At long last, we’ve selected another Featured Resource for the site. This time, we’ve selected Colorburned. This is a site that we like for a number of reasons – it’s beautifully-designed, has a ton of resources in many different categories and is just plain fun to visit. We hope you’ll agree!

Click here to visit the Colorburned web site.

We’ve been hard at work getting the word out there about the Design Groupies site and have also set up a new group for our friends on Flickr.  Drop by and add some of your creative work or photography to the group!  Show us what you’ve got!

Check out the group at: http://flickr.designgroupies.com See you there!

We’ve just set up a new YouTube channel for Design Groupies. We’d love to have you stop by to suggest your favorite design or creative-related videos – tutorials, interviews, or vids that take a humorous look at the creative life. Also, be sure to add us as a friend, make comments.

Join us in the fun at: http://youtube.designgroupies.com

After having our WordPress RSS feeds mysteriously stop working and spending hours on researching possible causes and solutions, we learned an interesting (and, possibly, obvious) lesson that we thought we’d share with our readers so they can avoid similar issues.

With all the social media sites out there, we were looking for a way to clean up all the extra URLs we’re using to direct people to our various profiles on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.

Instead of having a bunch of different, messy-looking web addresses all over the place (ie: www.twitter.com/designgroupies or www.flickr.com/groups/designgroupies), we decided to set up several sub-domains under our web hosting account control panel and create redirects to the different sites. So, we set up a sub-domain for each social media site, such as: facebook.designgroupies.com or twitter.designgroupies.com

We also created a subdomain for our RSS feeds in the form of: feed.designgroupies.com  Unbeknownst to us, however, setting up a sub-domain named “feed” would create an actual folder on our FTP called “/feed”.  Since WordPress creates its links on the fly and uses the format www.yourdomain.com/feed as one of its default URLs for accessing a site’s RSS feed, having an actual folder called “/feed” on the FTP created a conflict.

When we tried to access our feed after the sub-domain was set up, WordPress was not able to use the folder /feed on the fly to create a valid feed URL. So, instead of seeing our actual feed, we saw the empty “/feed” directory on our FTP. We were baffled.

Our clue came when we were investigating the FTP and saw the folder called “feed” created by the sub-domain redirect. This raised some eyebrows and we decided to remove the feed.designgroupies.com sub-domain and – voila! – all was fixed.

Additionally, it should be noted that WordPress also uses /rss as one of its on-the-fly URLs for feeds, so setting up a sub-domain called rss.yourdomain.com would create a similar conflict and result in feeds not working as well.

Now, we’re going with the WordPress-safe sub-domain feeds.designgroupies.com and all is well!

We hope our adventures in troubleshooting help others avoid similar problems!

After some aggressive “door-to-door” campaigning via our Facebook friends list, we’re proud to announce that we finally reached the 100 fans mark required by Facebook to register a designated URL for the Design Groupies fan page.

Now, instead of a long, overly-complicated URL no one could ever remember, we can more easily be found at:

www.facebook.com/designgroupies

Feel free to stop by our page, upload some photos or make a comment.

Much love goes out to all of our first 100 fans that helped us get there!

We are now on Twitter! Follow Design Groupies on Twitter to stay up to date on newly-added resources and other fun tidbits of interest to designers and other creative types!

http://www.twitter.com/designgroupies

We’re excited that the site is coming together and we’re making progress, slowly but surely. The latest area of the site to make its debut is the Design Groupies Bookstore. We’ve hand-selected a list of titles that we’ve found invaluable in the day-to-day life of a designer. If there’s a title on your bookshelf that you just can’t live without, drop us a line and we’ll add it to our library!

We’re pleased to announce that the Design Groupies T-Shirt Shop is up and running! Have a look around and feel free to contact us if you have an idea for a shirt you’d like to see in our shop! We aim to please!