This is Lindsay Donaghe's blog. If you like technology, programming, web and graphic design, meta languages (XML flavors), photography, informatics, and other geeky stuff then you'll probably find something here.
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Fleeting Thoughts
The new standard starter project for any web-based code library is creating a Flickr gallery widget. It’s Hello World 2.0.
I attended a presentation on “Inbox Zero” by Merlin Mann and he made a great observation about all those email chain jokes and Snopes items you get from non-tech savvy people:
Forwarding emails is like blogging for old people.
MousePrint analyzes advertising and its fine print. An interesting tour of the logic of advertising and how it can deceive people. Great for teaching people critical thinking.
A list of free things you can do to boost traffic to your website or blog. Many of them are obvious if you’ve done it for a while, but it’s a good refresher and checklist.
Seth Godin has an intresting perspective on things that seems to match mine in a lot of ways. I like his critcal thinking and ways to cut through the BS of marketing and advertising. Interesting blog.
How to fix the annoying bug in IE where a background applied to a FIELDSET displays incorrectly in the fieldset’s LEGEND and “overlaps” the border. I had to modify it a bit to get it to work in my situation. Also note that the bullets in the code snippe
A power cord with swappable “tips” so that you can use one cord to charge up all your devices. Too bad they don’t seem to have a tip for my Fuji Finepix F810 .
A model airplane that’s outfitted with a camera so that the person controlling it can see from it’s perspective and control it through a set of VR goggles. Very cool idea… and you know the military has got to already have these things….
A nice tutorial on how to create non-standard forms and mask input controls so that they’re not just inset boxes. Interesting idea, but some noted usability and cross-browser compatibility issues.
Site with activites and techniques for teaching children Aikido. A good listing under Curriculum of activites other than games that help them understand techniques.
A site that is supposed to let people learn about things in small chunks quickly. Users can create their own courses or just use those provided by others. Supposed to be short lessons that are quickly absorbed and narrowly focused. Interesting idea.
A more advanced version of Lightbox that allows embedding of HTML and not just images. Build on JQuery instead of Script.aculo.us so it’s a bit more lightweight as well. Seems pretty snappy.
A new free service that offers a combination blog/forum option hosted on their servers. Works on the idea (like I’ve always thought) that blogs and forums are essentially the same thing in different formats. I like the idea but wish you could host the s
Nice piece of software for Windows XP… screensaver that pulls from your Flickr account (or other Flickr params you specify). Works on dual monitors too.
A site that lets you browse images on Flickr by the camera they were taken with. A handy way to do comparison shopping for cameras you’re considering buying… assuming that the pictures aren’t post-processed with Photoshop or the like!
An interesting application of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service as HIT. People were paid $0.02 to draw a sheep and 10,000 were collected… They can be bought for $20 a piece… so if they sell 10, they’ve made their money back. Some of them are cool and
A set of RIA type UI scripts written with JQuery that achieve a lot of the same effects you see with libraries like Script.aculo.us and Prototype. Some nice stuff to play with here.
A nice JQuery implementation to do a fade replace for content in a container. Works for lists or nested divs, but not for elements other than divs within the content divs (to replace more than one image in a div, needs to be used as a background instead
The camera that’s the most likely successor to my Fuji Finepix F810. It has all the features but looks a bit bulkier and has a smaller LCD. The main advantage is 9MP vs 6MP on mine.
A cross-fader script using Script.aculo.us that is similar to the JQuery one I found. Requires that the items be absolutely positioned, however, but doesn’t fade to the background color before fading in the next item, which is nice.
Sweet and funny story about a Japanese rabbit who could balance all sorts of things on his head and the website that his owner set up for him. Some of the pictures are great. Kawaii, desu yo!
A very interesting idea. It allows you to grab any text from web pages and read it by flashing a single word on the screen at a time at about 300 words per minute. You can adjust the settings to show more words at a time or change the speed. I guess it
Not sure how this works but it finds the pictures you’ve posted on flickr that ended up in the “explore” pages based on their “interestingness”. I had been wondering how you could find out…
A tool that generates an hourly updating blog widget displaying some images from your flickr and some stats such as the number of photos, sets, contacts and “explore” you have. Cool idea and nice execution.
Good information on how to avoid IE memory leaks if using Javascript closures.
An unfortunate side effect of closures is that they make it trivially easy to leak memory in Internet Explorer. JavaScript is a garbage collected language - objects are allo
Suppose you want to create a function that accepts string arguments and prints them with a line break after each one. Since the number of arguments is not known, the only way to handle this situation is th
Interesting that the arguments can linger between calls if they’re not replaced. Don’t forget to set arguments.length = 0; before leaving the function so that they are not reused on the next call.
A new file storage/sharing site with no limit on files other than a time limit if the files are not accessed. Good alternative for sending large files through email, but not for long term storage and backup.
Another attempt at a resource to keep and organize your notes online. Organization by tags and tag clouds. As interesting as some of these attempts are, it’s kind of scary to become dependant on one at an early stage as you may end up losing your data i
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