Monthly Archives: January 2008

Top 5 things I saw in America which, as a Canadian, freaked me right?out

Written by Paulitics

I’m back from my vacation down in the United States, and will return to blogging with regularity as soon as possible.

To celebrate my return to this frigid, yet comparatively sane country, I felt it worthwhile to relay a list of five items which I saw during my travels which the locals thought was perfectly normal (I presume), but which freaked the heck out of me as a Canadian.

#5

A trucking company which hauls all manner of freight throughout the deep south of the U.S. which calls itself a “Christian company” (the very idea of which seems as bizarre to me as a “Christian dog”) and whichrequires that its trucks to carry religious and political messages. The messages I saw included:

It’s not a choice, it’s a child
and
God loved us so that he gave his only son.

#4

A breakfast creation in upstate New York called “Stuffed French Toast”. What does “Stuffed French Toast” entail, you na?ve non-American might ask? It’s French Toast (which, keep in mind is cooked in butter) stuffed with bacon, eggs and processed cheese (which they proudly call ‘American processed cheese’, I presume, to distinguish it from real cheese which could, after all, be French and/or offer unAmerican nutritional content). But here’s the kicker: on top of your “Stuffed French Toast” cooked in butter, you will find? a square of butter.

#3

A massive billboard in South Carolina just outside of Georgia which read:
“Victory is great, but honor is greater. Defend your Southern heritage.”

#2

A letter to the editor pasted proudly on a business door in Key Marathon, Florida by the business owner discussing how immigrants today are a disgrace to immigrants from the start of the 20th Century. The letter details how people need to read history because in 1901, when the business owner’s grandfather came to the country, he didn’t ask for any government handouts like modern immigrants are asking for. So modern, non-English-speaking immigrants are greedier than the immigrants from 100 years ago and thus do not recognize the value of hard work and don’t appreciate why America is great. (I’m not concocting a straw man here, this is, as best as I can recall, the structure of the argument). Apparently, nobody told the letter-writer that in 1901 NOBODY got government handouts (other than cheap land which WAS aimed at immigrants) because there weren’t significant government social programs until after World War II.
I guess the purpose of the letter was for other people to read history, not for the letter writer to read history.

#1

Casa D’ice, a restaurant located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania which features political messages as their signature claim to fame. Among the political messages they put up under their restaurant’s name and proudly reproduced on their website include:

outside_sign001.jpg

outside_sign007.jpg

Top 10 Underhyped Webapps

Written by lifehacker

undertheradar-header.jpg
Even in this golden age of Big Internet Companies Acquiring Everything In Sight, there are still a few independent, small webapps out there that don’t get the attention they should for their useful functionality. Every once in a while we get tired of writing about the same big name webapps everyone knows about, so today we’re turning the spotlight away from the obvious greats and taking a look at online tools that may have flown under your radar. Here are our top 10 picks of of underhyped webapps that should get more attention than they do. Photo by AP.


Note: There are hundreds of little independent webapps out there, and while we’ve tried many of them at least once, this list is slanted toward the products I use personally because they filled a need I (or someone close to me) had. Your list might look a lot different than this one?so tell us what we missed in the comments!


10. Qipit

Cameraphone image scan to PDF via email
Snap a photo of a whiteboard or document with your cameraphone and email it to Qipit.com, a webapp that scans your photo to a PDF document and stores it online automatically. Qipit ain’t the prettiest webapp you’ll ever see, but it does a great job of capturing meaning from low-res images of text. You can also fax images of documents from Qipit, too.

9. Ning

Social network creator
Build your own social networking community site with Ning, a WYSIWYG web site creator that offers user registration and profiles, polls, blogs, photo albums, and boards at your own URL for free. While at least one LH reader complained about Ning being slow to load for highly-customized communities, it’s still mind-blowing that Ning’s made creating a dynamic, user-driven web application as easy as snapping together (virtual) Lego pieces.

8. Jott

Voice to text reminders, blog posts, and calendar events
If you ever call your answering machine to leave yourself a reminder message, Jott’s for you. Call Jott to leave your message instead, and get it transcribed and sent to your email address. You can also call Jott and send your voice message to your blog, Twitter account, or add events to your Google Calendar via Jott as well as other services.

7. Anywhere.FM

Music library hosting and web playback
anywherefm-logo.png Stop toting your iPod or entire iTunes library around on your local hard drive: instead, upload unlimited MP3’s to Anywhere.FM and listen from your web browser from anywhere. At some point Anywhere.FM may start charging for storage and playback, but while it’s free, it’s a convenient way to get your tunes on the go.

6. Doodle

Group polling for scheduling large events
When organizing a recent reunion event that involved upwards of 80 people trying to figure out what the best date was for everyone, Doodle’s group polling app saved the day. Set up a Doodle poll with possible dates and times for any kind of gathering with lots of attendees, and email out the Doodle URL, where each person can enter what times they can make it, and see who else is available when.

5. Netvibes

Browser start page
netvibes-logo.png When Lifehacker alum Rick Broida ran his start page showdown, Netvibes was the clear winner. Set up your web dashboard at Netvibes, a sleek, drag and drop, customizable start page that gets all your crucial information in one place the moment you launch your browser. Here are a few ways to trick out your Netvibes.

4. Zoho Suite

Web-based office suite
While Google Docs seems to be the first product people think of when online office suites come up, the lesser-known Zoho Suite offers more apps and features. See how Zoho stacks up against Google Docs.

3. Meebo

Web-based instant messenger
Chat with your buddies across multiple IM services without installing a thing using the Meebo web-based chat client. Great for folks in IT lockdown, Meebo lets you log in and chat with buddies on AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, and Jabber/GTalk.

2. TiddlyWiki

Personal, one-page wiki
Even though it’s been around for years, we still have a huge crush on the thumb-drive friendly, magical Javascript personal wiki TiddlyWiki. While TW isn’t a hosted webapp like the others, it uses a web page to store your information locally. TiddlyWiki has to be seen to be believed, and it’s also spawned many offshoots like GTDTiddlyWiki. See how to get organized with GTD TiddlyWiki.

1. Remember the Milk

Task manager, reminder system, personal organizer
rtm-logo.pngAmong the slew of web-based task managers that have flooded the internet in the past couple of years, Remember the Milk stands head and shoulders above the rest: its modern interface and deep feature set make organizing your to-do’s actually fun. Here’s how to organize your life with Remember the Milk.

Which of your favorite webapps don’t get the attention they deserve? Tell us about ’em in the comments.

