Gadgetopia

Ken MacGray Design: This guy's site and the TypePad site look really similar.

waffle: under the iron: Anil Dash of Six Apart and LinkedIn has some comments over at Waffle about the future of The Semantic Web: "The most productive next steps are going to happen in a few phases, I suspect. The first will be new generations of blogging tools that natively ...

According to Wired News, Anil Dash has won the Nigritude Ultramarine challenge. "The impetus (was) for me, on a fluke, to say, 'Hey, I don't want these guys who do link spamming to win the contest,'" said Dash. "I figured that people would be fighting the contest the whole month ...

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?: There's a really interesting conversation going on over at Slashdot about something I've struggled with in the past: blog attributation. Some guy on Slashdot evidently just copies and pastes content from other sources, drvies traffic to his site, and then reaps the ...

Are there any hard-and-fast rules about attribution in blogging? Blogs are essentially just links to other content sources, so if you find something via someone else's blog, do you link to the link, or link to the target? Put another way, if you follow the link all the way back ...

Introducing Gush: I'm not sure about the functionality, but this is a flat gorgeous app. Anil Dash says that it's written in Flash. Gush makes instant messaging and news aggregation simple, functional, and attractive. Gush excels at the functionality it provides without including the kitchen sink. Leaving the safety of ...

This week's Friday Distraction: Plastic Balls Like a number of our items today, this one's via Anil Dash

Amazon Payment Services: Anil Dash has information on Amazon's push into payment services. Apparently you'll be able to use Amazon to process payments for anything on your Web site.

One Unwired Day "Join Intel on Thursday, September 25 your day to try public wireless Internet access for free at thousands of locations including coffee shops, airports, and hotels nationwide." Via Anil Dash.

Friday Feast #55: Friendly, Lasting URLs-: A great collection of links to articles about URLs how to plan them, how to make sure they make sense, and how to make sure they stick around. Timely, considering my issues of late. Via Anil Dash.

Registry Explorer home page: free software for windows: This tool will allow you to mount your Windows registry as a drive for browsing and editing in Windows Explorer. Via Anil Dash, who astutely notes that this is a "wacky way to f**k your system all up in a hurry."

The people over at Movable Type are miffed that the new Google 2.0 bar doesn't support MT blogging the "Blog This" button goes to Blogger only. Anil Dash is asking people to report this to Google as a "bug." Maybe he's kidding.

Scrabblog: Just a neat idea for a blog. Take a look at the site, because the design is quite well-done. "Every day, I'll be updating the site with a new set of 7 Scrabble tiles. Make the highest scoring words you can and post them in the comments." Via Anil ...

What's New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Here's a review of new features in Panther. Found via Anil Dash in an item entitled "nice page of features panther stole from windows" with this comment: "alt-tab switching! option to display file extensions! will apple innovation never cease?"

More evidence of a Google browser: Interesting... On April 26, 2004, Google registered gbrowser.com... Based on speculation here: Last summer, Anil Dash suggested that it would be a good move for Google to develop a Google browser based on Mozilla. Give that kid a gold star because it looks more ...

Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat "The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 ...

ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer: "ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. ... The program installs as a new button in the IE toolbar (as well as a new menu item under 'Tools') after filling in ...

Movable Type's Spam Hole: Six Apart is getting a little heat for not being more aggressive in notifying people about the recent MT spam vulnerability. The question does arise though, with literally tens of thousands of MT users affected by this vulnerability, why didn't anyone at Six Apart think that ...

PHP in contrast to Perl: As much as I adore PHP, this article makes a lot of good points when comparing PHP to Perl: PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations... PHP has inconsistent function naming... PHP has too many functions in the core I'll be the first to ...

Google Job Opportunities: From a job posting over at Google. Interesting. What is a Googlette? It's a new business inside of Google that is just getting started the start-up within the start-up. We're looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial manager capable of offering direction to a team of PMs working on a ...

World-Wide Media eXchange: WWMX: Doesn't appear to be any photos of Sioux Falls. "The WWMX, short for the World-Wide Media eXchange, is an experimental research project run by the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft Research. Our goal is to explore what we can do with a gazillion photos on ...

