It’s July
Another month. Some random bits (I need a link blog):
Horse racing for geeks
I was reading John Gruber’s latest post (he makes some great points) and then went back to other things. Then I saw Kottke posted a link to it, and Larry said he was writing a post about it. From past experience I know that you can watch the referrers of Daring Fireball posts, so I couldn’t resist. Kottke had a lead of around 100 when we (me/Larry) started watching the race.
MacMinute took over in about 10-15 minutes, and now owns the top 2 spots. Kottke still is on top of MacNN, which got into the game a little late. Expect MacMinute and MacNN to own the race down the straight away. My money is on MacMinute. Like it matters, but this method isn’t entirely accurate because referrals from RSS feeds don’t count–Kottke has a ton.
We played this game with Ranchero Software’s referrals on Monday (MacMerc vs. MacMinute). Try it sometime!
Cedar Point
A little life dream fulfillment happened this weekend: Cedar Point. I thought that after going skydiving it would be hard to get a thrill. Not true. Getting shot to 120MPH (in about 4 seconds) and launched to 420 feet will wake anyone up. Said ride also has a 90 degree ascent and descent. Fun!
This is not good
Not sure why this isn’t more of a front page story–I think it’s huge news. Hopefully it will end peacefully (being a Republican doesn’t mean you want everything to be bloody) but the ball is in Iran’s court.
AdSense turns one [updated]
As of today, I have been publishing ads for Google for one year. It has been a really quick year. Looking back at the early days when I had less impressions for a whole day than I do now in just one peak hour makes for smiles. I’ve served over a million impressions, that is amazing to me.
I still love the program (making a good bit of my income from it), but where is the direct deposit?
Here comes the next year.
Update: The new WebSearch feature looks nice, but since it’s against the TOS to change the code any, I can’t use it. Not only is a large non-paid link given to www.google.com, the whole search code is way too wide to fit into a column. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a change on this policy in a few weeks, but until then I’ll have to watch it from the sideline (except here on this weblog, may try it out here).
FoxNews.com redesign
FoxNews.com used to be a pretty well designed news website. Featured story, a good spot for for breaking news, other headlines and a bit more. A few days ago it got a 1999 looking redesign that just sucks. The page had well over 1,000 lines of HTML, the index page was over 400K and it didn’t render too well in Mozilla (I use FireFox). I wrote them about it a few days ago and got this back today:
We have read each and every email regarding our recent site redesign. We have listened to your suggestions and feedback, and have made some modifications to our recent redesign addressing your specific concerns. We have lightened the color scheme, added many more headlines throughout the home page, and made some alterations that should make finding stories and videos easier.
We were heartened to hear that the new site navigation made it easier for users to traverse Foxnews.com and find sections previously undiscovered by many of our readers. We believe this new navigation menu allows you to get faster access to more content than ever before.
Please keep the feedback coming and thank you again.
Say what you will about FoxNews, but at least they are trying. The site still sucks, but it sucks less. CNN.com is better, but Holovaty’s site, LJWorld, kicks both their asses.
Gmail invites [all gone]
If you want an invite to Gmail, leave a comment. I have 4 right now–it’s first come first serve.
Update: Only two left.
Update 2: All gone. It really was first come first serve.
Best post ever
Jason “playa hater” Calacanis gets his ass handed to him over at Gothamist. After reading the chat transcripts, I think the Gothamist bit is a little too soft on him. Funny stuff though.
I know this runs the risk of this site becoming a photolog, but here’s another photo that has been sitting on my hard drive for a while now. Enjoy (and yes that is Jason Calacanis, the picture was taken by Gothamist’s Jake, I did the other work).
** The chat transcripts in the comments are legit, Jason used “playa hater” about 12 times in an IM with me the other day. I thought he might have bumped into a “gangsta” earlier that day and borrowed some of his lexicon, but I guess it’s a staple of the Calacanis vernacular.
Three states
Earlier tonight I was in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia all within in an hour. Where has my life gone? Here’s the way to Kentucky.
The picture above and the one in the last post are both very poor quality. They are from a Nokia 6820 which is otherwise a nice phone. I’ll have a full review soon, over at MobileTracker.
The view behind MacMinute
The first part of a series… If you can guess (and if I told you that doesn’t count) what it’s about, you win.