Top 100 Funny Quotes

Written by Left of Zen

Albert Einstein Quotes

1. The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

2. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

3. Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

4. The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

5. If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

6. I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Fredrick Nietzsche Quotes

7. In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.

8. A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

9. Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

10. Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

11. Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

Mark Twain Quotes

12. Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

13. Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

14. I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.

15. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

16. The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

17. “Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”
Voltaire Quotes

18. Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

19. If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.

20. Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.

21. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

22. The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.

23. It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

24. There are men who can think no deeper than a fact.

25. Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

26. Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

27. By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

28. Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Plato Quotes

29. One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

30. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

31. This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

32. Courage is knowing what not to fear.

33. The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Winston Churchill Quotes

34. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

35. If you are going through hell, keep going.

36. The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

37. It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

George Carlin Quotes

38. Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

39. A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

40. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man?living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

41. You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.

42. Reminds me of something my third-grade teacher said to us. She said, “You show me a tropical fruit and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala.”

43. I never fucked a ten, but one night, I fucked five twos.

44. What year did Jesus think it was?

45. The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.

46. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

47. “No comment” is a comment.

48. If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.

49. The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Steve Martin Quotes

50. Boy, those French: They have a different word for everything!

51. There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won’t stand for that.

52. Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

53. I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

54. You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

55. First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.

56. Why is it we don’t always recognize the moment when love begins, but we always know when it ends?
* As Harris K. Telemacher in “L.A. Story” (1991)

Steven Colbert Quotes

57. “To sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush?I feel like I’m dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You now what, I’m a pretty sound sleeper, that may not be enough?Somebody shoot me in the face.”
-Roasting Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ dinner

58. On this show, your voice will be heard – in the form of my voice.

59. There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust”. It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money.

60. Folks, the President needs a break. He’s like a Black and Decker cordless Dirt Devil vacuum. If you don’t recharge his batteries, he can’t suck.

61. I’ve always been a big fan of beauty. Sure, you can’t judge a book by its cover but who wants to have sex with a book?

62. Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me “sir”.

63. Asia: Four little letters, three billion little people.

64. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends that are going to hell.”

65. Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

Jon Stewart Quotes

66. I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.

67. Insomnia is my greatest inspiration.

68. We have it. The smoking gun. The evidence. The potential weapon of mass destruction we have been looking for as our pretext of invading Iraq. There’s just one problem – it’s in North Korea.

69. We declared war on terror-it’s not even a noun, so, good luck.

70. Here’s how bizarre the war is that we’re in in Iraq, and we should have known this right from the get-go: When we first went into Iraq, Germany didn’t want to go. Germany. The Michael Jordan of war took a pass.
Jon Stewart’s Stand-up performance at RIT, 2005

Bill Maher Quotes

71. Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.

72. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.

73. Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need.

74. They’re talking about banning cigarette smoking now in any place that’s used by ten or more people in a week,
which, I guess, means that Madonna can’t even smoke in bed.

Jerry Seinfeld Quotes

75. Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women: a little
bit of support, and a little bit of freedom.

76. Dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them’s making a poop, the other one’s carrying it for him, who would you assume is in charge.

77. There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, “I know what I’m doing, just show me somebody naked.”

78. Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they’re killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? “Sweetheart, let’s make up. Have this deceased squirrel.”

Larry David Quotes

79. Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man – there’s your diamond in the rough.

80. If you tell the truth about how you’re feeling, it becomes funny.

81. I’m surprized Hitler didn’t round up the toupee people.”

Dennis Miller Quotes

82. A recent police study found that you’re much more likely to get shot by a fat cop if you run.

83. The average American’s day planner has fewer holes in it than Ray Charles’s dart board.

84. “The only way the French are going in is if we tell them we found truffles in Iraq.”

Jay Leno Quotes

85. Here’s something to think about: How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?

86. The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.

87. Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you’ve met your New Year’s resolution.

88. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot.

Rodney Dangerfield Quotes

89. My father carries around the picture of the kid who came with his wallet.

90. Oh, when I was a kid in show business I was poor. I used to go to orgies to eat the grapes.

91. I’m at the age where I want two girls. In case I fall asleep they will have someone to talk to.

92. A girl phoned me and said, “Come on over. There’s nobody home.” I went over. Nobody was home!

93. Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.


Sarah Silverman Quotes

94. When God gives you AIDS – and God does give you AIDS, by the way – make lemonAIDS.

95. I was raped by a doctor. Which is, you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.

Chris Rock Quotes

96. Every town has the same two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to.

97. I live in a neighborhood so bad that you can get shot while getting shot.

98. If a woman tells you she’s twenty and looks sixteen, she’s twelve. If she tells you she’s twenty-six and looks twenty-six, she’s damn near fourty.

99. “You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to
go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named ‘Bush’, ‘Dick’, and ‘Colon.’ Need I say more?”

100. “You won’t be able to take your eyes off the next four presenters: Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz.”
Chris Rock while hosting the Oscars

101. Gas is getting so expensive I’m gonna ride a mexican to work.

Building a .com in 24 hours

Written by dominiek

This is about how I spend 24 concentrated hours spread out over 4 days during Holidays to build the online service Wigitize.com. It is part of my ongoing learning process on how to run a successful web startup.

Even though I’m a super pimple-faced code-geek, I strive to be a creative entrepreneur who can utilize modern day tools and navigate the chaos to build cool stuff. What I tried to do for this project is use some new methods/tools out there to solve practical problems in my weakness area: design, frontend coding, system administration and SEO.

Purpose of this article is to show my thought process on the multidisciplinary aspects of this project. Also to invoke the discussion on how these things could be done much better (correct me!) and hopefully also to educate other entrepreneurial minded hackers.

Wigitize.com, A geeky Idea

While working for my current client here in Tokyo, I’m often running into problems where I wish there was a third party web service that could solve them. For example: Uploading/Managing pictures for user generated content. We want to build cool shit, not reinvent the wheel.

Another one of these ‘problems’ – by saying problems I mean ‘important new features’ – was allowing users to import their blog’s RSS feed. When users input the URL of their blog, a listing of their most recent blog entries will be displayed, sounds simple enough right?

Several weeks before, I already wrote a feature that allowed users to display their latest Twitter ‘tweets’. Building this ‘passive twitter integration’ seriously did not take any longer than one hour! This is because Twitter provides a blog badge or widget. More and more sites are starting to provide these widgets making it easier for people to take their data and display it on their blog. And that’s great!

However, the most popular data feed format – RSS – does not have these widget benefits. Widgets rely on a smart technique called JSON which allows your browser to fetch the actual data. With RSS feeds you need relatively complicated server-side processing to display the data.

