Categories
Delicious

links for 2010-12-22

  • Lord Vader commands you to turn to the Dark Side. Will you be able to resist as he guides you to your destination? Obi-Wan has taught you well but now it is time to choose your path. Light sabers at the ready!
  • Social bookmarking service Delicious is for the chop, it seems: owner Yahoo reckons it's one of its "underperforming or off-strategy products", and that it's not part of the firm's future. So what do you do if you really need to keep track of interesting things you've spotted online? Here are five favourites.
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    Categories
    Twitter

    Twitter Updates for 2010-12-22

  • The end of the Internet as we know it. http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/10/12/21/obama-fcc-caves-net-neutrality-tuesday-betrayal-assured #
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-21

  • Helping people like you learn to use Comic Sans appropriately.
  • This is my final blog post for The Atlantic. Five years ago, as a way to boost the competitive metabolism of The Hotline, Chuck Todd hired me away from ABC News to create "Hotline On Call." I was to be the first political reporter working for a mainstream news organization whose output would be exclusively online. "On Call" made its debut in early September, the same week that Chris Cillizza began "The Fix." Back then, reporters didn't blog. Newspapers and magazines hired curators to update their websites, and reporters would occasionally post online, but there was a strict separation based on platform. You were considered legitimate only if your byline appeared in print. You were considered a blogger if it didn't. And you didn't want to be a blogger, because bloggers back then were second-class citizens of the country of journalism. Bloggers were partisan activists, yellers, provocateurs and upstarts.
  • It was announced today that Yahoo is shutting down the popular social bookmarking service Delicious. So we thought we’d help you out with some solutions to export the bookmarks to other services. Users have a few different choices. You can choose to export your bookmarks into an html file and import them into your browser or directly import using services like Diigo, Xmarks and Faviki. Export Your HTML After logging into Delicious users can export the bookmarks along with their tags into a single html file. This file can then be added to most browsers by opening the bookmarks tool bar and locating the “import “ feature. On Firefox an import can be achieved by going to Bookmarks > Bookmarks toolbar > click on the icon with the star> import.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-20

  • Quality product descriptions can transform e-commerce conversion rates — it’s common to see increases of 30-100%. As well as converting more visitors, search traffic increases drastically when unique copy is written for each product. Most online retailers use manufacturers’ copy or rely solely on images to sell products. They then use inadequate copy elsewhere on their site and fail to achieve a consistent tone to persuade their audience. This creates a compelling opportunity for savvy retailers — by writing quality e-commerce copy you will create a unique competitive advantage. Essentially, your copy must achieve two goals: 1. Establish trust and 2. Convince visitors that your product is right for them. Potential customers cannot see or touch the product since it’s not physically there in front of them. This is why it’s important that your copy anticipates the needs of your visitors while convincing them that your company can be trusted to provide excellent products.
  • Wirify is a bookmarklet that lets you turn any web page into a wireframe in one click.
  • Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes, Online Bookmarking and Annotation, Personal Learning Network.
  • After giving millions of users a good 24 hours to express their anger and frustration at wide reports of a plan to kill off web bookmarking service Delicious, Yahoo got around to explaining that there was no need to panic. A leaked internal presentation had showed on Thursday that Yahoo was planning to “sunset” some services, including Delicious, and Yahoo statements to the press that it was “cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products” encouraged the idea that this meant Delicious was doomed.On Friday, Yahoo said something new: “We are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company”, officials wrote on Friday on the Delicious home blog. The service will stay up as Yahoo talks to potential buyers. Perhaps the company changed plans after a torrent of criticism.
  • (No joke. This is actually how I deal with Lawyers. This isn’t just theory, this is my experience.) Have you ever seen the movie “Monsters Inc.”? It’s a cute animated Disney film about Big Scary Monsters. All day long they go through magical doors, each leading into a bedroom of a young child sleeping at night, and the monster’s job is to scare the shit out of that kid and extract screams for money. That’s very much like the life of a lawyer. He goes about his work day, new situations come up, he gets involved and scares some people, he gets paid. The better he is at scaring people, the better paid he is. I’m not attacking lawyers for doing their job, everyone’s got to eat and earn a living. I just want to show you how best to deal with him. You have to understand this fundamentally: When someone hires a lawyer to threaten you, he’s not hiring someone to figure out the legal matters involved, he’s hiring someone to threaten you.
  • We are all obsessed with sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin at the moment but rewind a few years to when the term Web 2.0 first popped up and a whole host of different sites were the hot young startups destined for great things. It’s amazing what a couple of years do though because as we can see below, some of the biggest sites from the “Web 2.0 generation” are either on a massive decline, facing huge competition or about to be closed down. There’s a good lesson here to highlight; how the hype cycle around websites and services can come and go and what was once lauded and destined for great things can within a couple of years shut down and be abandoned…
  • In a blog post today, Delicious says “No, we are not shutting down.” But they aren’t staying at Yahoo either. Yesterday, it was all but confirmed that Yahoo! was sunsetting Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking services. They do admit that they are not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, and are looking for a home outside of the company. From the blog, “We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.” In the words of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, “Don’t Panic.” Delicious says they are maintaining the site and encourage users to stay active.
  • For busy websites, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to transfer static content such as images, javascripts, stylesheets, Flash etc. is highly recommended (as listed in Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site) as it reduces server load and bandwidth thus improves stability and availability. There is a catch – Commerical CDN’s like Akamai and Limelight are not cheap at all. Good news, we have an exception however – the free, P2P-based CoralCDN allows us to take full advantage of a powereful CDN without spending a dime. How to use it? Well, basically, just append `.nyud.net` to the hostname of any URL, and that URL will be handled by Coral – simple. This plugin takes that simplicity one step further (or closer?) by rewriting your static files’ URL’s (JavaScripts, CSS, images etc.) so that they are served from Coral servers instead of your own. You don’t have to touch anything! Just enable it, and boom! your static cont
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    Categories
    Twitter

