Interesting Things and Places
I am cleaning up my bookmarks this morning and came across some interesting things that I thought you all might like to see. Some are cool sites, some games and a couple of shops. I probably meant to post them up when I bookmarked them, but there are too many to flood the site with individual posts all at once, so I have piled them into this post.
Games:
Geosense is is a challenging game of geography, it tells you a place, you click on where on the globe you think it is. The accuracy and speed of the click combine to make your score. You can play alone or against others. I have a pretty good world sense but I get my butt handed to me here. Good fun.
If you have played the World of Warcraft online role playing game you are familiar with Murlocs, they are pesky fishmen who plague you at the lower levels. A clever gamer has made an flash game that allows you play as a Murloc, it is very well done.
Articles:
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters. What if real science applied to movie monsters? A good read.
Granularity for Students is a good Lifehacker article on breaking down big jobs into smaller ones. If there was one thing I wish schools were better at teaching it is this. I spend a lot of time trying to teach this to people I work with.
This site is dedicated to exposing the world to the plots of Tufty the Safety Squirrel. Timely warnings in these dangerous times. Take a look around the rest of the site as well for more warnings of squirrel based danger.
Blogging Stuff:
What is your blogs readability level? Mine is at a 5th grade level. Some other useful tools for web designers on the site as well.
If you run your blog on Wordpress it is important to stay on the current version, here are the upgrade instructions. If you are hosted your host may do this for you, but if you run your own, upgrade regularly.
If you run a blog your want to publish an RSS feed. Wordpress does it automatically, as does Blogger and Live Journal, but if you need a good tool to publish a feed or you want to be tricky with how you publish have a look at Feedburner. Very handy, very configurable and if you want to put ads into your feed you can.
What are these RSS feeds? They are an update notification tool that allows your readers to know when you have updated. A good feed reader makes keeping up with the news and blogs very quick and easy. I use Bloglines but the Google Reader is very good as well. Subscribing to sites is simple, many sites have a subscribe button on them but I have an add in for Firefox that lets me add any site with a feed by clicking a button. For a look at the sites I subscribe to have a look here.