ho ho ho

walkit.com joins Flickr, Amazon, Last.fm and Dopplr in being named The Guardian's 100 top sites for the year ahead.

We are working with the walkit team to develop their website, due for launch early 2009. There are lots of exciting new features, so make sure you hear about them first by subscribing to the walkit.com blog.

(Illustration: Jan Kallwejt)

Stef highlighted some really interesting Birmingham folk to follow on Twitter last week, so we decided it was about time we shared some of our favourite Birmingham blogs we've been reading this year. Some are creative, some spotlight the cool work of others and a couple are downright strange. They all make up the fantastic Birmingham blogging community and should be in your feed reader!

So in no particular order here's some of the best Birmingham blogs we've been reading this year:

Click the Subscribe link next to each blog to add them to Google Reader, or download this file to your desktop and import it into your Google Reader. If you don't use Google Reader, then you'll most likely need to download this file as well, look for the button that says import, cross your fingers and hope it all works out ok.

Tip: Try subscribing to something you've never even heard off!

• Big Cat


• Birmingham Social Media Cafe


• Substrakt


• Boxer Design - Soak it up


• Chris Unitt


• Clusta


• 383news


• Created in Birmingham


• Cul-de-Sac


• Custard Factory


• daveharte.com


• D'log :: blogging since 2000


• From Under the Rotunda


• Fullrange Blog


• Fused Magazine


• Home of the Autumnstore Blog


• Jibbering


• Joanna Geary


• Life Agency Blog


• Pete Ashton's Weblog


• Podnosh Blog


• Robot Vs Dinosaur


• Stefan Lewandowski


• 4Talent magazine


• Multipack


• The TAK! Design Blog


• ASH-10


• Audiences Central Blog


• CMYKern


• Capsule Blog


• Fierce Earth


• IE - Web, Interactive, Design, Brand


• Fireloop Creative


• Surely? - stuff & nonsense


• Prime Objective Blog


• Chromatouch


• Antonio Gould


• Rich Batsford


• Ganbaru!


• Digbeth is Good


• Birmingham Eastside


• The Jewellery Quarter


• Birmingham: It's Not Shit


• 4iP


• Birmingham Conservation Trust


• Web development blog


• Supercool


• mama feel good!


• no2self.net


• One Black Bear


• Pete Ashton

Did we miss you? or do you know about have a fantastic blog that we've totally overlooked, perhaps you totally disagree with our selections, let us know by adding them in the comments.

This is the 1st game of the Substrakt pool league... you could cut the atmosphere with a knife!

We'll be posting results, and laughing at the loser who'll be buying the drinks at the Christmas party.

everybody loves a cuppa, spotted near jewellery quarter

When your out and about meeting up with clients, it's handy to have their details on your mobile, iPod or SatNav. Most companies provide these details on their contact page, but if you want to get them in your phone, you've got to visit the contact page, create a new contact, then to do loads of copy and pasting, blah blah blah.

We think this is boring, time consuming and unnecessary. We'd like to make it as easy as possible for you to have our details, which is why from today we've started to provide our contact details as downloadable vCards on our profile pages and contact page which you can download and easily sync to your devices. We think you should be doing this to, so here's a quick "how to" which show just how eas this was.

Step 1 - Create your vCards

The easiest way is to open up Address Book and create a new contact for each person. Fill in all the details you want to share like URLs, business address, even a mobile number if you want to get personal.

Note: So far I've not managed to get images to work, if anyone has any ideas on how to attach a mugshot to an exported card please let me know in the comments.

Step 2) Exporting

Export each card individuality (multiple contacts don't go down too well) and upload to your server. We recommend you put them in a separate directory as you need to write a special htaccess rule.

Step 3) The Science bit

Next you need to tell the browser that it should expect a vCard instead of a regular text document. For this we'll be writing a .htaccess rule. Create a new file called .htaccess in the vCard directory and write the following line.

AddType text/x-vcard .vcf


Save and close. Yep that's it. Now point your browser to  the vCard. In our case http://www.substrakt.co.uk/vcards/TomMartin.vcf to see it in action. Once the card has downloaded AddressBook on Mac or Windows will appear and import the card. Magic.

Step 4) Link to it

So you'll probably want to put a link to that on your contact page and make it look pretty, we gave it a class of dvcard and added this little snippet of CSS to our stylesheet to make it stand out.

.dvcard {
margin-bottom: 20px;
padding-left: 20px;
background: url(images/vcard.png) left top no-repeat;
display: block;
}


(Address Book icon comes from the wonderful famfamfam silk icons.)

How easy was that? Your contact details can now be easily added to your clients mobile, iPod and other devices. If it's not working for you let us know in the comments and we'll do our best to help!

We were nominated for an Outstanding Business Development Award at this years Creative City Awards. Unfortunately we didn't win this year, the prize went to the Electric Cinema, well done to them.

We did, however, get a bit of extra credit from the judging panel.

Here is an excerpt from the Birmingham Post article that mentions our special commendation:

The Outstanding Business Development (Birmingham) Award went to the Electric Cinema.

The Electric Cinema, the oldest working cinema in the UK, was restored and reopened in December 2004.

Electric Cinema managing director Tom Lawes has recently carried out a major physical expansion of the business with the addition of a second screen and the development of a recording studio in the basement of the building.

Ms Alderson said: “Electric Cinema’s managing director Tom Lawes has done an incredible job since he took over. “As well as giving the building a major makeover, he has led the company through the challenging financial climate and continues to employ staff to his growing roster.”

But the judging panel felt design, marketing and advertising firm Substrakt also deserved special commendation in this category.

“The panel were very impressed with how Andy Hartwell had managed the growth of the business, leading to increased turnover, profitability and number of employees and wanted to commend him on businesses performance,” the judges said.
Thanks to everyone that wished us well on the night, and well done to the other winners including Stan's Cafe, Fierce Earth & IE.

The Substrakt team had a great night, and there will be photos posted up in the next couple of days.

Today marks the start of our first full week in our new office at 39 Fazeley Studios. If your planning on posting us anything or just wanted to pop around for a cuppa or a game of pool (yes we have a new red pool table) then you'll need our new address.

Studio 39, Fazeley Studios,
191 Fazeley Street
Digbeth,
Birmingham
B5 5SE

After being at the main Custard Factory site for nearly 2 years, we felt it was time for a bit of a change, plus we needed the room to expand the growing Substrakt team.

p.s. It's really quiet at Fazeley Studios at the moment, doesn't look like many other people have moved in yet? We've gone and got ourselves a pool table, so a Digbeth creative pool league is definitely on the cards!