Ben Brown

My Angry Cloud pixel art teeshirt - available here - is seen in...

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:25:00 -0400

My Angry Cloud pixel art teeshirt - available here - is seen in AMAZING ACTION in a bunch animated gifs by Jackson West for his piece, “Smokin’ Fast: The Walgreens Workout, As Seen On The Internet”

Bugs doing weird bug butt things.

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:31:57 -0400

Bugs doing weird bug butt things.

Photos from a few days at the great new web designer event here...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:06:00 -0400

Photos from a few days at the great new web designer event here in Austin, Artifact.

1. Photo of me and Andy Pratt by Jeff Robbins.

2. The fabulous Jennifer Robbins, who put created the event.

3. Responsive web design guru Brad Frost and his huge asshole.

8x8pixels: A little side project I call “Worf Watching” over...

Fri, 10 May 2013 23:57:47 -0400

8x8pixels:

A little side project I call “Worf Watching” over here —>

Well this is just amazing: squiggle-vision comics of scenes from Star Trek: TNG featuring Worf.

I found another great use for my tiny web browser app, Little...

Fri, 10 May 2013 21:04:00 -0400

I found another great use for my tiny web browser app, Little Bro. My coworkers love it!!

xoxco: Watch Ben Brown’s talk on reader aware design, and...

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:55:00 -0400

xoxco:

Watch Ben Brown’s talk on reader aware design, and building a valuable back catalog with the content in your website’s archives. This talk was originally presented at Austin’s Refresh meetup, and is now brought to you by Austin Tech Videos.

View the slides for this presentation here.

Read more about the concept of reader aware design or jump right in with our JavaScript tool, Aware.js.

Need a way to better merchandise the content you are creating? Sign up for Packa.gr, our multi-platform, multi-format publishing tool that can turn content from your existing website into premium digital formats like ebooks and iOS apps.

I am so stoked that my talk from last month is finally available online. Watch and learn!

Preview: Packagr’s cover management screen makes it easy to...

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:07:46 -0400

Packagr handles all image resizing, creating optimized sizes and formats for each platform.

Images can be cropped in-browser, allowing a single image to be used in multiple settings.

Preview:

Packagr’s cover management screen makes it easy to create great looking multi-platform, multi-format publications.

I come face to face with Elijah Wood a few times a week these...

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:19:00 -0400

I come face to face with Elijah Wood a few times a week these days, and in my mind, this is what happens every single time.

xoxco: This is a screenshot of the publish page inside Packagr,...

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:33:14 -0400

xoxco:

This is a screenshot of the publish page inside Packagr, our multi-platform digital publishing tool. Packagr helps people turn the content they’re creating into beautiful products like ebooks and iOS apps that work on a variety of devices, and can be sold in app stores - a great way to get lasting value out of the things we post online.

I am so excited about our work on Packagr, and even more excited to see the type of publications that it will soon help launch!

Ghost Duck

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:01:41 -0400

Ghost Duck

This is one of my favorite slides from the talk I gave a few...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:34:15 -0400

This is one of my favorite slides from the talk I gave a few weeks ago.

5by5 | The Big Web Show #88: Greg Storey

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:34:41 -0400

5by5 | The Big Web Show #88: Greg Storey:

Everyone must rush out and listen to the latest episode of The Big Web Show, during which web pioneers Jeffrey Zeldman and Greg Storey of Happy Cog discuss the work we’ve been doing at XOXCO on Packagr. Greg says some very nice things about our new publishing tool.

jexmusa: #refreshaustin @benbrown “content has a life cycle”...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:40:12 -0400

jexmusa:

#refreshaustin @benbrown “content has a life cycle” (at Capital Factory)

This video shows the slides for my hour long talk on reader...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:49:02 -0400

This video shows the slides for my hour long talk on reader aware design and building a back catalog, to be delivered at tonight’s Refresh Austin event, compressed down into 10 seconds.

"It would seem that Katie is a time-release crazy. Last night, after we had sex in the hot tub, she..."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:21:00 -0400

“

It would seem that Katie is a time-release crazy. Last night, after we had sex in the hot tub, she got all quiet and wanted to talk about our relationship. She told me that she’s in love with me and how she wanted to move to Iowa with me after the show ends.