    Twitter Updates for 2010-12-20

  • Latest Blog Post: I Still Use Del.icio.us http://goo.gl/fb/tLs1Q #
  • Unlike other 'Robin Hoods' I can speak with an English accent. #NameThatMovie #
  • TRON was great. Lived up to the hype. Possible sequel? #TRON Now to bed, to bed. #
  • It is Friday. Time for a happy dance. #
  • Ask Murphy? RT: @RizzoTees: @lisackeller @ArcoJedi Why must great companies like @Yahoo continue to make missteps as they fight The Google™? #
  • Agreed. What are they thinking? RT: @lisackeller: Oh I am so mad about this whole #delicious thing! #
  • The Escapist : Experienced Points: Bargains Are for Cheaters http://icio.us/355qis #
  • Kids Korner: Mars Email Hoax http://goo.gl/fb/HYafF #
  • A matter of degrees: a debate over higher education | Need to Know | PBS http://icio.us/3wcbje #
  • "Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back" as a silent film :: You know it to be true(ly funny). http://t.co/eBCCPuO via @youtube #starwars #
  • Dumb Cat Can't Figure Out How To Drink from a faucet: Video http://su.pr/8gIBfB Meh, whatever works. #
  • Quote by Demetri Martin: [showing a line graph] This is very autobiographical. This is the cuteness of a girl… http://goo.gl/fb/YO9E5 #
  • Was just beboppin' to the Hannah Montana theme bcuz I've heard it way too many times in this house. I'm not ashamed! #DoNotJudgeMe hahahahah #
  • My Comedy Awards: Tom Smith – Tech Support for Dad http://goo.gl/fb/2GEXR #
  • Need some construction paper for scrapbooking or back-to-school? This is the best quality stuff. http://icio.us/dizigi #
  • Hmmm, tasty tasty hard drive. Use at least 1 TB and season to your preference. Serves your entire family. http://icio.us/rwnmhr #
  • There is only 4gb left on this computer. It started with 250gb. Ugh. Must get larger hard drive to replace it or dump a whole lotta stuff. #
  • Just a warning, if you decide to let your 8-month-old use your computer, they can be pretty violent with the keyboard. BANG BANG BANG BANG! #
  • Sammy typed: uy vhg dut xvcer k XZEWDSDtrgf zgdf r f ve  b az~? .S X3w24$#????????? vv/ ' 3q.423ewzzzzzzzxzHGR]E XC[]RE \ 5 \\\\\\I ] V0B #
  • In the style of @wilw { ME: What will happen if I let my 8-month-old son type on the computer? HIM: ,? L055,2350000000000000 .2 .0 4789+ } #
  • The Wii Fit says BMI is 40.67 (-0.04) Weight is 253.x (-0.2) #WiiFitAge is 27 (-7). Small moves… #PublicHumiliationDiet #
  • Quote by Francis Bacon: He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest… http://goo.gl/fb/2bTIO #
  • I like this game, but the most difficult parts are timing the long jumps. 2,188,459 points. http://solipskier.com #
  • Quote by Thomas La Mance: Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans. http://goo.gl/fb/5ydvI #
  • There was no Twitter #WhenIWasLittle There was no Internet #WhenIWasLittle There was no 24-hour news #WhenIWasLittle #
  • I don't know anything about Keith Olbermann. But I agree w/ this: There Is No 'Ground Zero Mosque' http://t.co/v1Gj052 via @youtube #
  • Another of my goals for #WeightLoss and #PublicHumiliationDiet is to be able to wear my wedding ring again. #
  • Slipped a bit. BMI: 40.71 (40.14). Weight: 253.x (+3.5). #WiiFitAge 38 (+4). No excuses, just more exercise. #PublicHumiliationDiet #