Blogging: Design Your Own Weblog Application from Scratch Using ASP.NET, JavaScript, and OLE DB: "It seems like everyone wants a blog these daysâ I know I did. But I couldn't find any pre-built ASP.NET blog code with the features I wanted, so I built my own." I found this ...

A Standard for Site Organization: This is just a first-rate idea. This was actually written six years ago, and many sites still haven't pulled it off. A selection of well-chosen and well-named root-level directories, implemented across as many sites as possible, would go a long way toward easing the complexities ...

dropload: Who wants to try this out and report on it? "Dropload is a place for you to drop your files off and have them picked up by someone else at a later time. Recipients you specify are sent an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files ...

sylloge: I am a Windows User: The first two comments here are nice. "I ended up getting an eMachines m5310 (manufacturer's page) instead, putting an end to a 20 year stretch of owning and using Apple's products. It may seem like a funny time to be doing this switch, but ...

Example Web Page: Did anyone else know about this? "You have reached this web page by typing 'example.com', 'example.net', or 'example.org' into your web browser. These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3." It's right there in the ...

All Over NYC: Anil Dash has an example of a photo album in TypePad. After doing some beta testing last night, I can vouch that it's this easy. (My experience with TypePad leads me back to one important point that I made a few weeks ago. Great apps are not ...

101 ways to improve your news site: Some great suggestions here on how to improve news Web sites. I emailed this link to the Webmasters of the big three news stations here in Sioux Falls. Post a form at the end of a breaking news story asking witnesses to send ...

ProcessLibrary.com - The online resource for process information!: Very handy when you're trying to figure out just what your 10-year-old nephew has installed that's making your machine run like a 286. In the recesses of your computer, 20-30 invisible processes run silently in the background. Some hog system resources, turning ...

Google Tries Out Its Own Friendster-Style Service: The social networking space is getting awfully crowded, capped now by Google's entry. The launch of Orkut comes after Friendster's rejection late last year of Google's offer to buy the site that has become known as an online venue for hooking up friends ...

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers: Good for Yahoo -- instead of building their own blogging software, they just partnered with Six Apart to offer Movable Type to all their hosting clients who want to blog. Pre-installed, even. Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for ...

Using Perl code from PHP: The possibilities here make my head spin. Problem is, I don't know if it's spinning in a good way or a bad way. The PHP Perl extension was implemented to allow the usage of Perl code from within PHP. It is a wrapper that embeds ...

MSFreePC: This site is run by the Lindows crew. "Microsoft was found guilty of anti-trust violations based on claims brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. Microsoft recently agreed to a $1.1 BILLION settlement to resolve numerous lawsuits alleging that Microsoft's behavior violated antitrust and unfair competition laws. This settlement ...

Non-Blogger Fired For Blogging!: Anil Dash nails it here when he explains that "no has ever gotten fired for blogging." Take a person's words, and guess what would happen if you took the exact same words or ideas and sent them to the public via letter to the editor, streetcorner ...

Macromedia - ColdFusion Support Forums - Cold Fusion/SQL Server programmer needed: I agree with just about everything here: Please DON'T respond [...] If we have a tense moment or we say that we don't like the way you did some work and that it's not absolutely perfect and you're not ...

Making Sense of AdSense: Don't feel bad, Anil, Gadgetopia was rejected too. We still can't figure out why. "There's a far more serious problem with AdSense, though. The approval system is capricious, even arbitrary. It's understandable that Google wants to make sure sites aren't just ad farms, and it's in ...

How long before someone issues a Movable Type "distribution," and how would Six Apart react? Movable Type is so customizable, that a lot of users have custom preferences, myself included. Whenever I do a new MT install, I find myself loading the same plug-ins, building the same templates, changing the ...

Tables vs CSS: Decloak makes a number of extensions for (I think) DreamWeaver and ASP.Net. Apparently some of their Web authoring tools don't support CSS positioning. So, instead of adding CSS positioning support, or just ignoring the issue, they launched an offensive against using CSS positioning. This page is a ...

The New Diamond Age: This was a great feature in Wired magazine about 18 months ago. It details the current state of the precious gem market, and how diamonds can now be made for less than they can be mined. "These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope. "No, ...