Links from February 2009
- Links for Sunday 1 February 2009
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- ASCII by Jason Scott / Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse
- Catching up on stuff... AOL Hometown shut down and wiped all its users' sites with four weeks' notice. It's bad enough when chunks of the web disappear, but worse like this. (via Simon Willison)
- ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD
- A follow-up to the previous link on why keeping your stuff on servers run by other companies is a recipe for trouble. I try to avoid this but some things, like Flickr, make me nervous. (via Blech)
- YouTube - The T-Mobile Dance
- An IprovEverywhere type stunt as an advert but very nicely done. I love how the participants only gradually join in. (via Preoccupations)
- FreeAgent - Online accounting for freelancers and small businesses
- Another online thing for freelance types, this one for accounting. Lots of UK-specific stuff.
- Mathusalem - Google Code
- Interesting-sounding backup utility for Mac OS X. Backs up in the background to "local drives, iDisk, WebDAV, AFP, SMB, FTP, SFTP or Amazon S3". Maybe for when StrongSpace finally disappears. (via Tom Taylor on Twitter)
- Fraser Speirs – On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09
- I know Speirs could be accused of bias but it doesn't sound like iPhoto '09's Flickr integration is going to be any use to me at all. Sounds awful. (via Daring Fireball)
- Corner Cottage, St Ives
- We stayed here this past week. Lovely little place, great location, sleeps up to five. St Ives was great, if wet, this time of year: quiet, friendly, beautiful and tasty.
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- Links for Wednesday 4 February 2009
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- Webby :: Webby
- Mini CMS in Ruby. Mainly just converts text into web pages using a variety of templating languages. (via Daring Fireball)
- Nanoc: a Ruby CMS that generates static HTML » home
- Another little CMS. "runs on your local computer and compiles Markdown, Textile, Haml, etc. documents into static web pages, ready for uploading to any web host." (via Daring Fireball)
- RubyFrontier Documentation
- Another CMS... imitating Userland Frontier. I can't decide if this is brilliance and/or madness. (via Daring Fireball)
- Global Futures Studies & Research by the MILLENNIUM PROJECT
- "Functions under the auspices of the World Federation of UN Associations."
- A daily diary of Depression-era life, told on Twitter.: The Social Path
- Entries from a line-a-day diary kept from 1937 to 1941 posted daily to Twitter. (via Infovore)
- 140 Characters » How Twitter Was Born
- How Twitter went from idea to product. I love stories like this because you know how much it means to the people involved. (via Preoccupations)
- The little page of TRANSPORT CHAOS
- Great idea. Love the descriptions of chaos levels. Longer-term graphs would be nice.
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- Links for Friday 6 February 2009
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- Color Combinations | Color Schemes | Color Palettes
- The 'Combo Tester' provides a way of viewing up to eight colours together, and automatically creating complementary ranges of up to eight colours.
- ColorSchemer - Online Color Scheme Generator
- Simple way of generating twelve complementary colours.
- Snarkmarket: A Snarkmarket Book Project: The New Liberal Arts
- Writing a book about "the new liberal arts" and asking "what are they?" Also, the most pointless use of video ever. (via Kottke)
- Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline | Epicenter from Wired.com
- Another week another case of people losing data they've entrusted to a hosted service. (via Lee)
- Write to Reply
- Aims to provide a way to comment on individual paragraphs of public reports (starting with 'Digital Britain'). Great stuff (not sure about the way comments are integrated (or not) though).
- iCraig » Geotagger
- A Mac app for using Google Earth to add GPS coordinates to photos' EXIF data. A shame iPhoto doesn't update its cached data though. (via Lee)
- Support OpenStreetMap Donate Now
- OpenStreetMap are trying to raise £10,000 to buy a new API database server for their fantastic work. (via Simon Willison)
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- Links for Monday 9 February 2009
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- Breaking: Goonfleet stomps Band of Brothers in biggest EVE takedown ever
- "Can you smell that? That sort of eau du ozone, rubber, and dust? That smell is the goddamn future, friends. We are, all of us, finally living in the world our grandfathers wrote pulp novels about."
- YouTube - Band of Brothers (BOB) gets Pwned in Alliance Trounament 4
- I'd never seen commentary on a game before. I have no idea what's going on, but it's still somehow thrilling. (via Oblinks)
- Recreating the button | stopdesign
- Doug Bowman on how buttons were developed on Google apps. Good HTML/CSS cleverness. (via Simon Willison)
- Facing up to Fonts | Slides and notes
- Interesting presentation on which fonts are available to use on the web, and how best to specify combinations of them. (via Blech)
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- Links for Wednesday 11 February 2009
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- The Online Photographer: The Trough of No Value
- It's lovely when you find a phrase to name a thing you've always known but never been able to reduce to a handful of words. (via Kottke)
- Unit Interactive :: Blog :: Better CSS Font Stacks
- Sensible examples of lists of fonts to use in CSS.
- Font Matrix
- Nice grid of what fonts are available in different OSes with different installs of software.
- Watermarks Project
- Lovely idea to make it obvious how disastrous rising sea levels could be. All the photos are mock-ups though unfortunately. (via Noisy Decent Graphics)
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- Links for Thursday 12 February 2009
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- When can I use...
