![[Current photo]](/current_photo_full.jpg)
![[Book cover]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1421519208.01.MZZZZZZZ.gif)
![[Book cover]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1421519194.01.MZZZZZZZ.gif)
![[Book cover]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0140023747.01.MZZZZZZZ.gif)
![[Book cover]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1421519186.01.MZZZZZZZ.gif)
29 Jul 08 – Blab To Everyone, All At Once
I realize this blog's turned into Tech and Emotion Central of late, but that's all I've felt like writing about lately.
Today's subject: Ping.fm, an aggregator site for all you social networkers out there. Basically, you sign up with Ping.fm, and you enter your username and password for all the newest Web 2.0 sites: Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Then you enter a short message on Ping.fm's site, and boom! that message is posted on all your social networks.
So, you can sign up for many of these services, and even if you don't access them often, you can still post to them. This makes you at least useful on those sites, and relatively active.
Which brings up another point: these sites have varying utility. I only visit MySpace once a week, while I hit Twitter twice a day. But why not at least post to all of them?
24 Jul 08 – Yahoo! Buzz Is Not Buzz-Worthy
![[IMAGE]](http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/head/buzz_logo_tm_beta.gif){kind=logo}
You may have heard of Digg, a site where users submit stories and rate them, and the highest-rated stories hit the front page. (Slashdot and Fark are similar.)
Yahoo! now has its own version, called Yahoo! Buzz. It has a few problems.
For one, the titles are short, as are the descriptions. Most titles are 6 words or less, and the descriptions are less than 20. And since so many stories start with fluff or backstory, 17 words of description often isn't enough to elucidate the story.
Also, various links and stats on each story don't show up until you mouse over them. Which keeps the site clean, granted, but I was mystified about why stories were popular until I accidentally moused over one and "9 Votes" appeared next to it. (Incidentally, why "Votes" instead of "votes"?)
And there's a big Flash navigation bar at the top, which loaded in a full 10 seconds on my ultra-fast FiOS line, and shows stories just as cramped as those in the main story list.
Overall, it's an okay site. It's just frustrating and superfluous. I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to.
23 Jul 08 – Send an Email to Create a Blog...Wow!
Want a blog, but don't want to spend time building a blog? Do you have an email address? Then you've got a blog, thanks to Posterous.
Just send an email, containing whatever you want on your blog, to post@posterous.com. They'll automatically create a blog, and reply with your new blog's address. Then just continue emailing post@posterous.com with new messages. The email that they send to you will also contain a link letting you set up an account, so you can edit and delete posts, change your site's name, etc.
You can attach mp3s, videos, and links to your post and it'll all show up on your blog. Note that it all shows up, including your signature, so you may want to delete that before sending.
Here's my blog, as an example. Nice, clean, and simple.
14 Jul 08 – Topix: Local News and Commentary
I really love this site: Topix. It displays local news stories for your specific town or county, along with forum comments. All the comments are from people local to the story, so you'll see reactions from the parents or neighbors of those involved. You get really close to what happens.
11 Jul 08 – Donate to Teachers
Rather cool website out there: DonorsChoose.org. On this website, teachers ask for classroom project materials. You donate money to whatever you think is appropriate. The teacher and students then send you thanks, via email or regular mail.
You can donate as much as you want to any project. If a project falls through, you can apply the money you donated to any other project.
Simple, convenient, and with a real-world impact.
9 Jul 08 – Increase Web Page Font Size Using a Custom Stylesheet
Warning! Extreme geekiness ahead, but at least it's extremely useful geekiness.
Are you annoyed with the text size on certain websites? Would you like to increase the text size on just those sites? Do you use the Firefox web browser?
If you're using Firefox, find the "chrome" directory in your preferences (location varies by operating system). Create a file named userContent.css in the chrome directory, and add this to it:
@-moz-document domain(website.com)
{
body { font-size: 16pt; }
}
Replace "website.com" with the address of the site you want to affect. Then restart Firefox. You can add more entries like the one above for other websites.
If you're using Internet Explorer, unfortunately, I don't know of a way of changing the default font size for one website. You can change it for all websites, though.
Use Notepad to create a text file named userContent.css somewhere on your computer, and add the following to it:
body { font-size: 16pt; }
Then, in Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options, then select General, then Accessibility. Select the "Ignore colors", "Ignore font styles", and "Ignore font sizes" checkboxes. Under User Style Sheet, select "Format documents using my style sheet", click Browse, and navigate to userContent.css and select it.
Some websites lock their content down, so this trick won't work on every website. To get it working on specific websites, you'd need to look at their CSS (View > Source) and see which visual elements are used on the webpage.
But this should work on many websites. If it doesn't work on your favorite website, let me know and I should be able to find the offending CSS and offer a specific modification.
7 Jul 08 – identi.ca
I'm now on identi.ca, a new social networking site, as brentnewhall. identi.ca is apparently attempting to be another Twitter, though I don't see a lot of activity there yet.
Still, you never know what's going to be the next popular platform. A few minutes' time will at least introduce you to them.
3 Jul 08 – Robert Scoble
In concert with yesterday's entry, in which I talked about the IMDb, today I'm going to talk about a really neat guy named Robert Scoble.
Robert first came to my attention when he worked for Microsoft. He was one of the first employees there to blog seriously, and he blogged a lot. Some of his posts even criticized Microsoft policies. He came across as honest and matter-of-fact. He did one of the best things you can do when blogging: he put himself into his blog.
He then left Microsoft so he could freelance. That's when things got interesting. He began joining social networks; now he's on just about every single one. He blogs, he twitters, he Qiks, he comments on Friendfeed. It's like you can't get away from him.
And that's the neat thing about him. He tries out all these services, and not just as a casual experiment. He integrates them into his daily life, and decides what works for him and doesn't. Then he blogs about his experiences.
Meanwhile, his personal network grows. He's subscribed to 28,000 people on Twitter alone. He wrote recently about how he loves the noise, meaning that he derives personal satisfaction out of sifting through metric tons of seemingly irrelevant comments to see what people are really thinking about. And he engages constantly in those comments; he's posted 2,200 comments just on Friendfeed.
He's terrifically popular, and makes money through his interviews and videos, which he gets from tapping his social network.
Really neat to see a guy making a living off of his passions and interests.
2 Jul 08 – The IMDb and WALL-E
Surprised how many folks don't know about the IMDb, or the Internet Movie Database. It's a massive online database of pretty much every movie ever made, with entries for actors, quotes, trivia, etc. And they're all hyperlinked, so you can go from a movie, to an actor in that movie, to another movie that the actor was in, ''etc.'
It's not perfect; the general public adds and updates entries on the IMDb, so some entries are wrong or mis-identify an actor. But that's somewhat rare, and overall, it's a comprehensive resource.
It's what I use on my sidebar, listing the most recent movies I've seen. Including WALL-E, which I thoroughly enjoyed this weekend. Not my favorite Pixar film, but entertaining throughout and with a good message that's not preachy. Once again, Pixar can do no wrong.