I’ve been working on a side project since early last year and it’s finally ready for the big time, so I thought I’d share it with you.

It’s called TypeFront, and it’s a font distribution platform that leverages downloadable font support in browsers to serve fonts to the web sites that you choose.

Last year, the W3C and the browser makers finally got together to make something beautiful happen - downloadable font support in the CSS3 specification and an implementation of this in the latest versions of all the major browsers. Suddenly you could refer to a font file through your standards-compliant CSS code and it would be correctly downloaded and displayed in over 90% of the browsers out there.

Finally we could look back on our years of Arial-bondage and laugh.

However, there were still a few tricky issues to deal with, such as the fact that most fonts, especially the good ones, are not free. The companies that sell those fonts would not appreciate every second web designer uploading their font files on a web server somewhere that anyone could easily download without having to pay for it.

What I wanted was an access-controlled bucket where I could upload my font files and allow access to only my sites.

I also saw an opportunity for font sellers to use such a platform to control access to font files they had already sold. A platform such as this could also drive the use of different pricing models for fonts. For example, instead of taking a one-off payment for font files, a seller could take a monthly fee for access to the font on a particular domain.

And so TypeFront was born.

TypeFront allows you to upload any font file - we will automatically convert it into OpenType, Extended OpenType (EOT) and Web Open Font Format and give you the code you need to include it into your web site. Of course, you should make sure that the licence you bought your font under allows for web-based embedding before you do this.

Once you have uploaded your font, you can add the domains of web sites you would like to allow.

TypeFront also has an API that allows third-party applications to programmatically access all of its functionality.

I hope you enjoy TypeFront - I would love to hear what you think of it.

Since I launched Blavel in 2007, a small but enthusiastic community of travel bloggers has grown, posting travel stories and photos from all over the world.

Man have they been some places!

I thought that I would post up a selection of photos taken from posts by the Blavel community as a tribute to their worldliness. I hope you like it.

Thailand from Summer2009Part2

Syria from janash

Tokyo, Japan from Sharrie

Suzdal, Russia from janash

Hong Kong from carrco

Khao Sok National Park, Thailand from Summer2009Part2

Moscow, Russia from janash

San Francisco, United States from janash

Montepulciano, Italy from amanda_june

Brussels, Belgium from bandersnatch

Amsterdam, Netherlands from jenifer900

Cappadocia, Turkey from janash

South Africa from efish

Normandy, France from jenifer900

Petra, Jordan from janash

Highlands, Scotland from Sharrie

Bavaria, Germany from Twodals_Travels

Krka National Park, Croatia from janash

Greve in Chianti, Italy from bradwhit

Singapore from Summer2009

Cathedral Cove, New Zealand from bazza

Paris, France from Sharrie

Istanbul, Turkey from Sharrie

Huacachina, Peru from demdots

The Equator, Ecuador from JannaP

Brighton, United Kingdom from bandersnatch

Abu Simbel, Egypt from janash

Parkes, Australia from Kiwi_go_round

Quebec City, Canada from mmc314

For some people, social media is almost like a sport. How many followers can you get? How many subscribers can you get?

For other people, social media is their livelihood - it is how they put food on the table.

One thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is trying to single out the factors that make the biggest impact on their performance in social media.

For example, it might be your goal to get 1000 subscribers to your blog. Things have been pretty flat for the last month or so, but this week your blog has experienced a huge jump in the number of subscribers.

You have probably been employing any number of methods to promote the posts you have been putting on your blog - promoting them on Twitter, submitting them to services like Digg, making changes to your site to ensure it is SEO friendly, listing your blog on directories, making guest posts on other blogs, and so on.

The trouble is that often you have no real idea which of these activities has actually contributed to the sudden increase in your subscribers. You can often make an educated guess as to what the root cause might be - but you need to get as scientific as you can if you want to make the most of your future time spent on marketing activities.

What I think we all need is an analytics solution that gives us a summarised timeline of our activity across all of our social media and promotional channels and compares that with performance towards our goals.

It would be that much easier to track down the root cause if you could see that, for example, the day of the increase in subscribers coincided with one of your promotional tweets being retweeted by someone with a high number of followers.

If the spike in your subscriptions coincided with a number of possible contributing actions on the same day, you could zoom into that day and have a look at the hours at which each of those events occurred, available data permitting.

I think that the way such a service would work would be to aggregate data from Google Analytics and all of your social media presences, and arrange the data on a timeline similar to the mockups I have attached. This would give you a starting point from which you could then add in other actions that you wanted to track that wouldn’t have come through on any of your feeds, e.g. SEO changes to your site, or listing your blog on a directory.

This sort of system could be used for tracking the performance of your blog, website, Twitter account, Flickr account or any other internet presence with a feed of data that could be consumed by the tool.

So far I haven’t found any sort of social media analytics service that offers this type of view. If you find it (or make it), let me know, I would love to use it!