davidbarbarisi.com

Business card practices - These are really good. Most of these tips are a lot more interesting than the usual ones.

Watching grass grow - Is there anything more to say?

The Use of Color - This is a good post about choosing colors and how to use the color wheel to pick color schemes. I remember learning this a long time ago but then I forgot. My problem with choosing colors from the color wheel is that based on all of those relationships between colors, it seems like almost any colors go together. I think I need a real color wheel. But I need one with hex values.

The Guide to Avoiding Small Talk - Good tips for having decent conversations. I need to get better at this, but I'm just not that interested in it.

Shooting Fireworks with a Digital Camera - I haven't read this yet, but I need to before New Years or at least before the next July 4th. If you're reading this Alex, you'll probably like this link if you're still into photography by the time you find this post.

The Un-Funny Truth about Scientology. This is really sad. Apparently Scientology really does kill people.

Gliffy - This is online diagram software. It's like MS Visio, except entirely online. You can also share diagrams.

Etched in Time - Really elaborate Etch a Sketch art. It looks so good you'll think it's fake.

Against School - Did you know school is bad for you? It is.

isolatr - Social networking for people who hate social networking.

I finally made it to post 300. I'm pretending this is a big milestone for my blog. Now I'll reflect back on the last 100 posts. It took a lot longer to get to post 300 than it did to post 200. I think that's a good thing. The quantity is down a lot, and hopefully the quality is up. If my stats are any indication, then I am getting better at this blogging stuff. I mean there's a bar graph of something, and over the past year the bars are generally getting taller than the previous months. So that's probably good. Unless it's a reverse bar graph that graphs bad stuff. What kind of graph does that though?

Post 200 still holds the top spot for my longest post. I hope I'll replace that spot with this post, but I won't try too hard. I'll just talk about some new things I'm planning on doing for this blog to remind me to do them, which is apparently what I also talked about in post 200.

In Post 200, I had just started using Technorati, and my rank was 1,119,625. As of today my rank is 432,850. So if I'm interpreting that correctly, that means I squashed 686,775 other blogs to get where I am today. I hope that also means I can date in a higher up league now.

Also in Post 200, I started using FeedMap. At that time there were 16 bloggers nearby. Now there's 24. Welcome to the party new guys.

I said in that post that I'd put a bio and photo on the sidebar, but I still haven't done that yet. Maybe soon. I actually took a recent photo, but all of my photos have been so boring lately. I like most of the classic photos of me. A bio always seems like the hardest thing to write.

Ok time to talk about some new things to add to this site. I started tweaking the design again. I have some ideas for moving things around and redoing some stuff. I moved some of the navigation to the top of the page. I'm thinking of moving all of the dumb Javascript things to the bottom of the page because they're making the page load more slowly. I'm thinking about finally getting rid of this table that makes the two columns, because that would make the page load faster since it wouldn't have to wait for the Javascript stuff. But I always remember all the hassles of floating the columns and how Internet Explorer does some crazy stuff with floats. So I'm really dreading doing that, but it can be done. Thinking about it gives me flashbacks of all the hard work on the Fieri DC site to get that to work right. Oh yeah, speaking of CSS fixes, I finally fixed that weird problem in IE where the links in the sidebar would get messed up when you scroll the page. For whatever reason I had margins and padding on the links, so IE interpreted that as "mess up the links when you scroll" instead of "add some spacing here." Is it a rule to not put margins and padding on an inline element? I'll have to look that up. Maybe I was just trying to do something dumb.

Back on topic, I have some ideas for new pages to do, and I think I'll finally write a decent about page. I'm thinking about pulling in some lists from Remember the Milk so I can just make lists of favorite stuff and then you'd see it here. But then I thought wow that's nerd overkill, and so I'll just make lists here the normal HTML way and try to remember to update them. Note to self: Stop making complex solutions to easy problems.

Just today I started using FeedBurner. It's a service that adds a bunch of features to my blog feed. So subscribe to this new feed and unsubscribe from my old feed. Sorry if that means you have to do extra work. I'll try to limit the changing of my feeds on a whim in the future.

I've been thinking for a while that most of my friends and family would probably read this stuff more if there was an easier way to get updates. The people I know in real life aren't into RSS and feeds and that sort of techy stuff. So for a while I've been looking at a decent feed to email solution. I tried Bloglet in the past, but it didn't work for me. But now that I'm using FeedBurner, they said to use the FeedBlitz service, so now there's an email subscription form on the sidebar. I think all you have to do is enter your email address in that text box, click subscribe, then fill the image verification thing (called a captcha) to prove that you're a human (because aliens and robots can't read that text), click submit, and then they send you an email to confirm your email address. You click on the link in the email to confirm, then you should be good to go. It only sends out emails daily, and only when I update my blog. The emails have the full contents of my posts, so I'm going to try that for while because I hate those teaser posts that some other blogs do. But you should still come visit my site and post comments.

So there you go. This post is probably more for me to be a reminder of things to do. So I'll try to make some more posts for you to make up for this one. Note to self: stop writing for me, start writing for you.

AlexlovesRichelle.com is getting some crazy traffic just for
this one page. I'm pretty sure it's because of the cartoon monkey image, but when ever I do a search for cartoon monkey related terms, I can't find that page. The logs seem to always point to that page and say that people were searching for images of cartoon monkies monkeys, which I guess is a really popular search phrase. It's really weird that that page is getting a lot of traffic. Well, not really a lot, but more than the rest. So I'm thinking it would be really cool to make that page super duper popular. So I'll keep using the terms cartoon monkey and cartoon monkeys in this post, and linking to that page, so it'll move up in the search engines. I wonder if this'll work, and I hope this doesn't count as cheating. Also Alex and I were wondering if anybody would want a drawing like that of themselves. Jay drew that as a large poster, and Alex got it wallet sized and he said the people he shows all like it, so maybe someone out there would want to pay money to get a caricature of them like that picture? Let me know if you're interested. I can probably convince Jay to do it. We'll probably take requests for almost anything that you want drawn. I would show you some links to more stuff he made, but I can't think of anything to show right now.
Here's his band's web site though. And
here's his film site. That should help him get some traffic.

Oh yeah and his name's really Jared, but I can't be bothered with that many syllables, and he didn't like being called Jar, so we call him Jay. Mostly just online though. And mostly just Alex and I call him that. Alex gets to have two syllables.

And while I'm trying to sell you stuff, alexlovesrichelle.com was started by Alex to show how much he loves Richelle. Don't you want to start a web site to show how much you love your sweetheart? Because if you don't you know what that means... Yeah, anyway, if you want to start a site like that, or any other site for that matter, I can sell you some web hosting. Maybe even some web design. But Alex frontpaged his way through alexlovesrichelle.com, so that's not an example of my work. I do better stuff. I like to get my hands dirty in the HTML and CSS. Fieri DC is a much better example of my work.

This post explains the importance of design by using the difference between America and Japan as an example. The author, Kathy Sierra, says that to save your job you should learn design because it's a skill that can't be outsourced or replaced. She shows photos of an American manhole cover and a Japanese manhole cover. The American one is plain, but the Japanese one is very elaborate and detailed. This example, and a few others, help show where design makes the difference.