So wouldn’t it be cool if there was a web service that allowed you to convert any RSS/Atom feed into a embeddable widget? I’m sure some of you will suggest similar services now :]

A service like that should be:

  • simple, with one big ass URL input
  • smart, it should detect these data feeds
  • integratable (another adjective!), by providing an API for other web services

Aahhh a new project has been born. Let’s open up MS Word and fill in our Prince 2 Project template. Herein we can properly plan for all things we need to be doing and all risks and?

Neh, just kidding! Let’s open up that bottle of wine and? just fucking build it!?

Design Mockup, 3 hours

For me, this is one of the more tricky parts. But fortunately, the project is simple and Web 2.0 designs simple too! Since I don’t aspire to be the next whoever cool designer, I will just give you my Idiot’s view of doing design:

  • being able to draw is not a necessity
  • always start by putting down your content first
  • learn a bit about colors: Color in Motion, Vleere and Kuler (not cool but useful)
  • don’t force making a design, do it in the evening when you find the creative flow – or in an onsen if you have a waterproof mac

The weapon of choice: Adobe Photoshop (CS3, the latest shizne!). (Any good web alternatives yet? ๐Ÿ™‚ They say Photoshop has a steep learning curve and I agree. Still there are some things you can do to speed things up:

Learn the most important shortcut keys, you will use them a hell lot (ordered by usage):

  • V, get the arrow key to start dragging shit around
  • M, marker to select things
  • T, text tool
  • I, eyedropper to pick a color
  • CTRL+T, transform current selection
  • G, paint bucket to fill in stuff
  • W, magic wand to select stuff of the same shape/color

There are some things you will be seeing a lot in particular when doing Web20-like designs:

When performing blending options on a layer, you should be playing a lot with the following marked options:

You can learn here and here how to make these babies:

Woops, I shouldn’t get to deep into the details. Anyway, based solely on the content a design like this rolled out:

The colors can be justified as soil and nature, yin yang, peace man!

Storing your Files in an online Project Manager, 30 minutes

After having made those designs, I’d like to throw them online somewhere right away. Preferably in a SCM repository like Subversion. Luckily, I remembered an article on ReadWriteWeb about such Developer Tools

Basically there are two startups that provide freemium SVN and project management hosting. I chose Assembla for disk space, but Unfuddle was a close second.

That said, 10 minutes later I could start throwing things into my very own http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/wigitize/trunk

Hell, it even puts changeset notifications in my Junk box!

Playing with Rails 2.0, 4 hours

Weapons of choice: RubyOnRails 2.0 and Textmate.

Note: If one piece of software is worth paying for, it’s TextMate – am doing so now

RubyOnRails is very suitable for me, but I’m not sure if it is that suitable for you. I myself have a clear CS-engineering background and am very comfortable with digging in deep. On the other hand, depending slightly on luck, you can do a lot with this framework by just modestly hacking away and watching a screencast every now and then.

Rails is quite controversial in terms of scaling and production-ready. However, I think things are changing fast and as I will show you later. Serious innovation is done on how this framework plays with it’s systems layer and technologies like Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud

Like making the design, the coding also starts with content. First you jack in the important texts/inputs you have in your design and than you enclose them in the necessary ps so they can be CSS-styled later. In Rails this starts with making a home/welcome controller and writing the default layout: app/views/layouts/application.html.erb. Yes we are using the new Rails 2.0 way of html.erb.

A very important part of Rails I think is the config/routes.rb file. This file holds all your pretty URLs like: http://wigitize.com/json/for/http://dominiek.com/ . In a way routes.rb lays out all the abstract functionality of your web application. Rumors are that the routes part of the framework is internally the most complex one.

Some quick hinters on Rails practices that will speed up things:

  • Never do things like: link_to(”, :controller => ”), use Named Routes
  • If something seems complicated, break it down into simple steps and write a unit test first
  • Breathe consistentness, everything you code – even whitespace – has perfect reason. This also means applying Don’t Repeat Yourself all the time as a habit.
  • Naming can be a bitch and you can take up a lot of time. Do your best and pick a name consistently, you can always change it later.
  • In Rails, take Skinny Controller, Fat Model to extreme heights, it will make your life more easy
  • Do it in AJAX right away, it’s often much more simple than supporting plain HTML CRUD in the first place

There is a lot of material out there available on coding Rails in general, so I will let go here.

These first two hours are basically setting up all the routes, filling in the HTML and making things work in a very basic sense. For wigitize that meant:

  • hooking up the URL input to a feed detector and aggregator (most of that code is from here)
  • making sure that the aggregated data is stored in JSON format (In rails that means calling .to_json on any Object, easy as pie!)
  • adding a Widget model that can actually hold the URL, detected feed URL and JSON data:

I spend the next 2 hours seriously code-monkeying on the feed detecting and parsing part of the system. I will soon open source it under the name feedeater.

Style that HTML! 1 hour

Styling, already? Yes, I think it’s good to style quite early in the process. For me, there is one single argument: Flow.

When you are making something work it is nice when things already look quite tangible and usable. When you apply styling in an early stage you can see direct usable results of the things you are building, increasing the psychological state of the Flow.

Ok, so I also kinda suck doing CSS, but I learned enough to turn an image into a web page. These are my bullet point lessons:

  • Develop for Firefox first, using the tool Firebug. If you aren’t using Firebug and doing web development you’re either slow or an imbecile ;]
  • Always put in some basic CSS, I got some here and made it into my own html.css which I can include as a base all the time.
  • Padding and margin: These things are great and you need a lot of them. However, padding often gives you shit so try to choose margin over padding. Also, choose margin-bottom over margin-top since everything tends to float upwards (Thanks Simon)
  • Current fashion: Get some nice fonts going on, I’m using Trebuchet MS a lot for Wigitize and I mix it in with plain Arial.
  • Current fashion dictates that you use a less fierce black for your text, make it #111 or #222.
  • For mozilla/safari I’m using -moz-border-radius/border-radius, will never work in IE6 – fuck them, being a plain user is fine, but you’re not getting any round corners! Besides, isn’t Microsoft planning a forced upgrade soon?
  • You only need tables for tables. They will make your life a pain and you will not be cool if you use them for layout. Other than that it’s fine.
  • Little side note about AJAX: don’t use AJAX for navigation EVER! There are strong SEO and usability arguments against it (learned that the hard way, like most things in my life).

Spin it Baby! 2 hours

OK, I must admit that I spend way WAY too much time on this! However, when you’re doing things with AJAX, you need to put a spinner somewhere to indicate loading.

This so called spinner is pretty kickass and based on a piece of Javascript I wrote earlier:

Yeah Baby! It’s all hypnotic and stuff.

