Link torture

Meta Link Bait – This week’s Best 11 List of Lists

April 17, 2009 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

Online, people like lists — who knows, maybe people everywhere like lists, either making them or reading them.

Since the goal of writing online is, not surprisingly, to have people read you, the general wisdom is that posts composed of lists to get more readers. Look at the top articles on aggregating sites like Digg and you’ll always find lists.

That being said, here are my favorite lists of this week. This list is focused mostly how to do things better online, with a bonus two for fun thrown in. They tend to be a bit inside baseball about creating websites with a sprinkling of Twitter and social media.

7 Screenshot Capturing Tools For Windows – Several different approaches for capturing screenshots in Windows. Seven? Well, maybe not actually seven.
16 Windows Live Writer Plugins For Bloggers – If you want to write blog entries on Windows and don’t want to use your blog’s backend — Microsoft’s free Windows Live Writer is your best best. Here’s a list of plug-ins to give it even more power.
50 Sites That Will Help You To Become a Better Designer – Tutorials and resources to help you learn and improve your designs.
35 WordPress Theme Releases for April 2009 – WordPress the software for most blogs — 35 themes to make yours look different than the other 1 million sites. Enquiring Mimes, as do all Bluefugue media sites, uses the Thesis theme.
25 Inspirational 3D Typography Designs – Want to try 3D Type in your projects?
5 Great Web Design Resources – More website help.
13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners – How to start Twittering from the very cogent Blog and Twitter-meister Darren Rowse.
The Best Niche Social Media News Sites Right Now – A good selection of specialized social media news sites.
16 Biggest Tech No-Nos – A little technical and online ettiquette

The last two are from cracked.com a site that has made lists an art. For your amusement.

The 7 Most Horrifying Parasites on the Planet – The picture at the lead is from this list, it’s a parasite that eats a fish’s tongue and replaces the tongue with itself, rather a la Alien.
When Lobster Was Spam- 5 Gourmet Foods That Used to be Cheap – Amongst others, how do polenta become fancy?

Filed Under: How To, Link torture, Technology, Web Design Tagged With: Blog, Darren Rowse, Thesis, Twitter, Twitter Tips, Weblogs

Recommended Reading: Ten bits of randomness for your edification

March 2, 2009 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

Here are ten topics of interest from a recent perusal of the web. Several are interesting enough, that I’ll reserve the right to explore them in more detail in the future.

Give them a look here, for now.

Foxmarks becomes Xmarks, does site discovery – Foxmarks, one of the essential Firefox browser plugins, has changed it’s name to Xmarks and it extending its service which previously was synching bookmarks and passwords between computers to now include a site discovery search feature providing information about a website and suggested similar sites.
Amazon lets publishers disable Kindle 2′s read-aloud feature – A cool feature of the new Amazon Kindle electronic book reader annoyed book publishers. It seems the device has the ability to read your book to you in either a computer generated man or woman’s voice. Publisher said it violated copyrights by creating derivative works and potentially siphoning off recorded book sales. Amazon said it isn’t true, it doesn’t violate copyrights, but they’re going to allow publishers to disable the capability on a book-by-book basis.
Simple Facts About 64-bit Computing – AppScout – A few useful facts about 64-bit computing. Most new PCs are now 64-bit, does it make difference? Bottom line – not much for most users.
Today is Dr. Suess’s birthday, with celebrations by Google:

Better Interface for Uploading Gmail Attachments Sometimes it’s the small things. While users have always been able to do the basics of attaching files to messages in Gmail, the interface has been, well, basic. A new update to my favorite email service now allows multiple attachments to be included at the same time and bars show the progress of acquiring the attachments.
Back I Am – Following the life and times of Mike Arrington, editor of Techcrunch, may be a little “inside baseball”, but he is emblematic of the best and maybe the worst of the blog culture, so when Mike decided he was exhausted after being spat upon (literally) at Davos, he decided to take a vacation. He was gone 30 days and now he’s baaaack.
TG Daily – Analysis- Safari 4 lifts Apple above 10% browser market share – Apple Safari’s browser’s new beta release is very fast and has catapulted the browser’s market share to 10% in February.
The Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Annual Letter – Warren Buffet, investor and uber-rich guy, writes an annual letter with his take on the economy and how it will affect his Berkshire Hathaway holding company. The letter is always keenly watched due to Buffet’s success and with this year’s rotting economy, even more so. Fred Wilson, the New York venture capitalist, read and analyzed Buffet’s letter and published take-aways on his website. Interesting reading and analysis. Bottom line — the economy sucks.
Desktop Linux- Ready for the mainstream – InfoWorld – Analysis - While Desktop Linux has been declared almost ready for primetime for at least ten years, Galen Gruman in InfoWorld says that it’s now time and it probably really is. If you do as we advocate around here in enquiring mimes-world and do most of your work with web services like Gmail and Zoho Docs, why do you care whether you’re using Winows, Mac or Linux? Linux is free and open.

And finally:

Top 5 signs you are anal-retentive Better read Matt Cutt’s list yourself, but our favorite is #3 -”You look up anal-retentive to see whether it needs a hyphen.”

Filed Under: Link torture, Technology