Routine Order

Work Sucks is all kinds of awesome. Finally I found a type-in domain name that is actually what the domain name promises. Like they say, if you are a “go-getter” you’d have to go and browse somewhere. Work sucks is for slackers. They’ve got office videos, though I sort of wish they’d just cull the best from youtube and post it there more frequently. There’s the store which asks you to “Check back soon for more random items you can’t afford not to buy” to deck up your sucky workplace, I guess.

There’s also a daily crossword that I will be visiting often.
Before I leave you to browse the site, here’s 5 ways to decrease you productivity - what can I say - its not often that I spend a half hour at a website, randomly browsing. So when work sucks, head to work sucks.

Some of the people who were researchers for the defunct Google Answers service have now banded together to offer the world UClue.

Like Google Answers, Uclue is a paid service - you pay an amount and you get the answer. Only folks who were researchers for Google Answers can be UClue researchers - which is quite unfortunate since that means they can’t use my services

Learn more about how UClue is different from Google Answers in this UClue answer, or read the FAQ.

We’ll explode in year 2 as we revolutionize the way America reads.

Joe Wikert interviews George Burke, who owns, or works for BookSwim. I had written about Bookswim (Bookswim: Netflix for Books) earlier. This interview puts some things straight - like how they plan to fix the problem of super heavy books and their postage. The solution is that they won’t stock textbooks, or catalogs, or any other backbreakers. They also will be shipping media mail, so service might be slow. $15 for a 3-books-out-at-a-time service seems okay to me. Also, it seems like they will offer readers the ability to own the books they rent at a discounted price. So will they end up being a used-books seller more than a Netflix-like lending service?

George says they are white-knucking and late-nighting for a March 2007 release - which is not that far away. I, honestly can’t wait to try it. Then again, I’d probably rent three books and keep them forever, the kind of busy I am right now…

From Lifehacker I learnt about this cool new mashup website called Wipbox that lets you research a product before listing it for sale on ebay.

You can lookup the average, high and low prices it has sold for on ebay, which enables you to see what you can expect from the sale, or set a reserve price/starting price. You can then lookup product info from Amazon and provide all the information your prospective clients could want. Next, you can create a better looking ebay ad - all from this one website.

It’s awesome - just the way I would have built it if I knew how.

Alright, I have to get this out of my brain before it explodes with a distinct, loud “Boing!”.

Why doesn’t Boing Boing link to external pages in a sane manner?

Take a look at the article about Betelnut Girls in Taiwan.

Stop. Right there. Now, I were Boing Boing, I would write that as follows:
Take a look at the article about Betelnut Girls in Taiwan Link.

Do you see it?

You don’t? Well, head over to the article and see how there is a “Link” at the end of every phrase, which links to what the phrase talks about. Make the phrase the link, dudes!

So instead of “A westerner tries betel nut Link” we will have “A westerner tries betel nut“.

This idea is not mine - it has been common knowledge for ages - it makes more sense to machines that try to comprehend the data that is the web, you see. There must be one solidly confused robot who hates going to boing boing on her rounds. “Oh! Those folks who have a single-word vocabulary for anything that’s not on their site. Not. Again!!!” I can hear the robot moan.

The Consumerist asks for tips on organizing their site better. I stopped by from my feedreader to leave a comment, and guess what, you need to login to comment! (And finding how to create a login is not intuitive).

That is unacceptable to me, and I bet to a lot of people. We all know that comment spam is a problem. Combating it by making it more difficult for folks to leave comments is a lame approach, one which would be justified only if that were the only way to prevent comment spam. Fortunately, that is not the case now. Use Akismet — use a nuclear weapon to toast the spamming vermin! The consumerist, more than any other blog should know that collective power equals nuclear weaponry! Seriously, what you lose when you turn down one valid commenter is worth a lot more that what you gain by using Akismet for free. No brainer.

Now for answering the question they ask:

1. Add a search form
2. Use the Sidebar for displaying a list of tags, or categories, or something that enables better navigation.
3. Cut down on the number of front page posts so that people actually see the fat footer, or add a link on the top to the fat footer.
4. Use some plugin like the Ultimate Tag Warrior to make tagging easy - and if possible enable us to add tags.
5. Whatever you do, add a page in the “About” links that details how best to find the info that I am looking for, in simple terms.

The current archives are 100% useless. Who would want to read old posts, purely by their date? Even if I do remember that the consumerist wrote about some company in the past, what are the chances I remember the date that appeared on? So what would I do to find the post? Search on google, and then there is the possibility that I wander away to some other site that seems like a better answer!

Think as someone who lands there for the first time would -
she reads a post, and is impressed. Next, she wants to find out what you have to say about Foo Bar corporation. She looks up an down, looks in the archives, can’t find a way to search, and flails about for a while. Then she throws up her hands and goes away.

Or, she arrives at the site, likes what she sees and wants to read more about something. Thing is, there is no way she can continue reading except down the page - with tags, or categories, or lists of relevant related posts, she’ll probably stay a while, and who knows, maybe click an ad or two.

The sidebar is currently dedicated to ads! Agreed, ads float your boat, and are probably a major reason why you blog, but they should be secondary to my interests. Why? Because I am the consumer - the dude you put your weight behind (and who is the weight behind you!)

I guess the tool used dictates the ease with which the information can be organized, so use something like WordPress or something that is fully featured and that you are good at modifying.
Good Luck!

Levitated | Everything - Look at these here flash pieces-of-art if you do nothing else today. Some of them explore symmetry, some science, some the I-ching, and some just let me explore them.

I love it. Time to get back to the levitated gallery…

Stupid htaccess Tricks « Perishable Press

Will definitely come in handy. Lots of “recipes” or solutions to the more common problem solved easily using .htaccess in Apache. Great collection of solutions!

A list and explanation of some of the more famous paradoxes. Of course, most of these are also on wikipedia, but this is a site you can spend a couple of hours on, if you so desire.

Logical Paradoxes .info

This site explains many of the classic paradoxes, including Achilles and the Tortoise, The Paradox of the Heap, and The Liar Paradox, along with some less familiar paradoxes such as The Problem of the Specious Present.I hope that you’ll leave the site perplexed and confused.