Valhalla Island

Handy bookmarklet that strips all the bullshit out of an article’s page leaving you only with the beautifully clear and readable content. Looks fantastic on everything I’ve tried it with.

Great news. The HD video player size and layout of the page to match is the setup I wish Flickr used for general photo browsing.

It’s lightning fast, apparently 42 times faster than IE 7 and over 3 times faster than Firefox 3. As far as a web browser UI can be overhauled Safari 4 has been and for an application I use non-stop all day, it’s a little unnerving. But I’ll get used to it.

Incredible interface builder for making web applications using Objective J and Cappuccino. The UI they built in 3 minutes using Atlas is almost identical to that we’ve spent months building with HTML and jQuery at Campus Notes. Via Daring Fireball.

He sounds like a cool guy too. Every day I love Twitter more.

Social Networking is not Marketing; but the inability to grasp that fact is the defining characteristic of the New Media Douchebag. To a NMD like Scoble, every interaction; from posting a Twitter update, to talking to a person in a bar, to uploading a picture of their cat is an opportunity to promote the semi-mythical “personal brand” that they’ve built around themselves.

What New Media Douchebags call “personal brands” everyone else calls being yourself.

And then the redesign… dear lord god, I don’t think I would have received such a strong response if I had visited your house and taken a shit in your Cheerios.

A reader’s comment:

I hate your new layout. Such a hassle to have to scroll. Two words: lame.

Amazing.

Spent two days putting this together for Panedia. Buy a large, quality photographic print of the bushfire affected region (before the fires) for just $99 each and 100% of the profit goes to the bushfire appeal. Win-win.

Uses a photo taken with your iPhone to identify the font. Amazing.

A set of massively high resolution images of space. Scroll down to the galaxy and nebula sections to fine some that’d make great desktop wallpaper. This and this one are particularly beautiful.

Kottke has a great analogy for blogging:

As businesses go, blogging is a lot like shining shoes. There are going to be very few folks who own chains of shoe shining places which make a lot of money and a bunch of other people who can (maybe) make a living at it if they bust their ass 24/7/365. But for many, shining shoes is something that will be done at home for themselves because it feels good to walk around with a shiny pair of shoes. Everyone else will switch to sandals (i.e. Twitter) or sneakers (i.e. Facebook) and not worry about shining at all.

Jeff Atwood wondering why Google’s monopoly isn’t treated with the same contempt as Microsoft’s:

I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft “monopoly” ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google. Does the fact that Google’s products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny? Isn’t anyone else concerned that Google, even with the best of “don’t be evil” intentions, has become more master than servant?

I don’t know, maybe because Google aren’t actively pursuing anticompetitive behaviour. Google isn’t popular because they lock people in, they’re on top because they’re better.

Absolutely amazing info-graphic from the New York Times.

This is the worst possible thing that can happen to a web application. I hope they find a way to get it back but even if they do, trust has been lost.

Fraser Spiers, developer of the fantastic FlickrExport for iPhoto on the new built-in Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09.

I was very excited about iPhoto ’09’s Flickr support and it sounds like almost exactly what I want, a desktop application to manage my Flickr account. But the support sounds so flimsy, so half-hearted and contrary to the way I use Flickr that I’ll continue using FlickrExport.

Very cool, lightweight web publishing system to replace an ageing PHP and MySQL setup. Every release of WordPress adds more and more rubbish I don’t use, Brent’s system is a simple, fast solution to a simple problem. It’s a shame he’s not releasing the code, even making it public on github would be fantastic.

The project I’ve been dedicating just about all my time to lately has a blog that until we launch could be called a development blog. You can also now sign up for a private beta we’ll run in a couple of weeks.