Check out this gem from the AT&T website.
Wow. I get no commitment pricing with a 2-year commitment! And as a valued customer, I get a discounted upgrade at a higher price.
It is like no one even read this to make sure it made sense, or is just doing a terrible job trying to make me feel like their miserable offer is a favor of some kind.
This pattern creator is neat, but I’m curious about their use of Creative Commons. Can (or should) you really apply a Creative Commons license to the output of this kind of tool? To me it seems akin to if Adobe said that they have a license for anything you create with Photoshop.
For a long time, e-commerce sites were prohibitively annoying to set up. Weebly’s new features are one of the reasons that this is no longer the case.
Speaking of CMSs, I like the idea of hosted CMSs designed for a particular type of site. Enjin is a gaming CMS that understands what their audience wants and focuses on doing that really well.
3D items made to your specification? I’m pretty sure everyone has wanted this service to exist at one point or another.
I admit to being a fan of interactive fiction. And Zork is free now, so hooray!
I enjoy careful timing in re-purposed comics and blob rodents.
I’m not planning on having any kids anytime soon, so this is a bizarre mistake. Wonder if anyone has had a serious freak-out as a result of this kind of thing.
“I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!”
Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord in Truppenführung
I have never filled out a product survey. Until today. Let’s look at why this one is so good:
This survey is:
In addition to my being pleased with it, I’m sure GameFly gets useful data from these.
Lists are an amazing organizational tool because they produce no friction. Write a word on a piece of paper and you have a list. Adding and removing items is just as easy. This is important because organizational tools must be accessed asynchronously with everyday life. Life being as busy at it is, organizational steps that are even slightly troublesome to carry out will often go undone.
How do you make a better organizational tool than a list? Adding features generally adds friction, and since the list is already fully functional, the first trade-off made to add a single feature is probably not worth it. Unless you do it exactly right.
This is why until lately I’ve simply used text files for my lists. There are tons of applications out there for keeping organized, but none of them seem to offer features that balance out the additional effort to use them. Backpack from 37signals outdoes the text file. The software is expressive, flexible, and simple. Through legendary attention to detail, sweating the small stuff, and resisting the urge to unnecessarily complicate, their software matches the usefulness of the mighty text file.
This software has been around for awhile, though, and until now I have never used it regularly. What changed? Now, after all the work put into being as good as a text file, now there is a way in which it is better: access on my iPhone via Satchel. Satchel is dead simple, nicely organized, and easy to use. Now that I can access my lists from more places than I could with a plain text file, I have reason to change to Backpack.
Backpack has a free version, and Satchel is $9.99 on the iPhone app store. Give them a try!
A decent button maker. I like looking at these. The idea has been around forever, but they’re still improving as internet technologies evolve.
An excellent wine label. Buying wine by the label actually isn’t an awful idea. I always feel like people who care about making an excellent product also care more about making it look presentable.
I like this music video. Sometimes creativity comes from limitations.
Can you guess how big this is by its shape? A visual metaphor can communicate something other than function yet still be effective and fun.
Mmm, political street art, featuring Hobo Lincoln.
Amazing art from Yap Kun Rong at CGPortfolio.
I’m thinking about using Gravity’s Tags app to organize my music. It seems like a generally useful tool.
I love data. Here is a SQL database of IP addresses to location mappings.
I love it when someone takes something simple and does it exactly right. Even if it is a pretty pointless product like Fail Stickers. (yes, I bought some)
I went through every single one of these. I have no regrets. It is here that I found the best image ever.
Omegle drops you in a chat with a stranger. I have been enjoying gathering anonymous opinions about items on the Taco Bell menu.
Found a very interesting bug in Windows Media Player (WMP). An embedded player will fail to play if the URL of the page it is embedded into is too long.
This is fun because you can see this on any website. I have only tried this in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, but compare these URLs:
Same page with long URL parameters added
The WMP APIs are pretty embarrassing, but for me, this one takes the cake.
Here is a stock site just for silhouettes. Quality, free, focused stock sites are hard to find.
SFXR is small app for quickly making old-school video game sound effects. The joy here is that they have predefined parameters for types of effects, such as “jump”, and you can choose a randomly generated sound within those parameters, then randomly mutate or manually tweak it. Much faster than creating sounds from scratch.
When dealing with 256 pixels, pixel-art becomes a much more useful skill. Hence this nifty tool for creating favicons.
You may have seen Flickr’s tool for searching by color. It is amazingly fun, but the real reason to toss it in the toolbox is because so many of Flickr’s images are Creative Commons licensed nowadays, oftentimes making them valid as stock or blog dressing.
Concept Ships is a blog dedicated solely to concept art of space ships. I love this stuff.
Along those lines, here is a site with lots more concept art. It’s easy to get lost wandering around this site. They really need an RSS feed with featured artists though, or something along those lines at least.
I’ve often wondered what it looks like when a completely unknown site enjoys some social media popularity. So when my one-night project jsregex was on its way to the reddit front page, I threw some analytics on there to see what happens. If you’re curious too, here is the data.
This is for a site that received 269 points (413 up, 144 down) and had no prior traffic.
Unique Visitors per Day
That sums up to about 17,000 visitors, while still receiving a few hundred per day.
I also have analytics on this blog, which was discreetly linked to from jsregex. This site receives almost no traffic, and is only occasionally perused by some of my friends. Here is the data:
Unique Visitors per Day
Still a fairly small number: looks like roughly 0.3% of visitors clicked through to my blog.
Of course, I also have feedburner:
RSS Subscribers per Day
So roughly 13% of visitors to this blog went on to subscribe via RSS. That is actually fairly good. It probably helped that my most recent article was JavaScript related. [Edit: Later data showed about double what is shown here]
So now I know. It was also fairly fun going through the referrals and finding all kinds of interesting sites, from social media mashups, to blogs in Japanese, Spanish, and other languages, to rip-offs of major sites like popurls.
And if you’re one of those new subscribers: hello there! I hope you find something interesting here from time to time.
