This position is based in Carsonified’s HQ in beautiful Bath

If you would like to apply please send your CV’s to natasha at carsonified dot com, http://carsonified.com/jobs

Two big pieces of news on Django today. First, Django's now run by a non-profit organization, much like Firefox, Apache, etc. are. And two, Django will go 1.0 in September. Good news all around for my favorite new web app framework.

This is procrastination.

The NYT's "In the Hunt" column "profiled three new small businesses ... with the promise to report on their progress after six months and again after one year ... it has not been an easy six months."

According to Hitwise blog traffic's reached an all-time high in the UK. I guess that's really no surprise, and I'd guess next year and the next are going to be more of the same.

If you couldn't spare time during the working day to watch a live stream, take a few minutes now to watch today's WWDC keynote address and see some of the really iPhone impressive demos and games.

Looking Back: How different groups voted is an impressive coupling of informative and innovative. Easily one of the best news graphics I've seen in a long time.

If you haven't played around with 280 Slides yet do yourself a favor and give it a spin. It's run by ex-Apple employees and their attention to detail is impressive.

How much do you make? is an attempt at gathering anonymous salary data based on location, occupation and industry.

Dave Shea of Mezzoblue has redesigned his company site Bright Creative and it's a nice one.

Blogoscoped's interview with Kevin Fox (designer for Gmail, Google Calendar and the redesign of Google Reader and now emplyee at FriendFeed) is a great look at web usability, what life was like at Google pre-IPO and now his experience at startup FriendFeed.

Been wondering whatever happened to Boo.com, Pets.com or Webvan after the bubble burst in 2000? Well wonder no more because the Industry Standard has done the research for you with Where are they now?.

If you like learning by watching rather than reading, The Pragmatic Programmers have released the first of their new screencasts products, with step-by-step visual instructions on Erlang, Expression Engine and more.

Speed up your Ajax apps using Google's infrastructure with the Ajax Libraries API.

If you haven't yet seen Cameron Adams' new project Cubescape, do yourself a favor and check out some of the highlights.

I have a couple of GelaSkins already protecting my MacBook and iPod that I'm very happy with but these Eboy skins at Skinizi are almost too nice to pass up.

Philip Guo on Why Python is a great language for teaching beginners in introductory programming classes.

Flickr, Pownce and OpenDNS programmers released oEmbed last week a "simple API [that] allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly."

Been itching to learn some color wheel history? Well then Colour Lovers has the ointment.

Kyle Meyer gives his initial impressions (and takes lots of nice screenshots) of Silverback.

Why Yelp Works. "Yelp understood that, as with Wikipedia, a small group of people can create something that the rest of us can take advantage of."

Graphic Leftovers is a "haven where professional designers and illustrators sell or donate their unused, unsold or unfairly rejected pieces of art online." Nice idea.

NETTUTS, a new site from the same group that does Freelance Switch and PSDTUTS, has a nice post up about its development and design called 7 Crucial Tips for Designing and Maintaining a Large Site.

Derek Sivers (owner/operator of CDBaby) covers cloud computing, Google's mailserver features, businesses not needing employees and more with his post Some things I’ve learned this year that turned my world upside-down and I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

Seth Godin's Avoiding the Passion Pop Gulf is a nice post about either catering to the edgy/obsessed crowd or the vapid/trite crowd — and making sure you don't end up catering to neither.

Techdirt's Is The Era Of The Amateur Blogger Over? and Megan McArdle's Blogging goes professional are two interesting looks at how blogging has changed over the last 5 or 6 years.

Who Should I Follow? is a cool Twitter app that gives you recommendations of people to follow based on people you're already following.

Wake Up Later's The Evolution of Websites looks at how 10 sites — Apple, Amazon, etc. — have and haven't changed over the years.

Even though there's nothing to see yet, Yahoo! joins Google and Amazon in the brave new world of cloud computing by rolling out their welcome mat to developers with Yahoo! Open Strategy.

A really cool example of both parallax scrolling and using Twitter to market an app at We All Hate Quickbooks, developed by Less Accounting (via Dan).

If you weren't at Startup School and don't have the time or inclination to watch all the videos, here's a good roundup of the key points from the day in just a few paragraphs.

Structured Procrastination and How to Get Things Done are two great looks at how to use procrastination to your advantage. I especially liked this bit from the former, "[p]rocrastinators often ... try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation."

If you're going to be at Startup School tomorrow and want to hang out during lunch or something, feel free to send me an email at adam at thinkvitamin.

Jeremy Keith's detailed Future of Web Design blog coverage.

