There’s a nifty new trick appearing on various good-looking websites. The first example of it that I saw was Ben the Bodyguard (scroll down the page to see it). Now there’s an open source library to help you create these effects with jQuery. It’s called Scrollorama and if you’re into web design you should check it out.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

~ Robert Frost

A few factors convened recently to bring my latest project to life:

• I realised that I have more ideas than I could ever build myself
• Richard Price - who shares many ideas with his Facebook friends - helped me realise that the advantages of sharing ideas (discussion, criticism, someone else building it) could outweigh the disadvantages (someone else building it)
• Guy has been sitting on an awesome domain name for years
• I needed an app to demonstrate the basic functionality of Rat (a PHP framework I’m developing)
• I had a couple of days to kill. It was Thanksgiving weekend and I was in San Francisco. I had a wonderful dinner with a friend but there followed a couple of days when everyone seemed to be out of town.
• I wanted to deploy my first application in the cloud

And so, PleaseBuildThis.com was born.

I’m going to use it to share my ideas and hopefully collect feedback and get some indication of demand too. It will also be a testbed for developing Rat.

I believe that sharing ideas like this could become an interesting new method of self-expression. Imagine investors browsing PleaseBuildThis.com profiles to learn more about the people they are about to invest in and find out how they think about the world.

I hope you’ll join me in trying it out!

I have a couple of suggestions for your New Years resolutions.

If you can’t code then check out CodeYear.com and sign up to receive an interactive coding lesson by email each week. It will change your life.

If you can code then check out the article I posted yesterday and think about how to ‘level up’. You could resolve to send your first pull request on Github, speak at a local event, write for The Kernel or open source your first project. You should also follow @DailyDevTips.

Regardless of whether or not you can code, if you’re thinking of doing a startup then apply for an accelerator program such as Y Combinator, TechStars or 500 Startups in the USA or Springboard, Seedcamp or Ignite100 in the UK. The application process will be a valuable exercise and if you land a place then you win a huge head start.

Don’t forget to make your resolutions specific and achievable. And if I can help or encourage you with any of the suggestions above then feel free to give me a shout.

I recently found my New Years resolutions for 2011 on my phone and was delighted to realise that I have achieved seven out of eight of them.

The trick is to make them specific and achievable.

Inspired by Bryce and Fred, one of my resolutions for 2012 is to post something here every day. I’ll be posting ideas, projects, links, articles from The Kernel and anything else that catches my eye. I’m going to use Tumblr’s queue feature and publish at 11am GMT each day. I already have my first five posts lined up.

Happy New Year!