jemjabella

Useful (cool) icon finding site

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to find some obscure UK debit card icon, or a certain size of twitter icon (whatever) for work… I have an Icons folder for saving sets that I probably wouldn’t be able to find easily again:

(Like my desktop wallpaper? It’s from vladstudio)

And yet all along, there existed Iconfinder. Either I’m the last person to know about the icon search engine or it’s the world’s worst publicised website (it’s apparently existed since 2007?!) Either way, it’s top of my 2011 cool list.*

* this list is purely imaginary

“Fix its, Daddy!”

Project: Feeding Friendly

While I was on maternity leave in 2009-2010 I had an idea for a website / mobile phone app… a central location for feeding and changing facility reviews/ratings across the UK. There was nothing else like it available, and parents (especially breastfeeding mums I came into contact with) were desperate for accurate info on things like comfy, clean nursing rooms; bottle-warmers or boiled water available; changing facilities that actually had mats or decent tables and not just filthy plastic racks hanging from the wall.

Anyway, I finally started building the site this week. I’ve decided to build on the fly – completely live – instead of doing it offline and perfecting it (because I’ve discovered this means projects never get finished!) The plan is to use a WordPress back-end so that I can bum off their functioning user management as well as using custom content types to power the tagged locations and reviews. Nothing actually works at the minute and there is no design – hey, I’m juggling a toddler and a full time job here – but I want to get feedback now. Lo, Feeding Friendly.co.uk :)

If you’re interesting in contributing to the project … ideas, reviews, suggestions, whatever, please let me know. I will especially need mums who go out and about a lot to work with me tagging & rating places to begin with, so we can get some bare bones data up there. Comment here or e-mail me: jem@jemjabella.co.uk.

First World Problems

I want to tell you all about my amazing daughter and how at 20 months she can already count to 15, identify several colours, name all of her body parts (including her “bits” – her words) and talk the hind leg off a donkey but I want to balance that with the guilt I feel about, well… am I pushing her? Is encouraging her to count and speak and identify colours forcing her to take in more than she needs to?

I want to tell you all about my decorating and colour choices and bedrooms and pictures and all that home-y faff but I don’t want to sound like a pretentious knobber who thinks they have a clue about design (because I’m not and I don’t).

I want to talk about babies and hormones and periods and WTF AM I GOING TO DO ABOUT MY GALLBLADDER?! But I don’t want to keep on about it (much).

But you know, I can’t. Because half of London is on fire and people are losing their homes and businesses and that seems so much more important right now. Where do we even begin on that, though? Sigh.

Oooh, what does this button do?

You mean if I type jizz in here and press the Publish button it appears on my website? Clever, that’s like one of those blog thingies. Aren’t they supposed to be updated regularly? Oh wait…

(This is my sarcastic way of casually mentioning that I’m not dead.)