I Guess Its “Blog Day”
Happy “Blog Day” everyone! What is “Blog Day”? Well I’m stoked (thats right, I’m trying to bring back “stoked”) that you asked because I have no idea either. Maybe a well-placed quote that will fill out this post and require very little effort on my part will clarify the situation!
For one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post recommendations of 5 new Blogs, preferably Blogs that are different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.
Ok, great. Thats Blog Day. According to the site, if you run a blog, or if you run a site that everyone just calls a blog, then you should do the following:
1. Think of 5 different blogs that you like.
2. Tell the authors of those blogs that you like them
3. List and describe each of your chosen blogs.
4. Do some other stuff like linking and tagging…
Last self-imposed question: How did I find out about “Blog Day”?
Damn, thats a good question…I’m so happy you asked. The reason I found out about Blog Day is that Ran Aroussi chose Hell Yeah Bitch! .com (Thats the one you are reading now) as one of his 5 sites to feature. Very cool. That brings some real warmth to our profanity-laiden site-titling hearts. Seriously though, we did think that getting chosen by someone out there is very cool, even thought I almost mistakenly deleted the email he sent me as SPAM. Thanks Ran!
I guess this means I have to “Pay It Forward”, so here are my pics for 5 good blogs:
- socialitelife.com: A gossip blog. Good writing, great pictures, and no one loves Whitney and Bobby more!
- The Unofficial Apple Weblog: I’ve talked about this one before, but its getting to be THE place to go to quench your slightly insane Apple news thirst.
- “What Would Tyler Durden Do?” is a fairly new site from and its just a fun blog. Kind of a cross between The Superficial and Perez
- And All That Malarkey is a wonderful site for all you burgeoning web designers. Always worth a look to see if there is anything new going on.
- Last but not least is CityRag. Now I’ve talked about this one before too, but I thought I would mention it again simply because there is always something interesting going on there.
Ok, there’s my list. I have officially participated. I’m not sure if Dan (or Joe) would be inclined to leave a list up here of their own in a different post, because I make no claim that this be The List from Hell Yeah Bitch! .com. Either way, here are a few blogs for you to chew on, and if you would have any to add please share in the comments.
I wonder if this would count as “Random Blog of the Week” for this week?
Go Get Opera For Free
To celebrate their 10 year anniversary, Opera is not only throwing a party, but also throwing some free registration codes your way.
Just go to http://my.opera.com/community/party/reg.dml and fill in your email address, and they give you codes for any of the flavors of Opera they have (Windows, Linux, Mac…).
I looked and looked, but I could find any info on how long these keys will last or if there is any sort of catch, but I found nothing. So go get an Opera key and try it out. I’m posting this via Opera now and its pretty nice. Nothing out of this world, but there are some nice touches throughout, like a total of how many images the pages still needs to download. Being that I haven’t used Opera for oh about 7-8 years, I can certainly say that its different.
Another Lame GMail Giveaway
I just noticed that I’ve now got 100 GMail invites to give away (up from the 50 invites I had last week).
If there is anyone left on Earth still without a GMail account and wants one drop me a line at gmail@danielcole.us
update: my webhosting provider is not forwarding my email addresses as it should and the gmail@danielcole.us account might as well not exist. For the zero people who sent me an invite request please leave your properly obfuscated email address in the comments.
Ugly Woman Claims To Be Baby Stolen By Dingo
25 years ago, a baby mysteriously vanished from a campsite in Alice Springs, Australia. The case got world-wide media attention, and sparked many jokes, after the mother claimed that her baby was stolen by Dingos. The missing baby’s parents were later convicted of murder and sentenced to prison until 1998 when they were released and their story (“The Dingos ate my baby!”) accepted.
Now, one Erin Horsburgh has stepped forward with the claim that she was that young baby, named Azaria Chamberlain. Horsburgh, or Chamberlain, claims that, although she was taken by Dingos, she was not killed, but just beaten severely with the ugly stick. Her proof? Flashbacks to when she was 9 weeks old, being taken by Dingos and a scar on her arm.
The Alice Springs police have labeled her a “Nut Job” and told her to go away, while trying their best not to look directly at her face.
Click after the jump so see the “grown up Azaria Chamberlain”.
Movable Type 3.2 Burned Us.
Simple installation: Once the application is on your web server, installing or upgrading the system is as simple as a few clicks.
