Useful links for today

Giveaway of the Day Giveaway of the Day offers a daily dose of licensed software that normally costs you money. It’s free for one day. Each new day brings a new software app, free.

Lifehacker Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks has some great tips for searching. For example, searching Google for “site:webteacher.ws” returns 35 pages of results with 932 articles and categories from this blog, in other words, everything from the site.

An Event Apart gets gender-enhanced. The new speakers list for the 2008 An Event Apart programs was announced. In every city, they have a least one female on the list—sometimes two. Two! Count ’em, two! Jeffrey and Eric are redeeming themselves with the gender equity police.

iPhone Tester lets you load a live URL into an iPhone simulator. It wants you to use Safari for best results, and it isn’t perfect, but it gives you some idea what your site would look like on an iPhone.

Useful links for the New Year

  • Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, a NY Times article, talks about why even the most expert of people need to bring in fresh perpective from outside their “box” when innovative thinking is needed. Very interesting ideas on how the brain works. I posted a few thoughts of my own about this at BlogHer.
  • Adding Avatars and Gravatars to Your WordPress Blog gives you step by step instructions from Lorelle.
  • Time Magazine says these are the best 50 websites made in 2007. What do you think?
  • Indexed asks a pertinent question about the way culture intersects with education in “Cause, effect, or both?”

Goodbye, old friend

It’s the end of life for the Netscape browser. For the first 5 years or so after I learned HTML, I had such an intense and ongoing relationship with Netscape Navigator that I referred to it as “my significant other.” Lately it’s slipped further and further into the dust bin of my mind, and our relationship has dwindled to almost nothing.

Alas, the once mighty giant seems to have suffered a similar fate in the minds of others. AOL announced that the browser has finally fallen into that software category known as “end of life.” In English, that means, “We ain’t spending one more man hour of effort on this software: not on support, not on fixes, not on updates. The party is over.”

Who would think a person could wax nostalgic over the browser wars and feel a stirring of the old loyalty to Netscape when its lonely end is upon us? But I do, I do. So long, Netscape. It’s been a pleasure to have known you.

HTML WG links

Lots of disagreement, dissatisfaction, and conflicting opinions about what needs to be done with HTML. Here’s the latest round of discussion:

Mail and spam issues

Recently I’ve been getting tons of comment spam that akismet isn’t catching. I had this blog set to forward mail to me when there was a questionable comment. Getting all that comment spam in my mail has caused my server to be banned by my home ISP. In other words, just about all my mail is considered spam now. I’m trying to get  it fixed, but if you have been trying to contact me for the last week, I probably haven’t received it.