No Mod Required

As long as you’re happy with 5 being the definition of an explosion

Craftsmanship

Markup & Style Society Talk - Bokardo

“For my talk, I picked something I’ve never talked about before: web craftsmanship. I chose this topic because I’ve been thinking a lot more about it since going out on my own last August. I also consider both Dan and Ethan craftsmen, obsessed with doing quality work vs. gaining notoriety or getting rich. So I thought it would be a good fit for the audience as well.”

Not the greatest slideshare, but the very thought of it speaks to me as I’m trying to improve quality across the presentation layer at work and getting people to think in those terms is a key to getting the work I want to see produced on a consistent basis.

Wayback machine

jwz - Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!

jwz has resurrected a ton of old Netscape/Mosaic history, including the old Mosaic Communications Corporation web site and some ancient versions of their software (with which to browse it.)

SEO

Free Firefox Rank Checker - Check Your Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Search Engine Rankings : SEO Book.com

Pretty self-explanatory, no? I took it for a test drive this morning and it’s a fine tool.

A New Blog I Love

The Leila Texts

When you send a text message on the Verizon network, you can address your text by choosing a name out of your contact list, or you can address it by typing in a phone number. You can also type in a name. And if you type in L-E-I-L-A, then– bizarrely– your text will come to me.
This is a blog about the texts I have received. All of them are from strangers, intended for other Leilas, but obviously they missed their marks.

Just read it. It’s not a big time investment and it’s interesting/funny/weird/cool.

Creative Wins at PR

Message to Daniel_K - Sound Blaster - Creative Labs

Description cribbed from metafilter:

“A geek named daniel_k wanted to help his fellow Vista users. He created a set of drivers that would get their Creative sound cards working under Vista — something beyond the ken and expertise of Creative’s engineering team. Creative VP Phil O’Shaughnessy, however, took umbrage. The results? A PR disaster with hundreds of users pledging to boycott. “

It made slashdot, digg, reddit, etc. Nice work Creative!

Replubocrats unite.

Blogged mostly for the fantastic photo on the page, which is this close to being my desktop wallpaper (for at least a day- then it’s back to something nerdy. Cowboy Bepop FTW.)

“Ready from Day One, we’ve crossed the Commander-In-Chief threshold!”

McCain/Clinton — The Dream Team for 2008

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

garfield minus garfield

The difference, of course, is that Crockford should understand that things are a little more complicated than that, but the ideas that he thinks are good enough to announce to the world are no better than the ideas a 5-year old has before breakfast. “No more iframes! No more document.write!” he declares, blissfully unaware that his employer’s home page uses both. “Strict entity parsing!” he demands… in a page with unescaped ampersands. “UTF-8 is the One True Encoding!” he proclaims boldly… in a page that declares itself as ISO-8859-1. “No more javascript: URLs! In fact, let’s replace Javascript altogether! And I’ll be back to talk about CSS!” It just goes on and on, the awesomeness gradually swelling until it all folds back on itself like a Möbius strip of self-parody. It’s the Bolero of trolls. Everything he claims is secure isn’t, and everything he claims would increase security wouldn’t. Everything he wants to add to HTML would make it worse, and everything he wants to remove would also make it worse. Please, please tell me he’s shooting the moon to make the worst proposal ever. It just doesn’t make sense any other way, at least not from anyone older than 5.

The Bolero of trolls [dive into mark]

The Fixing HTML page itself.

Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle

Alternatively:

The ‘… Is Your New Bicycle’ Meme Is Your New Bicycle
Steve Jobs Is Your New Bicycle
Ron Paul Is Your New Bicycle

Explanation:

Change of Subject - Observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades | Chicago Tribune | Blog

I just clicked for a good five minutes. For me, someone who’s seen the entire internet twice, that’s a significant amount of clicking in one place.

Check out this incredible collision between everyone’s favorite administration and everyone’s favorite Xenu hunting A+ list megastar

and there you have it.

This is a uniquely cool, creative and extremely well written youtube video. It may not be the whiz-bang equal of “I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This,” but it certainly beats that recent classic in pure brain power. If the the average Youtube video was a 4 on a 1 to 10 scale of intelligence, this video is a 97…

Stephen M Stahl, MD, PhD, of Neurosciences Education Institute singing in prose lyrical about psychopharmacology. Music by Gilbert & Sullivan. Lyrics by who is obviously ADHD.

via

The best 11 seconds currently on youtube?

LittleBobbyTables.com

That’s one of my all-time favorite XKCD strips.