I was like, WHOA! It’s only been three weeks and all of a sudden she wants to have my babies. I don’t even want babies. Our priorities are totally different. I told her that you can’t be an on screen personality and have a girlfriend, and that I thought we were just having fun while we were on the show. She started crying and locked herself in the confessional for three hours.

That is not going to play well to the audience.

”

- From My Real World Diary By Ben Brown, circa 2003.

Please note that this is NOT about my wonderful wife Katie, but rather about a make believe person in no way based on Katie herself or any experience she or I ever had, together or separately.

But 2003 Ben, I want to tell you that you are awesome for putting stuff like this on the internet for 2013 Ben to find. You made the right decision, bro.

Photo

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:42:25 -0400

This is the cover for XOXCO Dispatch #2, which will go out to...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:38:00 -0400

This is the cover for XOXCO Dispatch #2, which will go out to subscribers sometime early next week. Great design work by Bushra Mahmood for the lead article by Adam Mathes. Are you signed up to receive this issue?

comicsonnetflix: Justice League Anything’s possible in this...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:02:00 -0400

comicsonnetflix:

Justice League

Anything’s possible in this animated series when world-famous superheroes — including Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Batman and Robin — band together to fight crime as the Justice League of America.

This is a great show! I just watched the first 3-episode arc, and it was almost as good as the live action Avengers movie.

There are actually a bunch of new super hero cartoons on Netflix, including this one, Justice League Unlimited, Batman Beyond, and Batman: The Brave and Bold. Check Comics on Netflix for the full list.

Where do old posts go when they die?

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:15:44 -0400

This post originally appeared as part of XOXCO Dispatch #1. Sign up now to be among the first to read our posts.

It is amazing how much content is poured onto the web every day. Just yesterday, our friends over at Pando Daily posted nearly 9,000 words of original writing on their site in form of 14 essays. The homepage holds only 16 posts, which means that some time this weekend, all 9,000 of those words will, as far as most people are concerned, disappear from the space-time continuum.

The articles in your city’s weekly paper are allowed to live for a week. Magazines sit on the shelf for a month. But the things we create for the web content get one shot, 24 or maybe 48 hours on the front page before disappearing into the archives. Surely, in this age of unlimited, flawless reproduction, we can do better than leaving the things we create to crawl slowly backwards towards infinity, away from anyone who might care.

A site that publishes as much as Pando Daily does creates almost a novel’s worth of content every two weeks. Yet rarely do we spend the time to pause and look back at what we’ve got once the initial flourish of chart beats end. Are we missing something?

The second page of XOXCO’s blog gets just 3% as many hits as the first.

Our visitors are left to search or crawl backwards themselves, and our editors don’t have the tools to curate and repurpose the content they already own. How can we look back if there is only the stream?

This is one of the reasons why we created Packagr. We want to help publishers tap into their content archives and give some of the best stuff a second chance to shine - perhaps in a different format or venue, perhaps to a new audience. After all, who doesn’t like a good rerun?

The future we’re hoping to build through Packagr is filled with short, interesting ebooks containing essays and reporting pulled from blog archives a decade long. We’re hoping to help a million iPad zinesters get their short stories and magazine articles on the virtual shelves. We want to help digital publishers continue the long tradition of creating distinct artifacts of their time, to take the important things out of the stream and put them in context, their proper place in space-time.

And then we’ll sell ten thousand copies of those artifacts for $3 each.

We’re looking for publishers who want to build this future with us. You can be one of the first.

Another issue of Dark Rye has just gone up, including nearly 40...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:29:47 -0400

Another issue of Dark Rye has just gone up, including nearly 40 great articles about THE FUTURE. There’s stuff about indoor farming, cycling, sustainable architecture, alternative energy sources, and a personal favorite, a review of some math-driven artists.

We worked with Whole Foods to create Dark Rye a few months ago, and each month it is a treat to see the new issue come to life. Check it out on your desktop or tablet computer for the best experience - each spread is unique and beautiful, something rarely seen in a web publication like this.