Tammy Butow

So I have been blogging for 5 years now, and it’s changed so much over time!

I thought I would write a post on some information around the different blogging platforms available and the positives and negatives of both… from my point of view <3

Hopefully that will help all of you out there who aren’t blogging to get into it!

WordPress

http://wordpress.org/

I am using wordpress for http://tammybutow.com/blog and http://makingstuffisfun.com. I find wordpress to be great for these blogs because I want to write a lot, share images and easily add plugins and change themes. It’s very easy to hack wordpress so you can really customise it to be what you want. I also like being able to host it myself… and then I don’t have to worry about it going down. I use bluehost to host all of my sites, and I have lots of sites because I like making apps!… and it’s only $6.95 a month. Or if you want to save a dollar a month, then go for host monster at $5.95 a month.  You can have as many websites you want for only $6.95 or $5.95 a month by creating a folder for each website and storing everything in there. You then buy the domain you want ($10 a year) and link it to that folder. Easy!

Key words that come to mind for wordpress:

Professional, custom, flexible, old-school

Tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/

Tumblr differs to wordpress because it’s social. It’s kind of like a mashup of twitter, facebook and wordpress. You follow people, they follow you back, you reblog their tumbles by easily clicking a single button. I use Tumblr for http://mobilemosh.com – So Tumblr is hosting my blog for me, and i’ve purchased a domain name to lihk to it ($10 a year through bluehost). I probably need to get into Tumblr more, it seems like it requires a fair amount of time and effort compared to other platforms because you are part of a community.

Key words that come to mind for Tumblr:

Trendy, fun, easy, custom, social, atmosphere, young, community

Blogger

http://www.blogger.com/

I’m not really a fan of blogger, I just don’t like it. I used to use it but I found it kind of annoying and not very flexible. Not many people seem to be using it these days.  The only nice use of blogger I have seen lately is Jess’ blog: http://www.makingjgb.com it makes Blogger look awesome! Google owns Blogger, and they could do some really amazing things with it… Here’s my old blogger http://butow.blogspot.com/

Key words that come to mind for Blogger:

Blank face, can-be-awesome-with-lots-of-tweaking

Other platforms that I’m not going to go into include Live Journal :p not even going there! And what were those Microsoft ones called? I can’t even remember? Live Sites?

Ciao
Tammy

Hai!

So Bec and I finally found an awesome house in Preston, and we are looking for someone to share it with us! It’s a 3 bedroom place right near Preston shopping centre and it’s got a sweet verandah and backyard too!

This is us, we like metal/hardcore & doing fun and awesome things! We met through roller derby (VRDL). I also really like programming and making apps! Therefore, our house will have sweet internet, very important!!

Here’s our house, which is amazing and has a very nice colour scheme!

If you think you would be an awesome housemate, please send me an email!

tammybutow@gmail.com

ciao

Tammy

Hello!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at OSDC2010 which was fantastic.

My talk was “Making Apps for Fun” and I spoke about the last 12 months where I have played with a lot of different APIs and created a lot of web and mobile apps for fun I chatted about setting goals, attending hack days / meetups and learning from others.

At the end of the talk rather than asking if anyone had any questions, I asked he audience to share their stories of making stuff for fun (I may have also bribed them with chocolate to talk hehe).

It was so great to hear what everyone has been building over the last few months. I always find it inspiring and amazing and a lot of people came up afterwards and said that I had inspired them as well which is fantastic!

I look forward to being able to blog about what everyone is making. I thought Graham’s CakeFest PhoneGap app which he made for a CakePHP conference was really awesome!

If you would like to be featured on http://makingstuffisfun.com please send me an email tammybutow@gmail dot com

Ciao,
Tammy

What do you get when you mash:

Soundwave Pirate Radio + Soundcloud API + HTML5 + Less Framework?

A mobile app that was super fun to create and super fun to use!

A mobile app that works on:

iPhone
Android
iPad

And what am I working on now?

- A way to support older devices that don’t yet support HTML5
- Collecting a list of HTML5 ready devices – do you know if a list of devices already exists?

The Soundwave Festival is a yearly nationwide music festival with bands coming from all over the world to play in Australian capital cities. It rules, and I love it!
http://soundwavefestival.com

I have a brand new blog that I’m putting together. It will have interviews, tutorials, audio-slideshows, videos, photos of anything related to tech, mobile, web, games development and design with a bit or marketing chucked in as well http://www.makingstuffisfun.com/

Looking forward to meeting lots of great people while creating content for Making Stuff is Fun. Already met heaps at GTUG Campout Melbourne and Freeplay Independent Games Festival – check out the audio slideshows on Making Stuff is Fun.
http://www.makingstuffisfun.com/

An awesome group of Melbourne locals interested in seeing what they can do with HTML5 in only a weekend. Things on the table include a Battleships style game, a mindmap app and an Android web app for visual searching. Tomorrow afternoon we will be able to see how they did and what they were able to create!

Chatting to a few of the talented folk who have been working on fantastic games over the last few years / months. We went to visit the Freeplay Independant Game Festival, which is being held at the State Library of Victoria all weekend. The Experimedia room is open to the public and you can go along and speak to the creators while playing their sweet games.

Just about to head to the Google Campout! This year the theme is HTML5 Looking forward to seeing what everyone is creating and also taking some photos! Freeplay is also on this weekend (Independant Game Festival) so I would like to check that out as well! This is a great weekend for Melbourne woo

Just got back from the MoMoMelbourne event which was awesome It was really great to hear from all the speakers about what they are working on the the mobile space. Everyone was pretty different too so that was great, there were iPhone game devs, web-based mobile devs, educational game devs to name a few!

It was also great timing that this event was on because I just got my first mac today! I’m really excited about it because I own an iPad and can’t wait to develop apps for it! Have already started playing around with that. Will make a few test apps just to learn some skills first before I decide on a project I want to create.

Will keep you posted!
Tammy