robglazebrook.com

• The Simple Dollar » 30 Essential Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows
  Not a bad list. A few of them are painfully obvious (Firefox? Wassat?), but some I’d never heard of before.
  (tags: software freeware opensource windows free tools download)

• TIME: America By The Numbers - Where We Live
  A great visual map showing the population of the USA. Iowa isn’t so terrible when you look at the West.
  (tags: population visualization maps demographics statistics usa map flash visual)

• YouTube - Fart in the duck
  Someone took a children’s telivision show’s song (in Flemish) and added phonetically close English subtitles. Naughty hilarity ensues.
  (tags: youtube video linguistics funny)

So it occurs to me that I should probably explain all of the “links for” whatever posts.

In the past, my website has had three frequently updated areas (and I’m using the term “frequently” pretty loosely here): the main blog area, the miniblog, and the links of interest. This worked acceptably well and all, but it wasn’t ideal. For one, I don’t think most people really noticed when I made a miniblog post, and almost nobody noticed when I added a new link. The miniblog was always tucked away in the sidebar, and the links were even further down in the sidebar, below the fold on most monitors. Secondly, the miniblog posts and links were essentially the same thing: websites I found interesting and wanted to link to, but didn’t feel I could write an entire blog post about it. My rationale for which links to tuck where was that generally geeky stuff got stashed in the links, while more mainstream stuff got a miniblog post. Of course, there’s a lot of gray area between those two categories, and that caused no end of frustration on my end. End.

My way of fixing these things is to introduce the “links” posts, and it has a lot of benefits. All I have to do is bookmark websites I’m interested in using del.icio.us (which is already how I was creating the links list on my last website), and write a bit of a description. Del.icio.us then automatically logs into my blog at the same time each day and creates a post summarizing my bookmarking activity in the last 24 hours.

Also, now I don’t have to worry about whether or not people are going to notice that ever-so-important YouTube video of dogs licking themselves I felt compelled to link to after a night of drinking… it’s all right there in the main blog area. And the benefit for you, the Faithful Reader, is you can see at a glance whether I’ve updated or not recently. Inn’t that something?

There are still a few bugs to be worked out, I know: the posts aren’t organized the way I’d like, and the date is off by a day (I have it posting at 10pm CDT, which is 3am the following day in GMT, which is the time the system seems insistent on using). I’m hoping to get those figured out in the future. But for now… happy surfing!

• Geometry of the Nintendo Wii (Or, Why My 5 Year Old Kicks My Ass at Wii Sports)
  Hillarious (and undoubtedly accurate) article by Amber Simmons.
  (tags: games nintendo wii sports)
• Color + Design Blog / The Müller Formula (or: Predictable Color Preferences) by COLOURlovers
  Color preference is predictable in general terms by looking at the brightness gradiation of the colors used.
  (tags: color design theory)