Phil Scott's WebLog
Quite exciting this computer magic
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What came next? Flamethrowers, of course
A couple weeks ago I thought I had a novel idea with spam poetry. Zero comments and zero referrals later, I felt like an idiot. But I noticed a couple of people finding me by searching for "What came next? Flamethrowers, of course." Not knowing why someone would be searching "flamethrowers of course," I hit up google. I found not only my spam poetry post as the source, but also uncovered The Register's Spam Poetry Contest. The first article from The Register was written two days after mine bringing up a contest for Spam Poetry. The coincidence doesn't end there, by god. Their follow up article from a couple of days ago ended with "What came next? Flamethrowers, of course."
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Spam or New Age Poetry?
I've been getting a big kick out of reading the text that's been accompany my spam to get around bayesian filters. I've found some of them oddly poetic, so I thought I'd share my poem I received about Vietnamese Girls. Perhaps I could write a book full of them. Maybe even get a grant.
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Looks like TODO-Driven Development has a pretty limited scope now
On the heels of SecretGeek's newest methodology, TODO-Driven Development, comes news that Microsoft has patented "A method, apparatus, and software are disclosed for assisting a software developer in managing tasks to be completed by providing a task list as a unified location for developers to locate errors and warnings in code, as well as specify user-defined tasks." Looks like this methodology will be limited to Microsoft technologies.
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Free e-Book - "Budget Design: Increase Profit by Improving Process"
For those who don't read Didier Hilhorst and Dan Rubin's weblog, Superfluous Banter, I thought I'd drop a line about their new e-Book "Budget Design: Increase Profit by Improving Process." It's a short little read, but it's the type of stuff anyone doing web work should be down with. And it's free for a short period of time (I think four more days...)
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Picking Color Schemes
One thing I've always had trouble with web development is coming up with color schemes. To be honest, every design I've been happy with mostly involved spending some time with the color picker tool in photoshop. I can recognize good color schemes, and even tell you why they are pleasing to the eye. Needless to say when Dave Shea wrote up some stuff on color schemes, I was all about it. Tons of great tips and articles in the comments too.
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Sizing Text with ems
Richard Rutter has a nice tutorial on sizing text with ems instead of using pixel based text sizes.
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Hardened PHP and, uh, adult oriented natured sites.
I've used PHP for quite a while now, but dropped it like a bag of rocks once ASP.NET came out. I still like following the project though, so when I saw an article on something called Hardened PHP I jumped right into the comments to get a "pulse" on what's happening. Anyways, one of the top rated comments was about a guy running a high volume site that deals in boobie pics, written in PHP. Followed by quite a few comments from people doing similiar work in PHP.
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Well, I guess if I ever need a Red Book...
In the past three days, Safari has posted 120 of IBM's Redbooks. MS Press has quite a few books on there, but it seems as of late there hasn't been as many posted. Luckily the phenominal addison-wesley series all seem to represent, but it would be nice to see some more .NET type books on that site.
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More Blogger and CSS.
I found a list of all the redesigns on Phil Ringnalda site. So here's a list of my favorites:
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The New Blogger.com and CSS
Over on StopDesign, Doug has a TREEEEmendous write-up about the redesign of the new Blogger.com. He's also thrown in some screen shots of the beautiful new templates, all CSS based and all standards compliant. Awesome stuff. Dan Cederholm's TicTac design is extra smooth.