- "Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies." A lot of waiting involved. (via Dotcode)
- Discount thoughts: critical thinking compilation
- Collections of intelligent writing about video games. Only two so far, but promising.
- Mapping the Brainysphere: 29 blogs switched-on gamers should read « Subject Navigator
- I was looking for one or two good games blogs to follow and found too many. Choices choices.
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- Links for Tuesday 17 February 2009
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- The Architects Who Made London with Maxwell Hutchinson - Architecture Programme - Royal Academy of Arts
- Series of six discussions about twentieth century architects who have done important stuff in London. On Mondays, first was last night, no online booking *rolls eyes*.
- How Not To Sort By Average Rating
- Some maths, which I'm assuming is good. (via Infovore)
- All Things Seen and Unseen » Similar Posts
- WordPress plugin for doing "more posts like this" stuff. Sounds well done. (via Infovore)
- Tech Support, Manuals & Troubleshooting for Consumers
- Nice idea. Like user-filled tech support forums but for everything, from white goods, cars, etc on. Although I did see a comment about them not paying people they'd promised to... (via Noisy Decent Graphics)
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- Links for Wednesday 18 February 2009
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- Adactio: Journal—Magnoliloss
- On backing up his Magnolia links and wondering how to back up the rest of his distributed online life. (via Blech)
- Husk.org. chaff. Aggregation and the Edge.
- "Is there a space for a piece of user-installable software, like Movable Type or Wordpress, that aggregates their data from sites across the web, and then presents it as a site?" Yes. Maybe even a WordPress plugin...?
- Flashbake: Free version-control for writers using git - Boing Boing
- Sounds nice and some lovely little features like saving info about the weather, etc when it automatically checks your files in. Contextual backup.
- Jacobian's jellyroll at master - GitHub
- "You keep personal data in all sorts of places on the internets. Jellyroll brings them together onto your own site." Sounds good, but haven't tried it. (via Blech)
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- Links for Friday 20 February 2009
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- Child's-eye view of Edwardian Ipswich - Evening Star 24
- Part one of my grandad's memories of growing up in Ipswich in the early 1900s.
- Datamoshing
- This stuff is awesome... ten years ago we wouldn't be able to see this as anything but an ugly mistake. In a couple more years it'll look really dated. It's now, yesterday's future here.
- Article Skimmer
- NY Time's prototype news viewer. Nice idea but it equalises the importance of all but one of the stories. I want a newspaper to tell me what it thinks is important (even if it's wrong). Otherwise it's not a newspaper, it's a database.
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- Links for Sunday 22 February 2009
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- AirBed & Breakfast: Better Than a Cheap Hotel
- A way for people to rent out rooms or apartments. More formal arrangements for paying than Craig's List, a step up from Couch Surfing. Got a nice (I hope) place for SXSW here.
- William Heath’s blog » Blog Archive » Who wants to live in our new hamlet, just outside London?
- William Heath and co have found a great place for their co-housing project. Exciting.
- Click opera - Art students (called Brian) observed
- The student days of Brian Eno. (via Blackbeltjones)
- The Demon-Haunted World
- Matt Jones' thought-provoking presentation on urbanisation and digitalisation: practical city magic. Great stuff.
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- Links for Monday 23 February 2009
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- Big L Radio Times Feature | Big L
- Article from the 'Radio Times' from last year describing life in the Frinton-on-Sea house that radio DJs Mike Read, David "Diddy" Hamilton and Adrian John share five days a week. Those wacky guys!
- Main Page - Lyrics from LyricWiki
- Never trawl through those oodles of banner-ad and ringtone laden sites filled with scraped and inaccurate lyrics again. Can't believe I've never seen this before.
- WikiMatrix - Compare them all
- Compare loads of features of loads of wikis.
- HOWTO/Install MoinMoin On Dreamhost - Mitch's Wiki
- The official MoinMoin wiki installation instructions are a confusing nightmare and failed me. These, on the other hand, just worked (even on a non-Dreamhost shared host). Still seems much, much more complex than an install should be.
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- Links for Thursday 26 February 2009
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- The Dead - a free survival-horror role-playing game.
- Looks like fun. Interesting stuff about relationships. Nice illustrations too.
- How to: create a wiki with Drupal | Cwgordon7's blog
- Drupal was quite lovely and easy to install, if complicated. But the wiki still felt a bit "not quite right" somehow.
- Wiki-Up that Drupal site | Patrick Teglia
- More on adding a wiki to Drupal.
- Great ideas generator - Dracos.co.uk
- Prepare for the next dotcom boom.
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- Links for Saturday 28 February 2009
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- Magical times at the picture palace - Evening Star 24
- Second part (of two, I think) of my grandad's memories of growing up in Ipswich in the early 1900s.
- Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way - Axon Flux - A Ruby on Rails Blog
- Nice "lessons learned" piece (via Simon Willison)
- Safari 4 benchmarked: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3 - Crave at CNET UK
- Shockingly bad bar charts. 3D bars drawn in perspective don't help with comparisons.
- Grid Focus Demo
- Nice clean WordPress template (with slightly annoying slidy social bookmarking panel).
- The Unstandard Demo
- Another nice WordPress theme. Uses images for the front page.
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