Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens
Sarcasm and vitriol wrapped in a twee bow.
The story of dethroner is interesting. A professional blogger with lots of experience decides to create a little blog to earn just enough cash. Not to build out a multi-million-dollar-gawker-etc… but just enough to make a decent living. Three months in, here is how it is going…
Dethroner Housekeeping: State of the Blog t + 3 Months at Dethroner
I’m a fan of Nick Carr and I’m interested in the abilities of creative individuals to make a living in the web 2.0 world.
As we, the people of the year, are all producing content, how does everyone else find it. Certainly, search isn’t enough…
Nick has a nice take.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carrs Blog: Lost in the shitstream
Add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to Blog Posts at ExplodingBoy
I was looking for how to do this simply for WP, and here it was!
Creating a Basic Print Stylesheet at ExplodingBoy
I haven’t done this yet, I have to see the interaction with my blog pages, but I will when I get a chance.
LightboxJS V2.0
A useful script for showing images on top of your pages, now with fancy shmancy effects.
ThickBox on jquery.com
this is similar to LightBox functionality-wise, but adds a lot of support for non-image types. It’s based on the jquery javascript library which looks like it might be cool.
Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets at AListApart
Nice article on switching stylesheets at runtime.
The Trackback List plugin and Making comments stand out on Tamba2: I was interested in figuring out how to show trackbacks separately and these two articles were very instructive.
SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check – Valleywag
As someone who was very involved in the second wave of virtual worlds on the internet (it depends if you count Habitat or MUDs as the first wave or not), I’ve watched them periodically come up and die again with amusement. It was always obvious the first time around, that it wasn’t a technology problem. Sure, Alphaworlds, Black Sun, Microsoft Virtual Worlds and V-Chat (my project) could have looked better or been slightly more responsive, but their main failings weren’t polygon counts. The main failings were all about having no reason to exist. none. They were novel, they were amusing for a short time, but they didn’t really bring much to the table that wasn’t there before. In the end it was just providing a new way of text chat. Adobe Atmosphere came out, gave me and the V-World’ers I know a laugh, and then died looking for a market.
Then came Linden Labs. Especially when the first details came out, I was really unimpressed. It seemed like a technology built by cyberhippies with nothing new to offer except some vague notions of on-line togetherness. I read some articles about it, and then ignored it, expecting it to go away soon. It persevered though and grew. They took their economy seriously and started selling real estate and making it possible for people to easily make a living within world (neither of these things was their idea, both have been done before). They started making large deals and announcing incredible usage (not profit) numbers. Of course, it is all a sham. The above article does a nice job skewering the Linden Labs numbers. Does this mean Second Life is a failure? Nope, even their (corrected) meager numbers are quite nice. Does this mean that Second Life is the first viable (long term) virtual world? Well, depends on if you want to count the on-line RPGs. Those were successful and have been around a lot longer. The question is if a purpose-less (non-game) virtual world can make it.
I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out.
Seattle restaurants | Restaurant menus, reviews and maps on urbanspoon.com
It is obviously just getting going (even Lark didn’t have a user comment yet), but I like that they have the local press reviews as well as people ones. Nicely organized, well arranged. We’ll see how they grow…
a message from Amazon about items in my shopping cart:
Please note that the price of The High Price of Materialism has increased from $10.85 to $11.32 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
Please note that the price of The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need has increased from $10.40 to $10.79 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
Please note that the price of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture has increased from $10.20 to $10.65 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
So, I’m staying a nice hotel in the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley. Of course, they have hot and cold running internet (wireless and wired!), but there is no outlet with 10 feet of the desk (where the wired internet is). Unless, of course, you move the bed away from the wall and unplug the clock.
morons
The Seattle Times: Local News: Airports trees stoking “war on Christmas”
Ya know, I’d like a Menorah in addition to XMas trees if they are going to be on public property too. I however think that suing the port “to make a point” during XMas season was a stupid move 10 times over. All it does it make all of us look petty and horrible. If it was a cross or a creche, something undeniably religious, I’d sign up on that suit myself…
Then again, the responses to the article also harken to my worst fears. The kind of stupidity on the other side “This is a Christian Nation” kinds of crap…
You get what you deserve. Everyone knows that the situation in Iraq is a quagmire and that our plans (or lack thereof) have been flawed and are still flawed. Report after report comes out saying that we are doing the wrong things and yet the president feels firm in his convictions. He is the decider, the commander in chief. His will is strong. Which is exactly why so many of you voted for him, right?
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Democrats on Iraq report: Bush just doesn’t get it