Note: As someone pointed out in the comments, on ajaxload.info you can get a lot of spinner images, like the one I’m using here.

Designing and Coding the Footer, 2 hours

I really like footers and I think they are becoming more and more important. Nowadays footers are used as sitemaps and often they are contextualized as well. These are nice examples of footers: last.fm and snooth.com

For Wigitize the footer is rather small since it’s a small site:

Making the JSON Embeddable, 3 hours

The embeddable Widget has the following code:

<p class="feed_widget">    <ul id="feed_widget_34"></ul>    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://wigitize.com/javascripts/wigitize.js"></script>    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://wigitize.com/feeds/34.json"></script>  </p>
  • define a containing list (ul)
  • include a JS library that has a special callback function, in our case wigitize_feed()
  • include the JSON file that will call wigitize_feed with the appropriate data

Providing styles obviously complicates things a bit. When choosing a style, it will include a generic wigitize.css and assign a class to the containing p.

Near future improvements:

  • Provide a ‘grab the grabber’ so that people can provide widgets of their own feeds (eg ReadWriteWeb providing a last-10 articles widget). This could have a lot of potential if provided in a simple feed-burner like button.
  • Put in better default styles than the lame ass ones I have now.
  • Option to include data (useful for photo feeds).
  • Option to display other kinds of aggregated data, eg microformats.

Making things run in the Background, 3 hours

Running things in the background – dubbed backgrounding – is an important part of production ready web applications. It’s a relatively new concept, since web applications used to be less complex. Now however, we are marching towards the Semantic Web where web apps are expected to become intelligent (the Intelligent Agents are coming, just like in the Langoliers!). I think being able to make your applications autonomous now will already reap you benefits (to be continued as an article).

There are several ways to achieve backgrounding in Rails, but the far away most easy one is using BackgrounDRb. BackgrounDRb is a plugin for Rails that allows you to easily kick off background processes and schedule regular tasks. Good for our purposes: detecting and fetching feed data.

I don’t agree with all of Zed Shaw’s big rant about the Rails community being a ghetto, but I sure do agree that there are a lot of idiots out there that produce things that can screw over your production apps. BackgrounDRb has become one of these projects and I strongly recommend that you do not use the latest code. If you start comparing code and read the mailing list you will see that a new guy has taken over Ezra fine project and I suspect that he has lowered the project’s level to pre-stable. I don’t hear any signals from the community and that worries me. Either I’m seeing ghosts or people are blindly accepting anything that’s marked as stable. In any case, I’m using Ezra’s version which works fine.

Finishing up the API, 4 hours

The Wigitize API for now is quite quick and dirty. There are two simple ways of using the API and examples are provided. In this area, a lot of improvements will be made down the line since it’s a key point in making any future freemium revenue.

Domain and Domain Email, 30 minutes

When I buy a domain I always buy a DNS managing package with it as well. This means that I can login somewhere and setup subdomains and set mail records. So the total price of Wigitize.com was 20$ per year.

Providing [email protected] email is easy, just get yourself a free Gmail for organizations account. In your Google Apps domain manager you can simply add your domain and in your DNS tool you set the MX record to ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. Now you can use gmail and IMAP to read mails sent to your domain.

Setting up a Production Server, 1 hour

I was really eager to put this project on Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud until I calculated my monthly costs. Running costs alone for simple projects like these will cost you 60$ a month. Still I think it’s worthy to look into this once you scale beyond simple project.

After digging around I figured out that slicehost.com would be a good cheap second. For 20$ a month I have a 256 memory slice with 100GB in data transfer – awesome.

Setting up your slice takes 5 minutes with a credit card. This slice is essentially a virtual machine with an IP address, completely yours. And the best thing: you get an awesome web console to control everything! Adding a new machine is a no brainer.

Now, I’ve used linux/unix for a long time as a working station. Eventually I got lazy and switched to my current MacBook. Fortunately, you can be lazy for the systems side of things too. All thanks to a lovely tool called Deprec.

Deprec allows you to install the complete Rails stack with a small set of commands. Shortly thereafter you can deploy your application to your production server by typing cap deploy_with_migrations. Please note that for Deprec you need to install Ubuntu Linux on your machine which you can do as follows:

Deprec installs the Rails stack as: Apache, Mongrel cluster (default of 2 instances) and MySQL. As I’ve written earlier, NginX is a nice nano-alternative for Apache. I would like to see that in my Rails stack someday, but I’m not going to worry about that now. Clock is ticking!

Little Pimps and Tweaks, 3 hours

I think it’s good to prepare a little bit for the storm (and I felt like doing something else for a bit), so I’ve created a nice maintenance message for in case there are system/scaling problems. In here I think it’s important to give people an extra reminder to bookmark and come back.

Which brings us to another great service, addthis.com. AddThis provides you with a button that makes it easy to bookmark on multiple social bookmarking services.

Another one of those little tweaks was proper error checking and displaying it to the user. I am using a pink error message to make it look more friendly (maybe I should go even further and make it yellow or something):

Statistics and Search Engine Optimization, 1 hour

Statistics is another 10 minute no-brainer by using Google Analytics. However I’m on the lookout to find something more real-time like Mint (but than free). Any suggestions?

Note: I just added getclicky.com to get more realtime stats than GA

I found a blog which is solely about Rails and SEO which I thought was very promising but in fact doesn’t have much content. I do found something on how to provide different meta tags in rails which I applied right away.

After looking around a bit I also saw some discussion about whether to use www. or not. The way to roll with this is: you permanently redirect your www. domain to say http://wigitize.com. It makes sense, www is old and architecture centric, http://wigitize.com is less typing and pretty.

On that note, make sure that you always write pretty URL’s by practice. This means thinking them through extra carefully, because changing URL’s is painful after going live.

Wigitize.com was also chosen with SEO in mind. The word is a mis-spelling of the term widgetize and yields 105 Google results (at this moment). Additionally, it is a verb, which lubricates the prettiness of the URLs :]

Near future improvements:

  • Making a list of ‘last wigitized sites’ and ‘most wigitized sites’, those pages can be accessed by the search spiders and thus associating external content with Wigitize.com. I think this might improve search rankings.
  • Providing a sitemap.xml, would that help?
  • Focus on the viral aspects of these widgets. For example a FeedB urner style button for on popular blogs.

Let’s throw it out there!

While writing this article – which took quite some time. Wigitize.com is already running and doing it’s job. However, I’m sure there are still some kinks to work out which I will do over the past coming days (eg IE6 support, SEO/viral tasks).

