Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Imaginary Foundation's new dresses

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/472667815/imaginary-foundation-3.html

Forrest Trans Our friends at the surrealist clothier Imaginary Foundation have launched a new line of women's dresses and tops. The fabric comes from their men's t-shirts patterned using a dye sublimation process that allows for gorgeous graphics without the thick feeling of most screenprints. The dresses and tops are lined with sustainable cotton. They're $60 each.
Imaginary Foundation dresses and tops

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The Critical Last Mile for SEO: Your Copywriters, Designers and Developers

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheInternetMarketingDriver/~3/471240622/critical-last-mile-for-seo-your.html

The last mile of SEO, your web developers and web designers.As I'm mapping out a half day SEO training course for creative and technical employees, I started to think about the importance of the last mile in SEO. In the telecommunications industry, the last mile (or final mile) refers to the final connection to end users (usually referring to data connectivity to businesses and consumers). It's often an area where issues can arise. In SEO, there's also a last mile, although it's slightly different. The last mile in SEO includes your copywriters, designers and developers. Let me give you a quick example. Let's say you were hired to help a company with a large SEO project. Your job was to enhance the company's SEO efforts by removing technical barriers, optimizing important categories of content, and increasing quality inbound links. You start by performing an extensive technical audit and you identify key barriers to indexation. Then you map out a full remediation plan. Your client is excited, you've built up some well-deserved credibility, and everyone involved believes that better rankings and targeted traffic are on their way. But hold on a second... Your changes still need to be implemented successfully. Enter the critical last mile for SEO, or your designers and developers that need to implement those changes. Needless to say, your technical and creative teams are extremely important to your SEO efforts. Why The Last Mile In SEO Is So Important It is critical that your creative and technical teams successfully implement your SEO changes. If they don't, then your changes run the risk of having no impact at all (or worse, having a negative impact). That's right, imagine you're brought in to fix a problem and you end up making things worse! It's definitely possible. Keep in mind that p! roblems typically arise in the last mile of SEO when dealing with larger sites when there are more people involved. For example, a 500,000 page website with 75 people working on it. However, whether you hand off technical SEO changes to a single developer or a team of developers, you're relying on them to implement something they might not be very familiar with. And you need to understand that without your designers and developers, it's going to be extremely hard to get your SEO changes implemented swiftly and accurately. Like I said earlier, they encompass the critical last mile… That said, your designers and developers also need to understand that your SEO changes are important to the success of the website. It's a symbiotic relationship and each party needs to understand the value that the other brings to the table.

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Gmail on your Google Desktop

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OfficialGmailBlog/~3/6LILiofOMfM/gmail-on-your-desktop.html

Posted by James Yum, Developer Programs Engineer, Google Desktop On the Google Desktop gadgets team, we've seen countless requests for a Gmail gadget over the years. That gadget is finally here, so if you've got Google Desktop for Windows, give it a try. You'll see that it covers the basics such as reading, searching, and sending messages. You can star messages, use the same keyboard shortcuts, and we didn't forget about contact auto-complete. It doesn't take up much space in your sidebar or desktop, and you can also resize it to show as few or as many messages as you'd like. When I'm at work, I keep two instances of the gadget open: one logged into my personal Gmail account and the other set to my Google Apps account for work related stuff. Instead of getting lost in a sea of tabs or browser windows, I can bring up the gadgets in an instant (hint: pressing the shift key twice brings up all your hidden Desktop gadgets). The Gmail gadget currently works with the latest release of Google Desktop for Windows. Try i! t out and please let us know what you think. Update: Changed title to clarify this is for Google Desktop.

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Syncing your Google Calendar

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OfficialGmailBlog/~3/VoZ_1mluHHo/syncing-your-google-calendar.html

Posted by Wen-Ai Yu, Support Strategist We on the Google Calendar team work hard to play well with others, so you can synchronize your calendars with a number of mobile devices and desktop applications. This way, you can choose whichever calendars you want to use and keep all of them up to date. Most of these options have been around for a while, and we're happy to announce that Google Calendar now supports the CalDAV protocol -- an evolving, open standard for calendar synchronization. Apple iCal and Mozilla Sunbird You can now sync your calendar with applications that support CalDAV, such as Apple's iCal and Mozilla's Sunbird. Learn more about how to get started in our help center. Microsoft Outlook Google Calendar Sync for Outlook lets you sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You determine the direction of information flow, as well as the sync frequency. It's compatible with Microsoft Outlook versions 2003 and 2007, and operating systems Windows XP and Windows Vista. BlackBerry mobile devices If you carry a BlackBerry smartphone, Google Sync for BlackBerry synchronizes your device's native calendar with Google. You can access your Google Calendar even when you don't have network coverage and get alerts for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration. It automatically runs in the background, so you can attend to other tasks and still be reminded of your appointments. Android devices

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Spice up your inbox with colors and themes

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OfficialGmailBlog/~3/_qa9949kqOc/spice-up-your-inbox-with-colors-and.html

Posted by Annie Chen, Gmail engineer Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven't been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we're launching today, there's a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There's even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers -- it's not exactly practical, but it's great for testing out your geek cred. We've also done a minor facelift to Gmail's default look to make it crisper and cleaner -- you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there. read more about colors and themes ...

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