  • Hooray for Verizon Billing, they just got schooled in math! http://icio.us/kvqa2d #
  • Hooray for Verizon Billing! They just got schooled in math! [mp3] http://icio.us/kvqa2d #
  • Character matters. Don't do business with people you can't trust. This advice will never change, no matter what … http://bit.ly/apHW6u #
  • If I knew WHY the stupid thing doesn't work, it would mean that I'd already fixed it. I'll let u know after it's fixed. #ThingsISay #tech #
  • My Friends: Derek Brink – New Year's Eve http://goo.gl/fb/i9O2S #writers #blogs #music #friends #derekbrink #
  • My Comedy Awards: The Preacher's Son…a valuable lesson to learn http://goo.gl/fb/6wmq4 #
  • Apparently, you think, therefore you ski. SOLIPSKIER, the game. http://icio.us/piwvax #
  • Hey teachers, get the power of @Aviary in your classroom in a private, secure environment. #aviary #art #music http://icio.us/v2mlkr #
  • My Comedy Awards: Married To The Sea – ARCHIVE: Aug 2010 http://goo.gl/fb/Bw2fv #
  • According to #WiiFit BMI is 40.14, weight is 249.8 (-4.4, wow), Wii Fit Age is 23 (-11). #PublicHumiliationDiet #
  • Only a few of these surprised me, but good read: 19 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Star Wars http://icio.us/spawo4 #
  • I have a new appreciation for Lando Calrissian! http://youtu.be/NATeU-r0GDU #starwars #BlackstarWarrior #
  • Quote by John Lennon: You're all geniuses and you're all beautiful. You don't need anyone to tell you who you are… http://goo.gl/fb/bXRW2 #
  • Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. http://goo.gl/fb/rTx2y #
  • STRAWBERRIES! Who doesn't love strawberries? [pic] http://icio.us/zpzvca #
  • Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web [TechCrunch.com] http://icio.us/szxhh2 #
  • How can I communicate to my kids that it used to be really uncool to be a nerd / geek? ??? CONFORM OR BE CAST OUT! ??? #
  • How can I communicate to my kids that it used to be really uncool to be a nerd / geek? "YOU LIKE SCIENCE?! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!" #
  • How can I communicate to my kids that it used to be really uncool to be a nerd / geek? I mean, social pariah; "U HAVE A COMPUTER? EHWWW!" #
  • #WiiFit says BMI 40.85. Weight 254lbs (+1.5) #WiiFitAge 31 (-3) #PublicHumiliationDiet – Workout 34min. Milestone 10 Hours Tot. (since Dec.) #
  • More bad news from Google. Google Wave go bye-bye. It was … neat … while it lasted. http://icio.us/q3wiea #
  • What happened to "Do No Evil"? Bad Google! No treat for you! :: Google and Verizon Near Deal on Pay Tiers for Web http://icio.us/zk4pei #
  • Music: Pink Floyd, Music Lessons, Guitar & Banjo Lessons – All on Netflix: Just a quick note for those with a… http://goo.gl/fb/WC3UA #
  • My long term goal for #PublicHumiliationDiet is something less than 200lbs. The #WiiFit suggest a crazy BMI that puts my weight at 136? WTH? #
  • #PublicHumiliationDiet Seems to be working? BMI: 40.6 (-.25) / Weight: 252.5lbs (-1.5) / #WiiFitAge 34 (0). Slow and steady… #
  • My Comedy Awards: Customer Service Comic at PartiallyClips http://goo.gl/fb/RY6zV #
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-17