Also, I didn’t discuss anything about an important aspect: How to make revenue with Wigitize.com? I’m not sure yet, but since I’m solving a problem for myself, I’m sure others out there had it. Besides, the costs are extremely low at this point so I will worry about monetizing later. Although I would like to hear YOUR thoughts about it!

I realize that this is a geeky project and I must say it’s quite different than the web apps I normally work on. It was fun for me however to write down my thought process, especially on the non-tech parts of building which I find increasingly interesting.

The 4 Laws of Simplicity, and How to Apply Them to Life

Written by zenhabits Photo by The 10 cent designer

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci

The problem with many books and guides on simplifying your clutter, your work life, your desk, your life, is that they are usually too darn complicated.

We need a simple method of simplifying.

It’s been nearly a decade since I first started trying to simplify my life, and in those years I’ve struggled with clutter, I’ve had surges and ebbs of complications and simplicity, I’ve tried dozens of methods of simplifying from as many sources. It’s been an interesting journey, although not one that I can recommend to everyone. If you’re looking to simplify a certain aspect of your life, you don’t want to go through that kind of confusion.

So I’ve boiled it down to a simple method of Four Laws of Simplicity (apologies to John Maeda) that you can use on any area of your life, and in fact on your life as a whole:

1. Collect everything in one place.

2. Choose the essential.

3. Eliminate the rest.

4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. – Confucius

To illustrate, let’s take a quick look at how to declutter a drawer. Let’s say this is the worst junk drawer in your home – it has take-out menus from restaurants that closed down a dozen years ago, manuals for computers that used DOS as their primary OS, tools that you have no idea how to use, more rubber bands, paper clips and chopsticks than you can ever use, mementos from your unfortunate foray into rubber stamp hobbying, souvenirs from that Mexico City trip you’d rather forget about, not to mention a funky smell that reminds you of gym class.

You could spend all day sorting through such a mess and still have a mess. (Or more likely, you’ll close the drawer and forget about it.) But let’s see how the 4-step method would be applied to our drawer:

1. Collect. Take out everything and put it in a pile. Empty the entire drawer, and pile it all on a counter or a table. Take everything out, down to the last paper clip.

2. Choose. Pick out only the few things you love and use and that are important to you. Just sort through the pile, picking out the really essential stuff. Be very selective. Put the important stuff you pick out into a separate, smaller pile.

3. Eliminate. Toss the rest out. You know you’ll never need those manuals again. Don’t be sentimental with this step. Either throw everything into a big trash bag, or find a new home for some of the items if you think someone might have a use for them – donate them to charity or give them to a friend who would love them. And yes, you have to toss out all the chopsticks.

4. Organize. Put back the essential things, neatly, with space around things. Clean the drawer out first, of course, and put the very small pile of things you chose back in the drawer, grouping like things together and leaving space around the groups. Having space around things makes everything look neater and simpler.

That’s it. You now have a very nice, simplified junk drawer, with (let’s hope) a much less funky smell.

This simple method can be applied to every area of your life. My suggestion is to focus on one area at a time, apply the method, and then move to the next area. So, if you just wanted to simplify a couple areas of your life, you could focus on one per week, but if you wanted to simplify your entire life, I’d do one area every couple of days until you’re done.

Here are some examples of how you could apply the above method to other areas of your life:

Closets. Focus on one area of the closet at a time – a shelf at a time for instance. Take everything off the shelf and put it in a pile on the floor. Pick out only the really important stuff that you love and use. Put the rest in a box to donate. Put the important stuff back on the shelf, grouping like things together and leaving space around the groups. You could use containers for groups of things, using clear containers and labeling them. Or just leave the shelves fairly empty, and get rid of most of your stuff. Move on to the next area. My suggestion is to leave the floor of your closet clear – it makes it look much nicer and simpler.

Your desk. Clear everything off the surface of your desk (excepting, perhaps, you computer and phone). For the surface of the desk, I would suggest only putting your inbox and a nice photo or two, and nothing else. Put supplies in a drawer, and file the papers. Toss out the rest. Then do the drawers of your desk the same way, one at a time, leaving space in each drawer. It’s so much more relaxing to work in a simplified environment. After you’re done with the desk, do your walls.

Your work tasks. Have a long to-do list (or a bunch of long context lists)? Spend a little time adding every task or project you can think of to your lists, until it’s as complete as you can (GTD’s brain dump works for this). Then choose only the tasks that you really want to do, or that will give you the absolute most long-term benefit, and put those on a separate, shorter list. The rest of the stuff? See if you can eliminate them, or delegate them, or at least put them on a someday/maybe list to be considered later. Then only focus on your short list, trying to choose the three most important things on the list to do each day.

Your commitments. Make a list of all your commitments in your life, from work to personal. Include hobbies, clubs, online groups, civic groups, your kids’ activities, sports, home stuff, etc. Anything that regularly takes up your time. Now pick out the few of those that really give you value, enjoyment, long-term benefits. Toss the rest, if possible. It might be difficult to do that, but you can get out of commitments if you just tell people that you don’t have the time anymore. This will leave you with a life that only has the commitments you really enjoy and want to do. Leave space around them, instead of filling up your life.

Your wardrobe. Do you really need 40 T-shirts? Or 40 pairs of shoes? How many jeans do you actually wear? One drawer or section of your closet at a time, put everything on your bed in a pile, choose the clothes you really love and actually wear on a regular basis, donate the rest, and put the ones you love back in your drawers or closet. Leave space around the clothes – don’t stuff your drawers full.

A room. If you’d like to simplify your cluttered rooms, start with the furniture. Which ones do you love and use? Get rid of the rest. Now clear every flat surface in the room, from counters to tables to shelves to desktops. Choose the stuff you love, and get rid of the rest. Leave the flat surfaces as clear as possible, only putting back a few choice objects. Now do the drawers and cabinets the same way. Also do everything on your floor that’s not a piece of furniture, leaving the floor as clear as humanly possible.

Your email inbox. Have an email inbox full of clutter? Dump all your emails in your inbox into a folder. Scan through the folder, choosing only a few to reply to and putting those in a separate folder. Delete or archive the rest.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness. – Henry David Thoreau

Flunked: 14 Signs of a Deficient Intellect

Written by Dookie McBride

1. God help us.

Sicks
(Photo by Laura Kicey).

2. Furst kum, furst surfed.

Groj
(Photo by Kuminiac).

3. From a politically astute second-grader.

Ff
(Photo by Lettuce1).

4. Nice try but no cigar.

Orange
(Photo by Tiny_tear).

5. Now hiring: police officers. Minimum educational qualifications: none.

Toad
(Photo by Xetark).