AdAge's It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content Is King is an interesting look on the "no reporting, all aggregating" trend that sites like Hacker News and TechMeme, as well as more focused efforts like EveryBlock, have obviously capitalized on in the past few years.

Lately have you found yourself looking for yet another reason not to use Windows Vista? Well, here you go.

Are you wary of trying out Google App Engine due to the lock-in concerns? Well, on top of the fact that its open source, it's already been ported to Amazon's EC2 infastructure. So, you know, don't be.

Anyone else impressed with Hulu as of late? They seem to have overcome the initial rush of bad press and are creating a really useful, and valuable, site.

Using Django with Google App Engine. Step by step walkthrough of getting a Django project up on GAE, a great counterpart to the GAE docs.

Blue Flavor co-founder Brian Fling is leaving to form his own company, Fling Media, and he's already started a cool new project in Six Sites.

These Web Development bookmarklets might be old news to some, but I've somehow never seen them before. The "test styles" one is especially handy because it lets you tweak CSS without worrying about losing your changes when you switch tabs, unlike Web Developer Toolbar.

Lots of chatter recently about the web standards crowd choosing Django and the growing Django trend. And when it hits 1.0 this year the buzz will only get louder.

EveryBlock on how they used open source programs like TileCache, OpenLayers and Mapnik to create their own mapping platform (example here).

Don't forget, your April Fool's Day joke continues to suck.

WordPress 2.5 is out and after using it for a few posts, I think I like it a lot. The ability to upload a folder of images is a godsend for my family blog and Happy Cog's admin revamp is not only cleaner, it feels a lot snappier, too.

Are you as excited as I am about Pixar's upcoming WALL•E? Then you'll probably really like these fun and lovingly designed promo postcards.

Kulveer Taggar — one of the founders of Auctomatic, a Y Combinator company recently bought for $5 million — writes about the acquisition process in the article From Oxford to Silicon Valley, part six.

A big, and helpfully illustrated list, of 45+ "fresh out of the oven" jQuery plugins.

A couple of competing points of view today with Five reasons why a recession is a good time to start a company and Matt Maroon's Why not to do a startup.

InformationWeek's article Solo Entrepreneurs: Big Bucks From Tiny Computing Startups profiles "one-person companies that are currently reaping more than $1 million in revenues annually." It also introduced me to Working Solo, a site I'd never heard of before.

I'm back from vacation so news posts and articles are now back on schedule. Clickpass — you might remember Peter Nixey's Vitamin article about Clickpass last year — launched last week and founder and CTO Immad Akhund gives a post-mortem of the launch here.

The Acid3 test has been released — here's what it's supposed to look like — and every current browser fails it miserably.

CodePad is a cool little app that runs code for you in multiple languages and lets you permalink it, like this.

It's Friday, time for new designs. Colibri (I really like the header background ... and the typing bird), Elston Hardwood Flooring (straight-forward and, dare I say, polished ... zing!), Vectips (well executed blog design complete with a very excited guy on the computer), cleanhotdry (the label logo is so nice and understated), StrawPoll (another well designed and thought-out Twitter piggyback app).

Much like an opensource project, FriendFeed is publishing its changelog so users can see daily what bugs are being fixed and features being added. Nice bit of transparency, even though it might be a little too technical for regular users to parse.

Though I think the clock in the top right is a bit much, the BBC's redesign of their new customizable homepage is otherwise very impressive.

It may be a little bit frothy, but Brainstorming over bagels is still an interesting read (Update: Hrm, sorry, looks like it's already gone behind the subscription wall, man what a genius business model ... bugmenot!).

5 of the best new designs from this and last week: AIGA LA (unecessarily uses tables, but still looks great and is complete with a dozen or so different skins), discountbox (icony goodness), C82 (the gorgeous blockup really makes the site), PrintHuge (pretty, even if it is unfortunately "optimized for Firefox"), Sundance Documentary Film Program (an Electric Pulp production and another great blockup).

No offense to Dan's Foamee but I think Commuter Feed is the first really useful "Twitter piggyback" service I've seen. Just twitter "@commuter(SPACE) citycode(SPACE) incident" and people who are subscribed to your city will see your latest traffic updates.

Join us in London and learn the secrets of giving your sites and web applications the rich interactivity they deserve. Our next one day workshop "Professional JavaScript and Ajax" by Thomas Fuchs, author of script.aculo.us and Rails core member, will provide real-world examples and practical knowledge to enable you to make the jump to using Ajax and JavaScript.

Find out more about the workshop on the Carson Workshops web site.

This link from waxy is supposedly old but it's new to Andy as well as me. File Destructor 2.0 creates fake trashed files — examples being .doc, .zip, .ppt, .xls, etc. — so you can blame that missed deadline on a faulty computer.

