People often ask me what companies we use for various products and services, so I thought I would be good to put together a list of Laughing Squid vendors. I’ll update this list over time as we add use new products and services.
T-Shirts
We have our Laughing Squid t-shirts screen printed by the great folks at Ape Do Good Printing in San Francisco. Here’s my write-up on Ape Do Good, which includes some photos I shot of their shop.
Stickers
People love our Laughing Squid stickers and we print them by the thousands at Contagious Graphics in Charlotte, NC. They make quality vinyl stickers and are able to match the PMS 360 green we use, as well as the occasional custom color. We have been using them to print our stickers from day one.
Buttons
We have our Laughing Squid buttons made by One Inch Round in San Francisco.
Fulfillment
For our fulfillment services we use NoonaCo in San Francisco, run by our good friend Helena “Noona” Nolan. They do all of the packing and shipping for our t-shirt and poster orders, as well as run our online store. Here’s my write-up on NoonaCo.
Managed Hosting & Data Center
We lease all of our servers, including those used in our web hosting operations, from Rackspace based out of San Antonio and our servers are located at their Dallas/Ft. Worth data center. They have been really great, living up to their motto of “Fanatical Support”. We are one of their oldest customers and have been with them since May 1999. Here’s my write-up on Rackspace from when I visited them in 2005 after SXSW.
Laughing Squid Blog Resources
Laughing Squid is proudly run on the wonderful open source blogging script WordPress, along with a variety of great WordPress plugins, including Akismet, WordPress stats and WordPress Super Cache.
Some other services we use for the blog are Flickr (image hosting), blip.tv (video hosting), FeedBurner (feed statistics), Google Analytics (traffic statistics), Federated Media Publishing (direct advertising), Google AdSense (contextual advertising), Amazon.com Associates (referral program), Google Reader (feed reader shared items), Skitch (screenshots) and ShareThis (blog post sharing).
The Squid List Resources
The Squid List runs on Helios Calendar, with the email list generated by FeedBurner using their RSS to email service.
Photography
My primary camera is a Canon 5D DSLR, which I use with a variety of lenses. Also I always try to carry along a pocket camera, which is currently the Fujifilm F50 (here’s my write-up on the F50). I use Apple’s Aperture photo editing tool and host all of my photos online (over 20K of them) using the excellent Flickr photo sharing service.
Computer Equipment
I’m an Apple person so I do most of my work on a Mac Pro as well as a MacBook Pro when I travel. Oh yeah and of course my mini computer, the iPhone.
Regarding Mac software, in addition to what comes with Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), the main apps I use include Firefox (browser), Adium (instant messaging), VMware Fusion (virtualization), BBEdit (text editing), Transmit (FTP), SpamSieve (spam filter), SuperDuper! (backups), 1Password (password manager), iTerm (terminal emulation), Skitch (screenshots), Twitterrific (Twitter client), Speed Download (download manager), AppZapper (uninstaller), Photoshop (image editing), Aperture (photography post production), Final Cut Pro (video editing), Colloquy (IRC), QuickBooks Pro (accounting), Skype (internet phone) and Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 (office suite).
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