August 29, 2005. AudioScrobbler (now Last.fm) is a very cool site that helps you discover new music and share what you’re listening to with others. You just download a plugin for your music player, and it reports what you’re playing to the site. The site then displays what you’ve listened to recently, as well as what you listen to most. It also gives you musical neighbors—others that share similar music tastes…. Read more »
June 7, 2005. Often times “404 not found” pages aren’t particularly helpful. They tell you that the page is gone, and not much else. The more tech-saavy know a great trick to help find what you’re after: just lop off a hunk of the URL. Perhaps you had a bookmark saved at this address, for example: http://tenseforms.com/tundra/winter.html You open your bookmark, and sadly, the page no longer exists. But… Read more »
April 27, 2005. With the recent design of Holly Tickner’s Tiny Forest, one of the biggest changes was largely unseen. Gone was the bloated, Dreamweaver-generated code, and in its place was streamlined, valid XHTML markup, using CSS for all of the layout (all hand-coded in BBEdit). It’s fairly common knowledge that good markup can improve search engine rankings, but this was a great opportunity to see it first… Read more »
March 29, 2005. RSS is a very cool technology that’s quickly gaining in popularity. It’s like having your own newspaper, with only the news you care about. And instead of having to wait for the next day, it’s updated continually. While it’s quite popular already, it’s a long way from mainstream use. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is that it’s rarely presented well. Many web sites have an “RSS”, “XML”,… Read more »
March 1, 2005. I often find myself wondering how my sites will work on dial-up connections, and I’ve long been looking for a good way to simulate it in OS X. I recently came across the ip_relay Perl script by Gavin Stewart. It isn’t quite perfect; it seems to have problems with larger files in particular. I was streaming MP3s with it, and it would often cut out for long periods of time, not sending any data… Read more »