Random Thoughts on A Few Cool Resources

I've been working on about a thousand things lately as I get more comfortable with my role in developing a digital division for a print publishing company here in Burnaby, and in my varied research have come across these excellent resources ...

On Digg, I found a link to Smashing Magazine.com which links in turn to some of the best free templates on the web -- CSS, whole websites, and Flash. Very potentially useful.

Through my RSS subscription to Read/Write Web (which is fantastic) I found this article from BusinessWeek.com yesterday about how social networking sites like Facebook are making themselves more available to third-party developers -- kind of like a controlled open-source-ish model for improving themselves and inviting innovation. This is interesting to me as my company is now considering using Drupal, an open-source CMS for our online publishing going forward. I love the idea that a piece of software can be continually improved by a group of passionate, smart people -- and with Drupal am really impressed by the look, feel and quality of the software. I also particularly like this quote from the BusinessWeek.com article:

"Part of what's exciting about a developer community is you don't know what people are going to do," says Lucian Beebe, director of product management at LinkedIn, which is considering opening up its software. "It offers you the ability to harness innovation."

I have to add that I'm liking LinkedIn a lot, as well, particularly because as we proceed with hiring for our growing Digital team, I've discovered that LinkedIn lets you post jobs to your personal network for no fee. It lets you post more widely, too, for a small fee ($125/job, I think) but by just posting to your contacts, you can feel out your network -- people you trust -- for interest in prospective jobs. This works for me, as I'm not quite sure I'm ready to post positions widely yet, but am interested in finding out about the types of people who might be up for the positions we will have open soon.