6. In love with all things domestic.

Homo
(Photo by 4rank).

7. Sorry, we can’t not point out how retarded you sound.

Water
(Photo by C.A. Shields).

8. And we all so clearly see who flunked remedial grammar.

Donuts
(Photo by Steph Tichenor).

9. Someone paid for this?

Huh
(Photo by Cloudasmoke).

10. Boat and mast sold separately.

Sail
(Photo by The Real Devil Doll).

11. You!! are!! a!! moron!!

Ladder
(Photo by Touchmenots).

12. Harry Potter’s country hideaway.

Private
(Photo by Zach Krugler).

13. Yum.

Wings
(Photo by Stephee).

14. At least there are no spelling mistakes.

Patient
(Photo by Seth W.)

Web achievements 101: Things to do before you die

Written by Josh Lowensohn

While the Internet might be a soulless place that’s mostly devoid of any real human warmth or compassion, there are certain things that make it better. While there might be a YouTube, we’re still very much the me generation when it comes to defining a personal identity online. Some of these “Web achievements” people pick up over the years require some serious talent. Others can be had with a little luck. We’ve compiled a list of some of the more prominent ones–consider it a list of things to do on the Internet before you die.

  • Skill.

    Achievements that require talent, skill, or personality

  • Get on Flickr’s interesting picture wall. Flickr’s interestingness algorithm is based on several qualities of user interaction with a photo. Flickr lists them as “where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” In short, it’s about how popular your photo is on an aggregate scale.

    Chances of it actually happening: Depends on skill. It could be one of the best pictures on earth, but if nobody’s looking at it, you’re out of luck. That being said, the photos you tend to see on Flickr’s explore page (the listing of interesting photos) tend to be great-looking, but even the occasional bad shot of something amazing makes the cut.

  • Make the YouTube featured videos list. This elusive honor puts your video on the front page of YouTube.com. Many unknown artists have gotten huge view counts and channel subscriptions out of a front page spot, which gets millions of eyeballs each day.

    Chances of it actually happening: Slim. The smattering of videos in the featured videos section on the front page is picked out by a team of YouTube editors. These folks are in charge of cool hunting, and given the amount of content that’s uploaded to the site each day, the best way to get noticed might be to get picked up on some other social sites for visibility first. Mark Glaser from PBS’ MediaShift has a great post on the editorial process here.

  • Get your post on The Best of Craigslist. This elusive honor is reserved for some of the best-written, or just plain obscure postings on the popular classifieds site. There’s no real science to it beside the fact that your post must be nominated by a certain amount of users before it’s picked out from the crowd.

    Chances of it actually happening: Slim. Getting on Best of Craigslist is incredibly tough. Nationwide only a handful of posts are picked out each week, and you’re relying on Craigslist users to not only read what you’ve written, but nominate it.

  • Making the front page of social news site like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Slashdot, and Newsvine.

    Chances of it actually happening: Reasonable. The beauty of getting on these sites is that you don’t have to write an article you’re submitting. In most cases, the only responsibility is to write title and description. Adding a little style and flair to the original title and description can do wonders. On the other hand, writing a story, taking a picture or video that makes the front page of any of these sites is a far greater achievement than simply adding the link.

    Continue reading to learn about repetitive and ego-stroking achievements galore…

  • Become the Reddit’s all-time karma gainer. We’d classify this under repetition, except that Reddit’s karma system actually requires users to submit quality content. If you’re just spamming the site with a bunch of useless links, your karma will be buried into oblivion.

    Chances of it actually happening: Not without some work. If you’re unemployed or working for a news wire service you might have a shot. Otherwise, you probably won’t be able to keep up with some of the folks on top who are submitting more than a dozen quality news links each and have been every day for years.

    Repetition.

    Getting these requires countless grinding or tireless participation

  • Acquire Elite status on Yelp.com. Becoming a Yelp Elite isn’t an exact science. According to the Yelp Elite info page, people are picked out based on a number of qualities, ranging from writing style to how much content they’re adding to the site. That being said, it doesn’t happen overnight. For some it takes months of countless reviews.

    Chances of it actually happening: Pretty good as long as you’re willing to invest yourself in the site and participate. The payoff is invites to private parties, and a snazzy looking profile badge. In the case of Yelp’s latest shindig, Elite members got to get into the party an hour earlier than everyone else.

  • Reach your Gmail in-box size limit. Google is currently giving everyone a little over 6GB of storage, but it wasn’t always like that. Google broke ground by giving people 1GB free along with a little counter that would add more and more storage as time passed. Throughout the years they’ve tweaked the speed of the counter along with total storage. The service is now at six times the original storage capacity.

    Chances of it actually happening. Depends on use. It’s happened before, and it can happen again. While most home users will be fine–if you’re trading around a lot of media files that max out that 20MB attachment limit, that space can eventually fill up. To those who have crossed the sacred threshold and fear deleting old messages, Google offers a paid storage expansion option to push the account up to 400 GB at a mere $500 a year.

    Egosphere cred.

    These are the nerdiest achievements of the bunch, and will make you feel important 2.0

  • Make the Twitterholic 100. The Twitterholic listing is based purely on followers on the popular microblogging service Twitter. These are people who are following your tweets, not the number of friends you have, or how many times you’ve updated your status.

    Chances of it actually happening. If you’re a male or female blogger with lots of fans, or a large Web news service, it’s in the bag. Otherwise you probably need to know at least 1,000 people with Twitter accounts who want to pay attention to what you’re saying. Currently No. 100 has a little over 1,100 followers with the No. 1 garnering nearly ten times that.

  • Get publicly slammed by Dave Winer. If you don’t know who Dave Winer is, he probably doesn’t know who you are either. Winer, who helped create the Web standards for podcasting, blogging and RSS is well known for writing or saying snarky things ranging from people to products.

    Chances of it actually happening: Slim. If you’ve built a popular Web app or retail product with some usability flaws, the damage might already have been done. He could also simply disagree with your opinion.

  • Make the front page of Valleywag. Silicon Valley’s self-proclaimed gossip rag is a blog at heart, and that means getting on it requires garnering the interest of its editors. Getting a mention on Valleywag holds more than some freebie potential traffic. You can become a hallowed member of its Facebook group “I got slammed by Valleywag.”

    Chances of it actually happening: Decent. Getting on the front page of Valleywag is no easy task but if you leave your cell phone unattended at a bar, are attractive, or and are dating one of Google’s founders, you’re a shoo-in.

