I have used, and mentioned here, some great web interfaces lately. As a counterpoint, I’d like to mention that using Bloglines is a terrible experience. I keep trying to like it, as a centralized collection of feeds is important, but it really is horrible. Since I’m not interested in the social aspects of the site, there’s not enough there for me to suffer through it. I hope they someday make managing several hundred feeds less painful, or that someone points out the “use good interface” checkbox I’ve missed.
Unlike many of the brilliant folks at the office, I feel that obsessing about fonts borders on silly. Serif, Sans serif, and Monospaced pretty much covers it in my book. Of course if the font is made from time-lapsed photos of headlights, now that’s a different story altogether.
I’ve been bitching about podcasting for as long as the word has existed. More specifically, my complaint centers around the way podcasting is typically done – by a geek or two who do nothing but wank on and on about the same boring crap that’s on their weblogs. For a long time I thought that was all there was to it. This is changing, and now that Apple’s iTunes 4.9 has all sorts of podcasting goodness built in I’m slowly changing my tune.
I didn’t think much of this the day after the one-day Rails competition. I must not have been paying attention, because YubNub is sweet. It takes a little while to understand why. Bookmark it for a few days, then add one or two of your own commands. You’ll get it.
I added “jbsearch” as a command to seach this blog, for no particular reason, but it works just fine.
When I finally snap, assuming I survive the first 20 minutes, I’ll probably buy this quaint little 17th century fort on its own island, “Imposingly poised in the central approach to europe’s 4th largest port, with spectacular and moody setting, own jetty, and many parts.” Starting at only £150,000. That’s like $12.00USD right?
Please read Peter Merholz piece entitled How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control as another example of a better, smarter writer saying what I would if I could.
You all know the hype surrounding Ruby on Rails, so we don’t have to talk about that. What needs talking about is the idea of “Web 2.0.” AJAX, Javascript libraries, Rails and other bits are coming together to enable some really nice, useful, usable web applications. For example, yesterday I spent 10 or 15 minutes reordering a list on one of my Backpack pages. So of course today they’ve introduced the new drag and drop interface for doing just that.
Cory Doctorow’s new book is out. He always releases books under a creative commons license and with the complete text available online, for free. Of course I bought a signed, inscribed dead-tree copy. It’s cooler that way.
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