LR2 Blogs

My latest little project, GeekChow.

I’m getting tired of the politics and doomsday predictions that have started to dominated the “popular vote” type sites like Digg and Reddit so I’ve come up with what I hope is a good alternative.

Geek Chow is based on the open source Pligg (a Digg clone) and gets it’s news from a select pool of RSS feeds.  As the importer reads the feeds it is applying some Bayesian magic to each article to give it an appropriate vote boost.

I am open to suggestions for adding feeds, the more the merrier, but I do require that they be at least 90% geek with no politics or religion.  It’s not that I don’t always like to debate either subject, it’s just that I tire quickly of people bitching about and debating the things we cannot change.

Don’t be discouraged if you think the current votes aren’t good.  The Bayes isn’t well trained yet and needs more articles and votes to get an idea of what people like.

So please, check out Geek Chow and let me know what you think, offer feed suggestions, or criticize the site.  Self promotion is ok too, if you have a truely geek blog, let me know and I’ll add the feed.

Contest: Blog about my new download site and win 0 | Steve’s Tech Blog

“Steve is launching his brand new site: 1 Cool File. It is a directory of cool files(shareware, freeware, plugins). For example, you can try a new media player after you have just finished a music download. You can add your ebook about making money or a screen saver. That’s not all, it has a section just for blogs (plugins). You can also rate a file or make a review about it. It does support PAD files so tell authors about it.

And just by linking to the contest post, I can win $50. You should read the contest post to win 2 other prizes of $25/each if you don’t have a blog. If your entry is before the next Google page rank, Steve will double the main prize. So, don’t wait to long. It’s coming soon!

And one more thing… You can read Steve’s blog while there.”

Looks like Steve is jumping on the contest bandwagon with a chance to win $50 Canadian, or as we always joked in Detroit, that’s about $3 American. Anyway, head over and check out his new shareware download site. I hope he’s got cheap bandwidth.

Josiah Cole » Blog Archive » 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website

1. DO NOT resize the user’s browser window, EVER. I know you can, I know you feel really cool when you put that little Javacrap on your page and like a little miracle the browser window resizes to your wishes, but NO. You see this atrocious web technique mostly with spam sites and when “designers” design websites. That is, someone in the photo/video/art industry who “also makes websites” (see #6 for more on that), but in reality has no idea how to make a successful ecommerce website.

If you’re thinking of developing a web site or web application, go, read, and obey.

Number one certainly gets my goat. I’ve disabled javascript resize in Firefox because way too many artists (musicians and photographers mostly) think it’s cool to push the browser out to full screen. If you think your layout looks good at 3200×1024 then someone needs to smack you upside the head with a +5 hammer of design sense.

40+ Ways to Make Money on the Internet - by Dumb Little Man

I did a little bookmark scrub this morning and thought I would share the remaining content of my “Online Money” folder. While some people are going to view this simply as a big list of ways to make money online, that’s good - because it is.

Dumb Little Man has some not so dumb tips on making some money. If anyone has experience with any of the companies he recommends, please comment.

Alexa Sucks!

Strange but True.

Stevey’s Home Page - A Quick Tour of Ruby

Ruby used to annoy me simply by existing. I first heard about Ruby years ago, in maybe 1997 or 1998, and folks said it was kind of like Perl, but “cleaner”, whatever that meant. Ruby fans back then seemed like a tiny minority of rebels and fringe separatists.

Gamer cracks code, finds jewel | Chicago Tribune

With clean-cut looks, a steely-eyed stare and 25,000 lines of computer code, the Chicagoan has been catapulted from his humble roots as a computer gamer to the forefront of the geek-o-sphere, earning the title of “Hottest Hacker on Earth” and landing on the cover of Linux Journal.

Among the community of programmers who are shaping the look and usage of the Web, Heinemeier Hansson’s software tool, dubbed Ruby on Rails, is described as a gem. And in a swoon over his brazen personality, these programmers are rapidly turning into evangelical Ruby on Rails followers.

Maluke Co. → Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

This looks very cool. Can’t wait to play with it.

Of snakes and rubies; Or why I chose Python over Ruby (jp’s domain)

You look around the web today and Ruby and its offspring Rails are the talk of everyone. You see former Java advocates moving over to Ruby. You see former Python developers checking it out. You see people who have never coded checking it out. On top of this, there is a massive influx of Ruby and Rails (particularly Rails books) flooding the market.

A New Way of Tracking Users’ Browsing Habits - techfoolery

Jeremiah Grossman came up with a really clever way of using Javascript to find what pages you’ve visited recently. It goes like this: when a link has been visited, you can use the :visited pseudo-class to style it. Using Javascript, you can walk through all of the links on your page and grab their styles; comparing a link’s style to the style given to visited links in the CSS will tell you whether or not a site has been visited.