10 Golden Lessons from Albert Einstein

Written by lifetweak

Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving – Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was an amazing physicist. He figured out so many universal principles and equations that he was way ahead of his fellow scientists at any point of time. But he is also remembered for another thing; a quality which made people call him a genius: his words. Prof. Einstein was a philosopher who clearly understood the laws of success and explained them like the way he did with his equations. Here is a list of 10 things out of the numerously wonderful things he had said; 10 golden lessons that you can put to use in your everyday life.

1. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

Most people don’t try new things because of their fear of failure. Failing is not something to be afraid of. It is often the losers who learn more about winning than the winners. Our mistakes always give us opportunities to learn and grow.

2. Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

30 years from now, you won’t possibly remember what chapters you had in your science book; you’d only remember what you learn on your way. Life lessons stay with you forever. Real education starts from within.

3. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

When you reflect on how far we humans have come from the prehistoric caves to mind-blowing technological advancements, you would feel the power of imagination. What we have now was built from the imagination of our forefathers. What we will have in future will be built from our imagination.

4. The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Creativity and uniqueness often depends on how well you hide your sources. You can get inspired and influenced by other great people; but when you are on stage with the whole world watching, you must become a unique, individual force that learnt different values from different people.

5. The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive. Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

If you think of all the top people in the world, they would have added something of value to the world. You must give in order to take. When your purpose is contributing or adding value to the world, you will be elevated to a higher level of living.

6. There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

When nothing is a miracle, you gain the power of doing anything you want and you have no limits. And when everything is a miracle, you stop by to appreciate even the smallest of beautiful things in the world. Thinking both ways will give you a productive and happy life.

7. When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.

Dreaming about all the great things that you can achieve is the key to a life filled with positivity. Let your imagination run amuck and create the world that you would wish to be in.

8. In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

If you want to become a very successful entrepreneur, you must start a business right away. Wishing to become one, but fearing the consequences will not help. The same applies to everything – in order to win a game, one must above all play the game.

9. You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

Learn the rules of your game and start playing it best. Keep competing like your life depended on it. And after a while you will have no one else but you to compete against. At that point, better your best.

10. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Intelligent people ask. Keep questioning yourself and others to find solutions. This will help gain knowledge and analyze your growth in all walks of life.

Top 17 Most Bizarre Sights on Google Earth

Written by Geekster

Satellite imagery used to be the exclusive domain of governments and spy agencies, but ever since Google Maps and Google Earth we can all get to see weird things! Fancy a look at Area 51? Wondered what it’s like in downtown Moscow? Or maybe you want to check out the Principality of Sealand? These are just ordinary, everyday things that millions of people use Google Maps and Earth to research every day. But what about the things you weren’t supposed to see, the freaks of camera? Here are 17 of the most bizarre sights for you to laugh at, complete with lat/lons and (where possible) KMLs. Enjoy.

Swastika Influenced Design

US Navy Swastika Building

1. Swastika Influenced Design: How is it that a US Navy building standing since the 1960’s could cause a controversy in 2007? As hilighted in the mass-media earlier in the year, Google Earth users noticed what only a few pilots would ever have seen – that a US Navy barracks on Coronado island, San Diego was built in the design of a swastika. The Navy said they always knew what the layout of the barracks resembled but thought no one would ever notice. As a result of these images becoming available online, they are being forced to spend $600,000 on new structures and extra greenery to camouflage the building. Embarrassing to say the least. Links: Google Maps / Google Earth

Aircraft Traffic Jam

Aircraft Traffic Jam

2. Aircraft Traffic Jam: What would you expect from one of the busiest airports in Europe? Looks like a freak of fortune to catch 3 aircraft on takeoff from Frankfurt International Airport, but it’s actually just overlay issues. Note that there is only a shadow for the middle aircraft. Links: Google Maps / Google Earth

Single-winged Aircraft Landing

Single-winged Plane Landing

3. Single-winged Plane Landing: This single-winged miracle-aircraft is the result of a bizarre mapping error that Google Earth occasionally suffers from. If you are a frequent Google Earth user you’ll probably have noticed incidences where roads and bridges don’t align properly or varying image resolutions cause some strange viewing. This aircraft was snapped on approach to the north western runway of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport but appears to only have one wing! Links: Google Maps

World War 2 Bomber in Flight

World War 2 Bomber in Flight

4. World War 2 Bomber in Flight: Google Earth has the ability to snap airplanes in midair – apparently some 3,300 planes have been placemarked. This is a World War II bomber flying over the sleepy suburbs of Huntingdon, England. Unfortunately, the bomber is no longer there in the updated image of the area.

Capsised Cruise Liner

Capsised Cruise Liner

5. Capsised Cruise Liner: If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a powerful typhoon slams into a cruise liner, then here’s your answer. This liner-shaped hotel was docked in the South Korean port of Busan when it was hammered by the 135mph winds of Typhoon Maemi in 2003. Links: Google Maps / Google Earth

North Dakota Truck Crash

North Dakota Truck Crash

6. North Dakota Truck Crash: Sometimes Google’s snapshots of our world are lucky enough to catch things as they happen. Here Google Earth captures a truck that crashed and sprawled out over East Burleigh Avenue just outside of Bismarck, North Dakota. Links: Google Maps

Ghost Ships

Ghost Ships

7. Ghost Ships: No longer confined to the annals of countless storybooks and Hollywood movies, ghost ships are real and they’re here today thanks to the camera-freakology of Google Earth! Here we can quite clearly see a ghost ship docking in Newark, New Jersey and taking on a load of cargo. Perhaps this is some sort of reincarnated Black Pearl? I dunno ?

John Travolta’s Airport / Home

John Travolta's Airport / Home

8. John Travolta’s Airport / Home: It’s no secret that John Travolta is an eccentric, but who would have expected him to build an airport and home in one? His home in Ocala, Florida is one of very few non-commercial airports in the world with a runway long enough to handle aircraft the size of his personal Boeing 707. Check out the internal and external shots in this Architectural Digest feature. Completely. Crazy. Links: Google Maps / Google Earth

African Wildlife

African Wildlife

9. African Wildlife: Imagine all the creatures roaming about African, just getting on with their thing. Now, thanks to the National Geographic African Megaflyover Project, we can enjoy some of the last true wilderness on the planet via super-high-resolution aerial photographs of Africa. Check out this magnificent image of a large group of hippos in the mud, including a poor old hippo which is seen laying on the bank, being eaten by vultures. Links: Google Maps / Google Earth

Gravity Defying Car Parking

Gravity Defying Car Parking

10. Gravity Defying Car Parking: Do you think getting somewhere to park your car is tough where you live? In Westenbergstraat, Netherlands, drivers apparently have to park on the sides of walls. Of course, this is just an example of tongue-in-cheek Dutch humour that comes through well from the above view. Links: Google Maps

