Hi, I’m Ben McRedmond, a transition year student who spent last week doing work experience in Contrast. Here’s a few things I learned during my week.
- I discovered Eoghan’s extreme dislike of user registration and login forms.
- I learnt that setting yourself deadlines works. I’ve had several projects die because they seemed to drag on forever. By setting myself small personal milestones for each day I got a lot more done.
- However, out of the whole week I think the biggest thing I learnt is how they taught me that “less is more”. To do one thing really well, instead of several things “kinda-okish”. You can always add to what you are making later.
I spent all of last week working on a little app with the guidance from Paul, Eoghan and Des and I am ready to announce it here.
The app is called Picomarks. I came about the idea after looking at all the big social bookmarking tools. Delicious being the most notable. All I want to do is bookmark stuff and for my friends to be able to see what I’ve bookmarked. I don’t want to fill out tags. I don’t want to put in a description. I just want to bookmark stuff.
So that is what Picomarks is all about. Simple and easy bookmarking.
Thanks to The Contrast Lads for such an awesome week.
19 Comments
@ben - Great stuff. Good man Ben.
@contrast - I love people who support the community like this. Great to see.
Posted by Robin Blandford at 11:23 am on 3 March, 2009.
Nice little app. Well done Ben!
Posted by Lee Munroe at 11:27 am on 3 March, 2009.
Cool! Good work. I’ll have to check that out after this meeting.
Posted by Matt Finucane at 11:34 am on 3 March, 2009.
Nice clean design and simple functionality - Well done!
Posted by Chris Gallagher at 11:38 am on 3 March, 2009.
Well done, looks and works great
Posted by Derek Organ at 11:46 am on 3 March, 2009.
Great job Ben, congrats!
Like the new Apple slogan goes “Solving life’s little dilemmas, one app at a time”.
You’ve definitely beaten my T.Y. work experience on The Den. Opening fan mail and grabbing coffee for Dustin. Unlike me, I’m sure this will really stand to you.
Posted by Iarfhlaith Kelly at 12:03 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Well done Ben and the Contrast team - i really like the idea of blogging your “Lessons Learnt” as well as announcing the app.
Posted by Wesley at 1:23 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Great little app. Well done Ben
Posted by Anthony McG at 2:07 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Nice work Ben, congrats.
Posted by Dave Cahill at 2:53 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Nice and easy. As a suggestion, you could use something like http://www.clickpass.com/ ( accept OpenID/Google/Facebook sign in) so the process is even faster.
Posted by Mihai at 4:16 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Fantastic web app Ben. I’ll be using it in the future.
Posted by Mike at 5:35 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Hello Ben! Good idea on the bookmarking. I think i could find that useful too.
Glad you had a good time at Contrast!
Posted by aimee.mychores.co.uk at 7:04 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Great app, congrats Ben
Posted by Grace Smith at 8:11 pm on 3 March, 2009.
Really love the tool, congrats to all involved! Just noticed one niggly little thing that could easily be sorted. When you drag the ‘bookmarklet’ to your browser, the title of it comes up as ‘Picomark’. I tried to access by bookmarks earlier by sticking http://www.picomark.com into my browser not realising it was http://www.picomarks.com. I’ve changed the text of my bookmarklet myself but it might resolve some frustrations if the ’s’ is added in on the bookmarklet. All the best with FOWA!
Posted by Steph at 5:35 pm on 5 March, 2009.
@steph interesting note. I was going with ‘picomark’ as a ‘verbized’ version of picomarks but I hear your point, will think about it. Thanks for the feedback!
Posted by Ben McRedmond at 8:16 pm on 6 March, 2009.
Excellent little tool Ben. Would you be willing to look at a version that has one more feature that we could use at work.
We are a not for profit organisation that have two locations and people who work remotely. This kind of tool but with the addition of categories would work perfectly for us.
Here is my write up of your tool:
http://www.3rdsectoronline.com/get-things-done/simple-bookmarking-tool/
I will also give it a link using the anchor ’social bookmarking’ on the socialprofilr.com,socioclick.com site and give another blog post over at wowjoomla.com just to express my appreciation of the brilliance of this tool.
Posted by Azzam at 3:43 pm on 7 March, 2009.
Great job, Ben. Hope to see you around more often ;P
BTW, did you use Django on this one?
Posted by David at 1:00 am on 8 April, 2009.
I am somewhat inspired by what you have created. Such a neat and simple web app
Thanks!
Posted by Hitesh at 8:49 am on 9 May, 2009.
Hey, ok, I get it, I guess - but does this really work?
Posted by D'Almert at 6:51 pm on 13 July, 2009.
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[...] with Contrast, an Ireland based web development team. The interesting thing he mentioned on the Contrast blog that the biggest thing that he learnt from his week experience is that ‘less is [...]
Posted by Simple bookmarking tool - Digitising The 3rd Sector at 3:39 pm on 7 March, 2009
[...] keeping track of these generally by using Ben McRedmond’s Picomarks service that he developed while doing work experience in Contrast (what a deliciously link-filled [...]
Posted by DeveLinks - 03-04-2009 | Ross Duggan at 6:24 pm on 3 April, 2009