I have been using TinyURL for quite some time – mainly when passing links to friends via Twitter and Facebook. I really liked it’s simplicity, copy the link from your browser, header over to www.tinyurl.com, paste it into the form and seconds later a shortened link appears ready to use. TinyURL also has a bookmark that can be added to your browsers bookmark bar, and when clicked it will automatically transform the URL of the page you’re on to a TinyURL. Magic, and all that I needed out of that service… until while listening to a recent episode of the Freelance Switch Radio Podcast, SnipURL was mentioned as a recommendation.

SnipURL has been around since 2001 (to my surprise) and is basically TinyURL with added bells and whistles, you can use it in the same way as TinyURL – just go to the site or use their bookmark to create shortened URL’s – but by registering and creating an account you get to manage your Snipped URL’s.

SnipURL provides you with basic statistics for each Snip you create, how many times it was clicked, and by how many unique users. This is really handy if you want to track links from blog posts or twitterings, tracking links you’ve placed on forums or comments on other blogs to your own website or blog – you can very quickly work out what’s working in terms of marketing your website – or just to see if anyone clicks on your links within a twitter post.

Try it out for yourself here; www.snipurl.com

The term passive income is something I’ve noticed around the freelance and design blogs websites for a while now. It’s a way of earning money from something that can be created, and once it exists income (hopefully) can trickle in from either subscriptions of customer purchases – this obviously depends on what the product / service is.

2009 is the year that I kick off my passive income project, and the product? T-Shirts!

I’ve wanted to print custom T-Shirts for ages, I designed a couple for a club night I promoted a couple of years ago and they were really cool – in my opinion. I got another T-Shirt that I designed printed up for a Christmas present and that went down really well with everyone that saw it – I was really quite proud at how well it came out.

Because I can design and build websites, the online method of selling the T-Shirts will only cost my time to initially set up and hopefully not too much time to run – hence the passive part.

Yesterday I purchased the domain name and hosting for Worm Sign T-Shirts and I’ve so far designed 3 of the 12′ish designs I’m hoping to launch with. At the moment I’m not putting too much pressure on myself to get it done because I’m really enjoying the fruits of my labour, I have a deadline in my head and it’s realistic – but I’m not going to stress over making it, because ultimately I want this to be a fun project as well as a serious money making machine – can it be both of those things? We’ll see.

I’ll definitely be adding more posts about this project on this blog, including a few designs as they get finished and progress on the website as a kind of case study.

I’ve been called an attention seeker a couple of times over the last few months, and I’m not 100% sure that it fits into my character. Close friends think I’m the exact opposite – fairly shy actually. But if you look at what I get up to online, then an attention seeker I might be.

The 70 odd friends on facebook will probably testify that they know exactly what I’m doing at any given time, as facebook allows you to import ‘feeds’ from other social websites such as digg, flickr and twitter. So via their news feed they see what I’m currently doing via twitter.com – as this updates my facebook status, they see the websites that I’m viewing when I create a book mark at del.cio.us, or when a news items get dugg at digg.com, recently taken photographs get published to flickr and blipfoto.com and the music I’m listening to gets listed via the scrubbling function at last.fm.

All these websites, added together and tracking my habits would definitely allow anyone to see what i’m up to during the day. but, there is one additional piece of information that would be vital to stalking that is not currently getting monitored – my location. there is one piece of technology that would i love to own that would do this for me – an apple iphone. geo-tagging your photographs is already possible with the right camera – the longitude / latitude is embedded into the jpeg’s EXIF data, some twitter application on the iphone will record your location, and there are some micro-blogging sites such as brightkite.com that make your location and geo-tagging the major part of it’s service.

So, in the future – and not the distant future – it will be a case of what am i doing, what am i listening to, what am i reading and where am i doing all these things.

BG Patterns is really simple tool that allows you to create repeating backgrounds by choosing a shape, a colour, the size, rotation and transparency for that shape, and finally the background colour and texture. It gives you a live preview of all your changes, and then once you are happy with the results you can submit it to a gallery to be judged by other designers on the site.

Have a go here; www.bgpatterns.com

Posterous is a very clever web app, it allows you to email blog entries – incredibly simple blogging. All you have to do is email your content to post@posterous.com, the subject becomes the title of the blog entry, any attachments are embedded into the post and formatted corrected – it even displays content from links, for example; if you add a url link to a youtube video posterous will grab the video and embed it into your post – rather than display just the text link.

You can’t format the layout – so it’s not a customisable as a Wordpress solution, but for if you are looking for a simple way into blogging, and adding your thoughts and observations to a space on the web you can call your own – then it’s worth looking into.

Try it out for yourself here; www.posterous.com

For a recently project I had to produce a blog to go along side the main e-commerce website, so the main layout and design was done and online – I just had to embed it into my chosen blog software – which was Wordpress.

I could of edited the default Wordpress theme or another one of the thousands of free Wordpress themes online – but this would of taken time, and considering I already had the html and css in place, I wanted a fast track solution. This was ThemesPress.

You upload the images your design requires, the html and a css and the application does the rest. You get the chance to tweak the options, html and css before producing a Wordpress ready theme. It isn’t free, but $10.00 is not a lot of money, and you can pay by PayPal.

Find out more here; www.themespress.com

TwitThis allows you to add a link to your website or blog so that people can tweet about your site through their own twitter account. Combining the same idea as digg.com and delicious where people vote for the content websites, and twitter where people inform followers what they are currently doing – and many do inform their follows of interesting websites that have been found.

TwitThis makes it easy for website owners to make it easy for Twitter users to tweet about their site.

Check it out here; www.twitthis.com