A ragtag bag of brags, tags and schwag
(This post title was brought to you by the rhyming dictionary)
Roll on tomorrow, when I can finally launch the site that has been sucking up all my time and energy for the last couple of months! And then roll on Saturday, when I’m off on holiday for, count them, two whole weeks!
On dial-up. Every silver lining has a cloud… ;)
This week, I have mostly been…
So is there anyone out there who’s not on LinkedIn yet? It seems to have had a bit of a UK jumpstart in the last week or so – I’m there as linkedin[at]matthewpennell[dot]com if you want to connect; it certainly seems to be the most active and potentially most valuable of all the networking apps that have sprung up recently.
Mint looks pretty nice, although I haven’t tried it yet (is the demo back online?)
Some of the conversations and blog posts on the subject have made for pretty interesting reading too – Chris Heilmann says it can’t cope with heavy traffic sites (although Jon Hicks had it running fine, and I would have thought he gets just as much traffic as the CSS Table Gallery), and an interesting flame war discussion still seems to be going on at Phoenix Realm about the Cost-Benefit ratio (like who can’t afford $30?)
For my part it looks interesting, but I’m quite happy with Shortstat as it is… well, maybe not quite as it is; it could definitely do with a bit of smartening up. I’ve got some ideas I might implement – a bit of design, a touch of Ajax, maybe some additional Javascript browser stat-sniffing… it is GPL, isn’t it?
I’ve also put my hosting move on hold for a few weeks; I haven’t been able to give it enough attention to prevent me being certain I was going to forget to do something major, so instead I’ve put it off for a month until I get back from holiday and no longer have a major site launch hanging over my head.
Google Blogsearch
Two-and-a-half years after the original announcement, Google has rolled out yet another “beta” product, but this time it’s a Blogsearch tool – hooray, one more way we can obsess over how (un)popular we are!
Some of the results seem to be a little flakey at the moment; searching on web standards returns a Livejournal entry on hearing loss as its #2 result (but not #1, as Derek was quick to point out immediately by IM!), but I wonder if this may mean that Google considers blogs to be in the same category as online stores, i.e. often irrelevant noise; will we be sidelined to the blog-only category and disappear from the main search results?
Perhaps we’ll start to see more blogs disguised as businesses – interestingly it hasn’t got my freelance site listed, so business logs should be safe.
And finally…
Regular readers may remember the Egyptian plagiarist who ripped off the services page on my company site, and then got linked by Zeldman just to rub it in.
Well, who should email me the other day asking if I would be interested in employing him “for as little as $1,000 a month”? Either he’s got a really bad memory, or he’s deserving of the abuse I heaped on him by return post…
Filed under: General, Internet.
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Comments
- Matthew Pennell
- 2439 days ago
- I guess you’re just a bit more disciplined than I am, Kev – even when in the most dire straits, I can always justify pointless expense on technical widgetry (what else are ‘company’ credit cards for?) ;)
- #2
- Chris Heilmann
- 2432 days ago
- Yeah, well, my mint issues are because I am on a shared hosting environment, and the server load made mailing impossible for some reason. It seems that the newer version of mint now is less greedy and it will try it and talk to my hosting company about it. I guess if you are on a root, then there are not many issues with it (except for the reordering of panes not working in firefox). I was just a bit disappointed by no answer whatsoever on the support forum, as it is a not uncommon setup.
- #3
- fridgemagnet
- 2425 days ago
- No way am I going anywhere near that “linkedin” thing. I just smell “being bothered by millions of recruitment agencies for jobs that I have no interest in and have told you that and you still keep sending me shit”. I have enough trouble with that as it is.
- #4
Well, me for a start :o)
I’m never going to progress beyond the level of mid level designer/developer as my family situation means I don’t have the time to dedicate to pursuing a career. My wage matches my status. All of our spare money goes on as much speech therapy as we can afford or taking the kids out as a bit of ‘time out’.
I don’t have, and neither am I ever likely to have, an iPod, a Mac Mini, an iTunes account, Basecamp acct, a decent monitor, holidays, latest version software or any of the other perks that my contemporaries have. I can’t justify the expense – that includes the tenner or so that Mint costs.
Prabhath has also blogged along these lines: http://nidahas.com/2005/08/24/third-world-designer/
I don’t want to come across as ‘pity poor me’ but there are still people who have to look at every penny that leaves their household. Including us :o)