Stuff I found funny, interesting, just plain disturbing, or for my own personal benefit.

allmusic – Genre explorer

Tags: music, genre, recommendations, discovery, tool, website, directory

JW Media Music ~ Night At The B Movies

Tags: music, movies, soundtrack, retro

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

A few site updates to mention:

• I’ve converted the majority of the categories over to tags. At the bottom of every page is a tag cloud of the tags I’ve used here. Slowly, I’ll start tagging old posts.
• I’ve spruced up the comments a bit to give them just a bit more colour.
• And I now include Gravatars in the comments!

I’m dragging this blog kicking and screaming into the latter half of the Aughts…

I’ve been tweaking the stylesheet for the site over the last few days, making it a little more efficient and readable hopefully (i.e. making it more about the “C” than the “SS”). There’s a lot about CSS that still throws me for a loop sometimes. I seem to have a hard time with styling technologies in general (but that’s a different story).

I didn’t have too hard a time of it this go around, I think mainly because of the new Web Inspector in Apple’s web browser, Safari. DOM/HTML/CSS inspectors in web browsers is not a new idea, and Apple wasn’t the first to the table with the idea. In fact, their inspector has been around for a couple of years now, in various forms.

It wasn’t just the live-updating of the CSS that helped, but also how it shows the different style rules in play and how they’re being overruled by others, and lastly the ability to see the final computed style. It’s still a little clunky and could use some more features, but it’s definitely usable the way it is now.

If I didn’t find Firefox as a whole rather clunky on my G5 (but only on my G5, for whatever weird reason), I’d probably be using it with Firebug, which looks awesome. Actually, if I was back in the business of coding web pages to make a living, I’d definitely be using that.

Anyway, if you’re still reading this, you shouldn’t really notice too many changes. I’ve pretty much kept all the styles the same, I’ve just reorganized how they cascade in the stylesheet. The biggest change I just implemented, is switching the main font over to a series of various Lucida variants from Verdana (which I’ve used for years now, simply because it was different, and Tahoma looked too cramped). Only problem now is finding the right Lucida variant for the job, as only certain ones came pre-installed with certain OSs or applications at certain times, and some look like utter crap. But I’ve done my research, and I think I’ve chosen the best option that screws all people equally (maybe the Windows people slightly more than others).

I’ve also started using tags, so at least I now appear to be “with it.”

Stuff I found funny, interesting, just plain disturbing, or for my own personal benefit.

Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » Downloadable Fonts

Tags: apple, web, safari, html, css, fonts, webkit

A List Apart: Articles: CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

Tags: web, html, css, fonts

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

A word to the wise, trust documentation. The help for my add-on said not to leave it on for extended periods of time, and that it’s really only meant for short periods of debugging traffic. Well, I read that and chose to ignore it, thinking of course that I knew better.

Well, it’s turned off now, and things are much snappier than they were.

I still don’t know what it was doing, because I never did get any output from the darn thing. Apparently, it was just spinning its cycles, spewing its data into the /dev/null’s of the world.

So here are the search strings that were used by said users’ browsers to reach my site from January 2005 on (in rough chronological order). Where a search phrase has been repeated, I’ve placed a multiplier modifier at the end of each line to represent how many times. There’s a bit of a common thread going here, and might also lead you to realize how such adware may have been installed in the first place. Ashlee Simpson screensaver anyone? The IPs have been hidden to protect the incompetent.

* used rolex wanted
* PDV-0700K (x2)
* ps2 hdd winnipeg
* crash bash
* heroscape pieces
* swoosh swoosh sound
* bestbuy.ca
* “never fly”
* leaf collection hose
* fly games
* penial implants images (x5)
* redd skull comics
* hands in my pockets spoof (x3)
* jeopardy snl scenes
* CJME
* fly with leaf blowers
* scrollable comments (x2)
* “guy fawkes costume”
* amazing race
* Korean girls
* clever firefly quotes
* haircut skateboarder
* humour old 80′s stories
* fly rider game (x4)
* o.c.disorders
* saber rider
* humour of accountant
* wqiki
* list of cooking shows of the 80′s
* 80′s sci fi toys
* savings in egypt in the 80′s
* 80′s weird songs list
* hentai girl with bandaid
* where can i watch free cartoons from the 80′s

I’m not sure which is more shocking: that my site is considered that much of a haven for photos of penial implants, or the types of search queries that will eventually lead to this post now that I’ve collected everything in one place.

That’s just the search phrases from the people “infected” with FunWeb stuff, which is a much smaller slice of the pie that represents my overall set of visitors. The other search phrases are far more boring (but maybe I’ll give the same treatment to those some day).

And if you happen to recognize some of those search queries as your own, you might want to try running Ad-Aware and some other kinds of anti-virus and anti-spyware software on your computer. And get your Windows Updates up to date. And stop clicking “Yes” and “Allow” to everything that pops up. Actually, just stop clicking anywhere on a pop-up. Forget that, install a pop-up blocker. Better yet, get one of your kids to do it. Scratch that, just stop clicking… period. Don’t even turn your computer on.