  • It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but all signs point to the impending demise of delicious.com. What are we going to do with all of our bookmarks? There are several alternatives available and, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to test some of them out until you find the one that best fits how you like to save bookmarks and later search for them. You’ll also want to export your existing delicious.com bookmarks and, if possible, import them into the new service you choose. Instructions on that are below, but first, here’s a list of options for your post-Delicious.com bookmarking.
  • About once a week I get emails demanding to know my stance on a particular piece of “historic orthodoxy”. Lots of folks wonder about my view of hell, or who I think Jesus was or if I think there will be a second coming. I think it is a bit funny – after all, I run a ministry for homeless people. Perhaps, it would be more appropriate to ask my views on homelessness. But I digress. So, to answer the title of this entry – do I deny the resurrection of Christ?
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-16

  • First things first, I love Photoshop. It is the world’s best program for image editing. I do not intend to say Photoshop is a bad program, I just wish to clear up the misunderstanding that Photoshop is the right tool to use for web and screen design. Photoshop was designed to be used for image manipulation. It was not designed to create effective pixel-precise layouts for computer screens, or to make quick changes to screen layouts. Photoshop tends to be used for this purpose however, because users are familiar with the program, and are not aware that Fireworks was designed for this specific purpose. Users generally try to compare Fireworks with Photoshop. Of course you can do a lot of things you can do in Fireworks somehow in Photoshop. It is also possible to do the same tasks in InDesign as you can do in Photoshop, but is this effective and efficient way to work?
  • For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others. In some kind of weird founder solidarity, the slide was originally posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier. Listed under the ominous “Sunset” are: Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks Under “Merge” are: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline, FireEagle, Yahoo Events and Yahoo People Search. It also looks like sundry Yahoo properties like Yahoo Deals and Yahoo Calendar will be made into features.
  • Del.icio.us, a beloved social bookmarking service, is being killed off as part of some "organizational streamlining" by Yahoo and we're already in tears. Here's some advice on how to preserve the memories—and bookmarks—we have with the service. Simply head over to this link and you'll be offered the option to export all your bookmarks—you'll be provided with the option of including your tags and notes as well. Once you're done exporting those bookmarks and mourning, you can check out this list for some alternative bookmark management tools. [TechCrunch]
  • Of all the data analysis that I’ve done, day-of-week and time-of-day data has been consistently the most popular. So in preparation for my upcoming webinar, titled Science of Blogging, I decided to combine all of my existing data on timing with my new research into one master post on the subject.
  • Compositing is a skill and process that spans the entire spectrum of creative industries. At the high end, compositing boasts its own specialized profession in film and television post production and visual effects. Dedicated software such as NUKE and Shake have taken the craft to powerful levels of its own, leaving behind the relatively basic compositing toolset of Adobe Photoshop. However, for many graphics practitioners compositing is a vital everyday process — and as with all pixel-pushing endeavors, Photoshop remains the entry point and hub to learning and ultimately mastering the fundamentals of this important skill. In this article, I’ll share some of my own time-saving tips for compositing in Photoshop. Tips such as these should never replace a solid understanding of your craft; however, being able to adapt a technique to make it work for you is part of being a creative professional. I encourage you to share your own creative compositing tips in the comments to this article
  • Browse local data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, based on samples from 2005 to 2009.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-15

