Today started a little better than yesterday on the news project. With two days’ worth of news I was already starting to see themes that would extend across the week, stories that would be worth condensing and summarising in a weekly round-up. But I’ve also started wondering if I’m trying to tackle the wrong problem.
I was anticipating a period in this news project when I would feel lost and like nothing was working. Most projects have them. I just didn’t expect the feeling to start before I’d begun: last night was full of dreams in which I was endlessly reading and summarising news websites but getting nowhere and making no sense.
What's the fastest way to write text? A keyboard, natch, but the relative speed and rank of the other devices is surprising. - Phil Gyford's Comments
He claims he can touch type, but "I tend to make too many mistakes." Well, guess what: you can't touch type if you can't type by touch while looking at the source text!
- The State of Split-Screen Gaming Article | Eurogamer
- A summary of decent games to play with a friend in the same room. (Thanks Tom A.)
- Boks - A Visual Grid Editor - Toki Woki.
- An AIR application that generates customised CSS etc files for use with the Blueprint CSS framework. Handy.
- Grange Hill Online - Locations
- Amazing: matching up shots from Grange Hill episodes with photos of the real world contemporary locations. The Internet's fab. (via EnemyOfChaos on Twitter)
After those bits of background, mulling over what I’ve been thinking, here’s what I’m going to do next week. I’m going to spend the week writing an online news website. Part of me is still wondering why, so here are some reasons.
Yesterday I wrote about my frustrations with current sources of news. There’s another main reason for my current news-related project though, and that’s more optimistic.
I mentioned in yesterday’s weeknote that I’m currently working on personal project about news. I’ll describe the project itself later in the week, but first a bit of background. There are two main thoughts that have lead me to this project, and here’s the first.
- CamWorld: Thinking Outside the Box
- Cameron Barrett's account of SXSW 2000.
- Hack the Planet: Are you sure?
- A post-SXSW2000 discussion about weblogs and cliques and oh all those things that now seem so old.
- Comments on 1142 | MetaFilter
- A bit more flurry about weblogs and "3000 word" Ben Brown-style essays, post SXSW 2000. Quaint.
- The benbrown website :: daily text
- Ben Brown's 6985 word account of his SXSW 2000 and *that* weblog panel. A lovely piece, still worth a read.
As an alternative suggestion... I've been using Tuffmail http://www.tuffmail.com/ as my email host for my domain for a couple of years and have been very pleased. Several friends recommended them to me.
The service is not free -- you pay more depending on the number of accounts and amount of storage you want, but it's extremely configurable (more so than I need or understand) and, so far, has been rock solid, with awesome spam filtering. I like to think that because it's the only thing the company does, they're very good at it. They have web mail clients so you can check your mail online too.

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