freeform goodness

I’m probably the last person on the internet to run into this, but I love it.

Click the link for the full screen version, even better with nice speakers.

:: Dave Walker 10:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web/widgets]
:: tags: widgets

:: Comments (0)

I don’t really have a post here. I just wanted an excuse to use Panic’s fancy image zoomer. If you’re reading this in the feed it won’t work, of course.

:: Dave Walker 17:35 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

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Randy memetagged me. Basically, you enumerate all the websites that you use; daily, weekly and monthly.

• Daily
  • Gmail — The webmail to end all webmail. No comment necessary.
  • Google Reader — My preferred feed aggregator: works great if you read feeds from multiple locations, fast and feature-rich.
  • del.icio.us — Bookmarking and linkblogging in one. I pull my bookmarks to my desktop and laptop where they’re searchable with Spotlight. I can’t function without it.
  • last.fm — IMO, the best of the social music websites. Makes it easy to keep track of the music your friends are enjoying, makes discovering new bands you might be interested in a delight, via customized streaming music. It’s all a million times more pleasant than they aesthetic car crash that is MySpace. I love the new event tracking features, too.
  • Twitter — I tend to use it as a cross between an IM client that I can toggle on and off at will and an inanities blog. The fact that i can update via SMS when I’m bored out of my skull standing in line somewhere is just a bonus.
  • Netvibes — My default “portal”, complete with headlines from various sources.
  • Icanhascheezburger — My daily lolcat fix.
• Weekly
  • Digg — The occasional nugget of information buried inside a steaming pile of trollcrap, yay.
  • Slashdot — Slashdot has actually improved a bit since some of the morons moved to Digg. :) Still some knowlegeable posters poke their heads out of the deluge from time to time.
  • Flickr — I share my photos here. The community features are nice, the API means that there are lots of supporting applications (both desktop and web-based), and the Atom feeds are quite useful.
  • Emusic — One of the “best kept secrets” in internet music for years. A reasonable fee nets you a nice chunk of music on independent labels every month, DRM-free. I’ve been a member since 2000, and have hundreds of legally downloaded albums from the service.
  • iTunes Store — Though it’s not always the best value (see the item immediately above), the iTunes store has the advantage of a truly huge selection and immediate availability, as well as tight integration for iPod owners.
  • WowHead — My favorite of the World of Warcraft reference sites, ideal for figuring out what you need to do to get the Sword of A Thousand Truths to drop. Nice use of DHTML for function, not just eyecandy, too.
  • Television Without Pity — Not so much Web 2.0 as just fun and useful. Amusing recaps of episodic television.
  • Mozy — Continuous online backup. Still in beta (at least for Macs) but promising.
• Monthly
  • Joost — Still not completely sold on their approach, but worth a look.
  • The Armory — Blizzard’s own bit of info-porn for the WoW playerbase.

  I’m tagging Sven and Chris.

:: Dave Walker 16:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

:: Comments (1)

:: Dave Walker 17:09 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

:: Comments (0)

For some reason, del.icio.us just (intentionally) broke a major piece of their functionality. They no longer file tag subscriptions and user subscriptions into the same bucket, they’ve created a new bin called “your network” (hatehatehate stupid Web 2.0-ism) to hold the user subscriptions. The reason I use del.icio.us in the first place is so that I have less places to check for new stuff. That single inbox feed was a feature and you just broke it.

:: Dave Walker 09:36 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

:: Comments (1)

It’s not often you come across a website that completely changes the way you use the internet. del.icio.us was one of those sites for me. It made linkblogging effortless, and finding new links became just as easy. Though there have certainly been some growing pains as the userbase has grown to half a million(!) users, I want to raise a toast to the service on this occasion.

:: Dave Walker 12:51 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web del.icio.us web2.0

:: Comments (0)

Anyone know anything about them? Is it just YABSE, or is there some secret sauce? They’re sending a lot of traffic my way, so I’m not complaining.

:: Dave Walker 20:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

:: Comments (2)

Hola Lazyweb. Since adding a web browser to my Sony PSP, I’ve become obsessed with the idea of instant handheld access to reference sources. Google works reasonably well in the PSP browser by default, and the Wikipedia’s simple layout works ok on short entries, though longer ones tend to cause out-of-memory errors in the browser. Bloglines Mobile works more or less perfectly.

I could kind-of use the Internet Movie Database, though once again I had problems with really slow rendering speed and out of memory errors. I’m happy to say I found a solution, though. There’s an open source Python library that interfaces with the IMDB called, logically enough, IMDbPY. There’s a simple CGI frontend that can talk to this library. After building the library (I did it via DarwinPorts) I installed the gateway on one of my local boxes, and now I can search by tile or performer and get lightweight results pages that perform fine in the PSP browser. It’s perfect for sitting on the couch and watching TV, being able to look up J. Random Actor and see what other things they’ve performed in.

I’d love to find a similar hookup for doing searches in the All-Music Guide. I’ve been a great fan of the AMGs content for as long as I’ve been using the web, but their web presentation has always been painful (even moreso since last year’s “redesign”). Trying to work with it with the PSP’s limited browser is beyond hopeless. A quick scan through the search engines hasn’t turned up a mobile-friendly way to access the AMG. Has anyone given this a try? I imagine their Terms of use wouldn’t make it easy, but it’s worth a look.

I know the business models of a lot of reference sites make doing this sort of thing a challenge for them, but there are so many of these sorts of reference sites that potentially become even more valuable when you’re out in “the real world” rather than sitting in front of a computer. I know that in the “perfect future” when every site has a well specified API and uses smart stylesheets that gracefully degrade, we won’t have to worry so much about these things, but in 2005 it’s still a challenge.

:: Dave Walker 10:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

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I mentioned this on the linkblog, but it’s cool enough to merit a separate link in a full entry. Gvisit gives you a visible look, via the Google Maps API, at the (approximate) locations your visitors are coming from. Here’s mine. So far I’m only seeing hits from North America and Western Europe, though. I wonder which IP-to-geographic-location tool it uses.

Fun to watch, though — pure geoporn.

:: Dave Walker 20:43 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

:: Comments (0)

via Danny…

And no, I don’t exactly see the point, either :)

:: Dave Walker 22:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

:: Comments (1)