Welcome to the first of my weekly social media round-ups – kind of the ‘what’s hot and what’s not’ of the SitePoint community. I’ll let you know what we’ve been up to at the forums, what to watch out for, what’s trending on Twitter and what’s up on Facebook.
The hot date this week (so wear something pretty) is the latest in our Talk With The Experts sessions. We’ll be talking jQuery with Craig Sharkie & Earle Castledine (authors of our jQuery: From Novice to Ninja books). Find out where and when it’s on here. This is one you don’t want to miss.
This week Fontroversy has you buzzing out on Twitter (for those of you that follow @DesignFestival). Love it or hate it, it has to be said that Comic Sans gets you talking. Here is what you’ve been saying:
According to Don O’Shea “Some of the revulsion toward Comic Sans seems to be nothing more than FontSnobbery”. I wonder what Don would think of ‘Copperplate Gothic Bold’ who says “It is a fact there is no use for comic sans for any use…period. It’s a joke that it’s even a font. I can’t think of a worse font because comic sans is the worst”.
My personal favourite take on the subject is a tweet from @G0ddessM0ther who says ‘The rebel in me wants to figure out how to get all my tweets to show up in Comic Sans…”
One of the most popular posts I’ve made on Facebook this week was a tool that our designer Alex loves. Check out SpritePad for all your CSS sprite creation needs.
Last Wednesday and Thursday saw a bunch of SitePoint staff head off to Web Directions Code where we ran a Twitter competition. Entrants had to snap a pic with a SitePointer and tweet it in order to go into the draw to win a Kindle Fire. Search our hastag #lovesitepoint to see the entries. The lucky winner was @itsthelisa. Here she is with our Technical Editor Di.
Both our Community Blog and Facebook got a bit excited over our inaugural caption competition Name That Pic.
Lots of you came up with hilarious entries, but my favourites from the Facebook contest were Mike Brady with “Ok, do you see a black cable? Just plug it in to the back of the monitor..” and Suzanne Bradley with “my other computer is a laptop.”
The winners onsite were Matt Asbury with “If WordPress did wiring…” and Timothy Jack with “Sorry, this is the wrong desk. We are going to have to get you to re-setup over there.” Those guys all took away digital copies of PHP Master : Write Cutting Edge Code. Keep your eyes open for a new image this week.
The last thing to keep on your radar at the moment is my ‘Twitter sprinkle”. Aptly named by our Marketing Manager Mick, because it involves randomly ‘sprinkling’ free books around, just because I can (ok – and to get retweets).
So that’s what you’re saying this week. I’ll be back next week with more from the Community.
Sarah HawkFormerly a developer in the corporate world, HAWK (known as Sarah by her mother) said goodbye to the code and succumbed to the lure of social media to become the Community Manager for the SitePoint network. Now Hawk is working with Discourse to build their product and community.