  • In May 2003, Apple invited me to their headquarters to discuss getting CD Baby's catalog into the iTunes Music Store. iTunes had just launched two weeks before, with only some music from the major labels. Many of us in the music biz were not sure this idea was going to work. Especially those who had seen companies like eMusic do this exact same model for years without big success. I flew to Cupertino thinking I'd be meeting with one of their marketing or tech people. When I arrived, I found out that about a hundred people from small record labels and distributors had also been invited. We all went into a little presentation room, not knowing what to expect. Then out comes Steve Jobs. Whoa! Wow. He was in full persuasive presentation mode. Trying to convince all of us to give Apple our entire catalog of music. Talking about iTunes success so far, and all the reasons we should work with them.
  • The Regional Channel Manager is repsonsible for managing and growing a channel of telecom Interconnects/?VARS within their designated geographic territory, covering multiple states.? This position will recruit dealer partners in the telecommunications industry to represent the Company's services and OEM partners.? Key results expected from this position in the first 6-12 months.? Duties: * Seeks and nurtures strategic partnership relationships by identifying and exploring potential relationships including SIs, ISVs; VARs, OEMs, IAs, alliances, retailers, distributors, dealers, and licensees; engaging key personnel and building relationships; communicating company vision and product potential; negotiating business contracts; driving channel harmony.? * Prepares partners to develop markets by developing and conducting sales and technical training programs; conducting joint seminars; managing trade show participation.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-14

  • Ladies and gentlemen, it is the second decade of the third millennium and we are still kicking around the same 2-D interface we got three decades ago. Sure, Apple debuted a few apps for OSX 10.7 that have a couple more 3-D flourishes, and Microsoft has had that Flip 3D for a while. But c’mon – 2011 is right around the corner. That’s Twenty Eleven, folks. Where is our 3-D virtual reality? By now, we should be zipping around the Metaverse on super-sonic motorbikes. Granted, the capability of rendering complex 3-D environments has been present for years. On the web, there are already several solutions: Flash; three.js in <canvas>; and, eventually, WebGL. Finally, we meagre front-end developers have our own three-dimensional jewel: CSS 3-D transforms!
  • For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.
  • Yummygum designed 60 free vector Photoshop icons with care. Perfectly suitable for iPhone & iPad apps or your new web project!
  • Yummygum is back with another iconSweets; a huge FREE icon set containing over a 1,000+ icons, all in a vector-shaped Photoshop format. iconSweets2 will crunch your icon thirst for all of your iPhone, iPad & Android apps or new web projects!
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-13

  • Create a simple CSS folded-corner effect without images or extra markup. It works well in all modern browsers and is best suited to designs with simple colour backgrounds.
  • I know you may not like Wikileaks and view what they did as irresponsible and harmful. I want to take the time to give you all a second opinion on the situation. I want to express why I feel the media is horribly misrepresenting this issue. I have heard in news reports the accusations of Wikileaks being a hacker organization or indiscriminately leaking 250,000 diplomatic cables. They have been blatantly lying about leaks themselves, Wikileaks, and Julian Assange. Let's get the facts straight before jumping to conclusions or forming opinions. Wikileaks is a journalist organization who's mission is to help whistleblowers remain anonymous. Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, is the site's public figure. Here's a short list of previous publishings that wikileaks has been lauded for: * Systematic killings and disappearances by the Kenyan Government; this leak changed the Kenyan election. * Illegal Cayman Island activities of the Swiss Bank Julius Baer.
  • Your browser of choice may have changed a lot in the past year, but luckily the best extensions for making your browser better have kept up with all the most popular browsers. Here are our cross-platform, must-have favorites. Last time we looked at our favorite browser extensions, we only looked at Firefox. A lot has changed in a year, and now our favorite-extension pool has expanded to several other browsers.
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