Giant Indian Head w/ iPod

Giant Indian Head w/ iPod

11. Giant Indian Head w/ iPod Turns out that the original inhabitants of north America were much cooler than previously thought. “Loud White Ears” had set such a trend back in the ancient times that they decided to build a large effigy of him in commemoration. Links: Google Maps

Super Shrunk Aral Sea

Super Shrunk Aral Sea

12. Super Shrunk Aral Sea: The once thriving Aral Sea used to be the 4th largest inland lake in the world but has shrunk to a mere 15% of its original size over the last 20 years. The water-guzzling cotton industry has mainly been responsible for this super-shrinking. As a knock on result, the once busy local fishermen have had to pack up and leave, abandoning their boats which are now 50km from the receding shoreline. A sad scene to look upon indeed. Links: Google Maps

The Leaning Tower of Seattle

The Leaning Tower of Seattle

13. The Leaning Tower of Seattle: This building in Seattle, Washington appears to be leaning badly across the building across the street, nearly touching the opposite building. Despite the appearance, it’s not really the case. There are a few quirks with Google Earth and this one is due to two different satellite angles for this area and merging of the two views. Seattle – you’ve missed out on a proper tourist attraction! You’re just going to have to make do with Microsoft and Starbucks. Links: Google Maps / Google Earth

Bursts of Light

Bursts of Light

14. Bursts of Light: Many optical illusions and anomalies are captured by Google Earth. Most of them are reflections of lights, flashes or some quirky image pixelation. Some crazy people claim to have discovered angels, aliens and UFO’s in Google Earth. So to continue in the tradition of jumping to conclusions – could this burst of light this be an opening to a parallel universe? Links: Google MapsGoogle Earth

Crop Circles

Crop Cirlce

Firefox Crop Cirlce

15. Crop Circles: What self-respecting post about bizarre sights on Google Earth would be complete without some manmade alien-user-generated crop circles? Just to be clear: I wasn’t aware that ET used Firefox.

Brand Spamming

KFC

Coca Cola in Chile

Ford Logo

16. Brand Spamming: Yeah, let’s spam Google Earth! This huge KFC logo (Google Earth) was formed from 65,000 1-foot-square tiles laid out in the Mojave desert that took six days to put together. Other corporate giants who can afford to spam us do product placement in Google Earth include Ford who have placed a large logo on the roof of their HQ and Coca Cola who used 70,000 empty coke bottles for their logo on a hillside in Chile.

St. Patrick Fanboy

St Patrick's Fanboy

17. St Patrick Fanboy: OK, everyone might like St. Patrick’s Day, but this is taking it just a step too far don’t you think? I’d rather go to my local parade and shout abuse at the leprechauns. I’m also slightly annoyed that they missed the apostrophe: it’s St. Patrick’s Day not St. Patricks. Argghh! Links: Google Maps

NB: Over time these flukes will probably be removed as Google updates their data and creates even more bizarre sights.

10 Extraordinarily Peculiar eBay Purchases

Written by Julius Vortemizzi

Since the creation of eBay, just about everything has been bought and sold. Take a look at some of this stuff…

eBay – The worldwide garage sale. Since its creation millions of items have been bought and sold. You can find just about anything on eBay, the question is whether or not you would buy it. Some of the items are quite hilarious, some are rather interesting, and others are just plain weird. Perhaps the strangest phenomena is the ridiculous amounts of money people are actually willing to pay for some of this crazy stuff.

  1. Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich:

    Diane Duyser, from Florida sold her grilled cheese sandwich that appeared to have the face of the Virgin Mary upon it. The item was purchased by an online casino for $28,000!

  2. Ghost in a Jar:

    A man from Arkansas sold a strange jar that he claimed contained a ghost inside of it. He said he found it while metal detecting around an old cemetery. For his full story visit here.

  3. 18 Year old British Girl’s Virginity:

    In order to pay off her college tuition, Cary’s Copestakes put her virginity up for auction on eBay without her parents knowledge. The bid started at $10,000 and was taken up by a business man. However, he merely gave her the money in pity of her situation and did not take her up on the service she offered.

  4. Ex-wife’s Wedding Dress:

    A man found his ex-wife’s wedding dress in the attic and before he could burn it, his sister suggested he sell it on eBay. Along with a description of the dress, he delivered a hilarious rant about his ex-wife and even modeled the dress himself. He claims all he wanted was enough money to buy tickets for a Mariners game and a case of beer. His wish came true when a young lady purchased the dress for $3,850! For the full story, check out No Marriage.

  5. Doritos Cheese Pope Hat:

    In Salem, Massachusetts, the Chadwick family opened up a bag of Doritos to discover a chip that perfectly resembled the Pope’s Mitre or in other word’s, the pope’s “really tall hat”. The same online casino that purchased the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese bought this cheesy artifact for $1209!

  6. The Meaning of Life:

    That’s right, folks. For $3.26 it’s all yours. The answers to everything you could ever ask. But if you live outside of the U.S., that’s just too bad because the seller would only ship within the U.S. The exact nature of this item was not given and the only picture was the rainbow.

  7. Vampire Killing Kit:

    A seller from Oklahoma made $2,005.50 from this supposed 18th Century Vampire Killing Kit. It all came in a linden wood box, lined on the inside with maroon velvet. Inside the box were the following items: One wooden hammer (9 inches long), four stakes 7 inches – each), prayer book, crucifix, knife, picking scissors and eight bottles with Pamant (holy soil), Agheazma (holy water), Mir (anointing oil), Tamaie (holy incense), Usturoi (garlic), red serum, blue serum and secret potion, wooden cross, and a metal syringe box. The seller claimed that the estimated value of the artifact was between $29,000 and $51,000 although many doubt this to be true.

  8. John F Kennedy Assassination Shooters Perch Window:

    The actual window and frame from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed our 35th president, John F. Kennedy. 188 bids were placed and the winning bidder paid $3,001,501.00 on February 16th 2007 and gained what is most likely the most valuable window in the world.

  9. Real Shrunken Heads:

    26 shrunken heads were sold on eBay. The heads came straight from the J?baro Indian tribe in the jungles of Ecuador. Only 7 bids were placed on them and the winner paid a little under $25 for them.

  10. UFO Detector:

    A small Brazilian Company known as InterBras put this “very sensitive magnometer” up for sale on eBay in March of 2000. They claimed that when foreign objects were flying nearby in the sky, it would flash and beep. A UFO enthusiasts happily payed $135 it. Unfortunately a picture of this piece of equipment could not be found. It must be top secret.