Ha! Earlier today I succumbed to the shiny website and long feature list of Movable Type 3.2, so against the nagging of the little guy in my head that never wants to upgrade anything that is working fine, I decided to go for it. I should have listened to him.
Here’s the quick version: I uploaded the files, I ran the “check” program (I passed). I then ran the install and I got a nice little paragraph of Perl errors. I checked the permissions…I ran to their support site…neither helped. Thank god I did a backup, right? Well I managed to chose the very day when the “restore a home directory backup” feature at my webhost didn’t want to work. Long story short(er than it could be), I finally did the restore by hand and I think we are back to normal.
The moral of this story? Listen to the little “don’t upgrade” guy in your head more often.
Random Blog of the Week #13
I found it appropriate that for today, a day of endless downloads for Google Talk, that this week’s Random Blog is Download Squad. Yeah, its part of the blogging network Weblogs Inc along with 36% of all other blogs in the universe.* But for those of you out there that are download / beta junkies and have to download every new thing out there to see what its like, this is the blog for you. In fact, it seems to be written by a few of you. Everyday there is another page full of things to download and take a gander at and make your Windows Registry more and more dense with crap.
Of course, you could also visit Download Squad to clog up your Preferences folder for your OS X box, because they post more than their fair share of software for the Mac as well. They have it all, and even a nice set of links on the side to filter the page for just a certain OS. Its the little things like those links that gives a blog that extra juice to be Hell Yeah Bitch! .com Random Blog of the Week!
Links: Download Squad
* Note: I might have made that up.
Jabber Chat Via Your Web Browser
With the rumor, then confirmation of Google Talk in the last 24 hours, I guess the theme for today is Instant Messaging. In a effort to not break the unintentional theme of the day, I’ve got more Instant Messaging stuff for you to choke down.
JWChat is a SourceForge project that is such a cool idea I think I peed a little when I saw it.* JWChat allows Jabber based instant messenging completly via the web broswer. No client software what so ever…just the server with the client interface written in JavaScript and XHTML with a double scoop of AJAX.
Not impressed? Think of the cool things you could do with this. This could be a simple “live help” feature on a e-commerce website. Or this could be a great way to allow a client to chat with designers via the company’s existing Jabber IM network without having to download and install programs and set them up. I’m sure there are more applications for this very cool project. Any other thoughts? Have you peed a little yet?
Via: Download Squad
* Just kidding. If anyone saw me today, that wasn’t pee, that was water that I spilled.
Google Talk
Well, it looks like the rumors were true…Google Talk is here! I’ve had it installed for all of 30 seconds and I managed to crash it. I’m going to try again to get Google Talk going to see if it is worth yet another account for myself, but in the mean time here are a few links to get you started:
Google Talk download (Windows only)
Download Squad’s Review of Google Talk
Lastly, Google sucks for not releasing a Mac or a Linux client…but never fear! Google Talk is Jabber (The open-source IM server) at heart and Mac and linux geeks have clients for Jabber in spades. For mac you can use iChat, or Adium, for linux use GAIM. Here’s a link that TUAW has on setting up Google Talk on iChat or Adium (Virtually the same setup applies to Linux’s GAIM as well)
How to set up Google Talk on your Mac
Let me know if this crashes for you as well, and if you are on Linux, how good is the connection for you?
Update:
For those (ok, maybe just me) having trouble connecting via Adium, heres a bit of help. As stated before, username and password are your Gmail username and password. Here is a grab of the connection settings:
As for a “review”? Its ok I guess. Nothing special.
Are Those Whispers I Hear At Google?
There are rumors and conjecture floating around the toilet bowl we call the internet today about Google launching something possibly called “GTalk”, which, as the name would suggest, could be a jabber-based instant messaging service from Google.
What does this mean? I means that, if released, everyone will go ape-shit trying to get an instant messaging account from Google while they forget about the 4 other IM accounts each of us already have (Yahoo, AOL, MSN, ICQ). Then after the dust settles, everyone will go about their business and complain that they “…have too many damn IM accounts!”
I am interested to see Google’s take on IMing if they are truly launching a service such as this. Jabber is very cool stuff, the last few weeks I’m been toying with it at the office to see if I could glean any use off of it for us. I would imagine that Google would (or has) added a lot onto Jabber to get it to fit their needs and scale well enough for the future onslaught.
I guess we will just have to wait and see. That and get ready for a IM version of those “Get Your GMail Invites Here” sites. Maybe I’m just big enough online now that I can get an invite (if they do that) on the first or second wave. (See…dammit, even I already want an account!)