Carsonified is looking for a tremendously talented web designer who is passionate about Web Standards, accessibility, blogging and beautiful hand-coded CSS and XHTML (print design experience is also a bonus).

We work a 4-day week, give you 35 days holiday and give you great gear (iPhone, 23" Cinema Display, MacBook Pro and Aeron Chair). One of your first jobs will be do re-design Vitamin :) Please note that you'll need to work from our nice new office in Bath, UK.

You can apply today - move fast as the job will probably get filled quite quickly.

Tell us what you think of Vitamin by filling in our 2008 Reader Survey and you could win a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and a free ticket to any of our forthcoming events.

Looks like Amazon's had their first big AWS outage. Down for 2.5 hours early this morning and not much communication so far from them as to what the problem was. It'll be interesting to see what the reaction is.

A good interview with EveryBlock founder and Django creator Adrian Holovaty touches on the most challenging parts of EveryBlock, why they built their own mapping application and the open-source nature of the app due to the grant money they used to build it.

Garrett Dimon's blogging the rest of the development process for his upcoming bug tracking app at new company site NextUpdate. Most likely worth a subscription.

Interesting tidbit from the NY Times article Small Companies are Finding a Home on the Web: "[i]n its first survey of small-business Web sites last April, Jupiter Research found that just 36 percent of all businesses with fewer than 100 employees had a Web presence". Huh.

Netdiver has just released their top 100 designs for 2007. Great list for browsing.

What better way to gear up for the week ahead then to look back at the week that was in new designs? Il Frutteto (click on a nav link, mmm, JQuery goodness), Griffin Technologies (a refreshingly constrained corporate site), Chyrp (YAWDCMSS: Yet Another Well Designed CMS Site), Deaxon (I believe it's what you'd call "polished"), Vineyard Vines (absolutely nails the white and blue beach aesthetic) and Impress Lab (paper and paper clips done well).

If you love the web industry and want to lead DropSend, a small web app start-up ... we've got a job for you. Benefits include: 4-day work week, your very own iPhone, 23" Cinema Display, Aeron Chair, MacBook Pro, traveling with the team to Miami, NYC, London and a company pension plan. Read more about the job.

Heroku. Build, test and deploy Rails apps without ever leaving Firefox. Wow, what an app. If this had been around 3 years ago, all those hours and days of frustration getting a server up and running (again!) or updating my local environment (again!) could have instead been used to do productive design and development.

Matt Webb and Tom Armitage are working on a new idea they've called Snap — it's essentially RSS for doing stuff. An example would be if you could use your RSS reader to not only track incoming bugs for an app, but also accept them and assign them, all inside the reader. A presentation on the idea is here.

It's almost weekend, and what better way to spend Saturday and Sunday than looking at the best new designs of the past week? NOFRKS (the day and night themes are a nice touch), Design Sponge (no sponges, but plenty of fabric background images), Protagonize (what a great name for a site about writing, looks nice too), TillyMoss (homemade MacBook covers stylishly presented) and Sideshow (clean site with a lovely blockup).

All our Conference in a Box packs for past events, Future of Web Apps Expo London 2007,and FOWD London and NYC 2007 are now only $150. You get all the video presentations from the day, plus the presentation files from each speaker.

Etsy — a truly impressive company and community, and one of my favorite sites to get lost in, browsing through people's handmade products — announced its new round of funding on its blog complete with a companion video of a reading of the children's book Swimmy. Great news for a very cool company.

With the day winding down why not sit back for a few minutes and watch Gabe and Max's How To Get the Dreamlife of Your Dreams Using the Internet? Their 430 part system is the total system you need!

Five of the best new designs from the last couple of weeks: Beach Freak (very nicely done header, though the wear on the surfboard looks a little off), Krysáci (you just can't beat animated Czech mice), Why We Whisper (very well layed out and organized book site), Bookkeeping in a Box (the colors! the illustration! the ... accounting kit!?) and Vision Forum Ministries (what is it about well done Christian websites? Web 2.0 could learn a little something from the Lord).

"What's happening in my neighborhood?" That's the question newly launched EveryBlock — founded by Adrian Holovaty — hopes to answer, starting with the Chicago, New York and San Fransisco areas.

12 Things You Wish You'd Known Before Building a Web App - is now available on SlideShare

In case you missed it, Scott Shane's post over at Guy Kawasaki's blog earlier this month is full of interesting stuff. Like "[t]he typical start-up only requires about $25,000 to get going", "the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower" and "[o]nly the top ten percent of entrepreneurs earn more money than employees."