David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
I can’t take it anymore. Yet another ingenius post by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com. I hate to be a blogger that just points out stuff that other bloggers say, but Hugh consistently amazes me. Read gapingvoid every day…especially if you are in traditional Advertising or Marketing. Then you will understand why you are about to be squashed like a bug.
I just ran across an article on blogs in the Omaha World Herald (this link will be dead within few weeks, a testament to the tech-savviness of the OWH).
They define a blog as “An online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on the Web; also called Weblog, Web log” and make no mention of the benefits of blogging for businesses, self promotion, just how RSS allows one to “read entries from several different blogs on one site,” how blogs help power popular search engines such as Google, or how blogs are turning marketing and advertising upside down. I know newspapers are written at the third-grade level, but this is ridiculous.
The article explains how to set up a weblog like this: “Anybody can do it. If you’re technically savvy, you can create a Web page for your blog that’s based in your own machine. It’s not easy – there aren’t any places to click or windows to open, just long strings of computer commands.” Huh? In all fairness, they do go on to mention blogger.com.
Then there is the blogs that they link to in the article. I get the feeling they didn’t spend very much time scouring the internet for the best in Omaha blogs. Kenneth Ross’s blog is a pretty decent representation of what a blog is, but Cathie English’s blog hasn’t been updated in over nine months! Jitterblogs.org opens to an excessively prominent disclaimer, which links to another page, which links to five blogs, two of which have zero posts, one that has one post (from five months ago), and another that also hasn’t been updated in five months. Certainly, simply by clicking on “Omaha” in someone’s blogger profile, they would have stumbled upon the hub of Omaha-based blogging.
Maybe they don’t want to generate too much interest in blogs, seeing as how blogs and technology such as RSS threaten to make newspapers, and the old method of advertising that powers them, extinct.
Jason Kottke has posted about Saft, A Safari Plugin that saves time. Amongst the features it has (many of which I had wished for before) are:
If I have a bunch of tabs open in Safari that all relate to a specific job or task, Saft adds to my Bookmarks menu a “Bookmark this group of tags” function (as well as other “why didn’t Apple think of that?” functions), which bookmarks all of the tags in that open window, and places them in a bookmarks folder. This already came in handy to me earlier today when a client handed me a list of websites and said “These are my competitors.”
Want to read that whole window full of browser tabs, but can’t get to it right now? You can save the window, and reload it later. Saft will even remember the browser size and position.
You can set your Saft preferences so that just typing “a” into your address bar will take you to Amazon, or so that typing “dict blog” will bring you to Dictionary.com search for the word “blog” (a default Saft preference). Any such searches will also be loaded into your contextual menus, so that if you select a word in your browser and right-click, you can search for that term on any site you have set in your preferences.
For those times when you have a bunch of tabs open Safari crashes. When you restart Safari, Saft will ask you if you want to restore those windows.
Many browsers already have this, but this will highlight text on the page that matches what you type. Great for “clicking” on links without a mouse.
I tried the demo this morning and didn’t even flinch at the $12 price tag. Learning to use this along with Quicksilver, and you’ll wonder how you ever functioned before.
Don’t make me rate all of my songs. Having songs rated is great for enhancing the Party Shuffle, and populating the “My Top Rated” playlist, but rating can be a hassle. Use the power of the Internet, and assign all of my songs an average rating, which takes the average rating of each song from all of the iTunes libraries across the world. Then let me override this rating by making my own rating, which is then sent to the database and calculated back into the average rating for that song.
I’m sure Apple has probably already thought of this and is working on it, but hurry up!
[4:16 PM – Title has been edited to be more descriptive]
[4:16 PM – One more thought]
Imagine the sales potential for the iTunes Music Store to know your ratings of songs, and to know what other songs are enjoyed by people who rate that song highly.
A fellow employee of RDG has joined the blogosphere. Our IT guy, Joe Schmidt, of joeschmidt.com, after starting a few internal company blogs, has written joeschmidt.com’s first post. I’m really looking forward to seeing what his intelligent, yet sick, twisted, and sometimes disgruntled, mind will create.
I know that he will likely be concealing his identity for some time, but since he is such a handsome fellow, I feel I must show you what he looks like.
Welcome, Joey!
Right before New Year’s, I noticed a lump inside of my lower lip. Now, being the hypochondriac that I am, I was naturally petrified that I had Oral Cancer. Why? I’m certainly not at risk. I don’t have a family history of Cancer. I’m 25, not a smoker or chewer, and am otherwise healthy. Because any Google search for “lump in mouth” or lump in lip will likely have even a reasonable person convinced that this is a sure sign of Oral Cancer. keep on reading »
If you’re going to have Affluenza, at least get some environmentally sensitive stuff through Grist Magazine‘s green buying guide. Okay, so it’s actually a green gift guide, but the holidays are way past.
I recently got a new laptop, and I have to admit, I have been spending a disturbing portion of my time on the couch. I’m not a big TV watcher, so prior to acquiring my laptop, I spent the majority of my time at my desk, which I guess should be even more disturbing.
Having a laptop is great, though. I got Airport Express, so now I am wireless, and can even play music through my speakers via AirTunes. I can even take it to bed with me, do some blog reading before bed, put it on my nightstand, and then check my e-mail before I even get out of bed (“oh, a computer in bed…the porn jokes I could comment with”…don’t bother). Maybe I’ll slowly devolve from never leaving my desk, to never leaving my couch, to never leaving my bed.
I’m sure I will spend some time on my deck once, if, the weather is ever nice again. It just snowed 14 inches here in Omaha, and every time this happens it makes me wonder why people aren’t nomadic anymore. Oh, that’s right, because we have so much stuff.
AJ Kandy of “West of the Expressway” has made some perceptive observations on The Economics of Urban Sprawl. Not only do the suburbs exterminate culture, they may be an economic drain all-around. It’s great to make the decision to not buy a gas guzzler, but how about designing our lives so we drive less to begin with?
The eventual realization of these economic consequences may result in the End of Suburbia, looks like an interesting documentary, analyzing “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” It probably won’t be coming to a theater near you, but they do encourage public screenings. Anyone up for one in Omaha?
Now that kadavy.net is included in the sites drawer for NetNewsWire 2.0b10 (a great RSS Reader for the Mac), I figured it was time to gain a little edge with my own favorites icon (that little icon that is showing up next to the web address on your address bar on most browsers).
To make one for your site, design a 16×16 pixel gif and upload it to your root directory with the name “favicon.ico”. It’s best if you can stay within the standard 256-color 216-color web palette.
Tip: When working at the pixel-level in Photoshop, it’s a good idea to have one window zoomed way in (like 1600%) so you can see each pixel clearly, but also have a second window open for the same document (Window < Arrange < New Window for document name) at 100%, so you can simultaneously see what it will look like at actual size.