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Stumbles for the Week of March 18, 2007

March 18, 2007

As always, another great week of stumbles. Here are some of the precious gems that caught my eye this week.

  • Interactive Photo Mosaic: I’ve always had a soft spot for the creativity of photo mosaics. This one is brilliant. It kept me busy and engaged for a pretty long time.
  • Photoshop Tutorial: Web 2.0 Buttons: Just about everything Web 2.0 can be done by yourself. Here’s how you can create “Web 2.0 style” buttons using Photoshop CS2.
  • Mac Products Buying Guide: I’m not a Mac user in the slightest (I sold my iBook awhile ago on eBay), but for whatever reason, StumbleUpon serves me a ridiculous amount of Mac pages, probably because I am always thumbsupping the Mac sites. This one happens to be rather cool. It tells you how long Apple typically goes before releasing a brand new product “update,” advising buyers to either wait until a new release is about to come out or to buy now since the product has just been updated. For example, for the iPod Shuffle, which has just been updated (2nd generation), it says “Buy now, product just updated,” but for the full-sized iPod, it says “Buy it only if you need it – approaching the end of a cycle.”
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You Can Learn a Great Deal from a 17-Year-Old

March 12, 2007

Quizlet LogoI must have first heard of Quizlet through Lifehacker. Studying my SAT words (believe it or not, vocabulary is not one of my strong suits) is not as much a distant memory as it is for others who have been out of high school for 8 years. I remember taking classes, buying flashcards, and doing whatever it took to have a decent Andrew Sutherland, Founder of Quizletunderstanding of large words to score well on the SAT. In that way, I wish Quizlet, an online application to make learning vocabulary fun and engaging, was available back when I needed it. Fortunately, for students who do, 17-year-old Andrew Sutherland has already gone well along on his way to make learning big words a little more exciting.

I was reading a recent interview with Andrew, who built the application out of a passion and a need — I don’t think anything like Quizlet exists anywhere else. I know that whenever I go to the house where I grew up, I end up finding a bunch of flashcards that I no longer want to see anymore (man, what a waste of paper!) I also remember being “elected” as the note-taker in high school; one of the easiest ways to absorb lecture notes and book notes was to type up questions and answers in a frequently asked questions document and ask myself the questions again and again. I definitely could have seen myself “quizletting” back in the late 90s… too bad Andrew was only about 8 years old then.

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Stumbles for the Week of March 11, 2007

March 11, 2007

StumbleUpon LogoIt’s been awhile since I posted my findings on StumbleUpon, but this week, I have a great list — I hope!

  • FreeComputerBooks.com: Download free computer books, tutorials, and lecture notes. This site covers major topics, such as computer science, programming languages, Unix/Linux, networking, Microsoft, and others.
  • Paper Pilot: A Flash game to kill time. Design a paper airplane and then throw it as far as you can!
  • EarthWallpapers.org: Stunning wallpapers of the Earth’s surface as taken way above ground. The photos are stored on Flickr by a photographer named mrtruffle.
  • Cool Advertisements from Around the World: These are some of the most clever advertising campaigns I’ve ever seen.
  • Full illustrated list of ACME Products: Most of my favorite cartoons when growing up were produced by Warner Brothers. I particularly loved watching the crazy little antics of Wile E. Coyote and RoadRunner. I must say that I still remember their use of ACME products. I guess it left an impact; this fictitious corporation has made hundreds of products that are now categorized online in this guide. Creative.
  • Tahoe Turner: The amazing wood artwork of Malcolm J. Tibbetts is featured in this photo gallery. His work is beautiful.
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Should the Subscribe Button be Above the Fold?

February 25, 2007

Ever since I began surfing on the web (it’s been well over a decade now), I’ve considered search essential. More so, on sites with a large amount of content, I find myself searching within the site for ease of locating results, especially because even before I understood what SEO was, I knew that not every page was being necessarily crawled by the search engines. Consequently, I put a lot more faith in the on-site search rather than the results spit out by search engines.

I’ve found myself time and time again searching for a term in the email subscription textbox, only to realize after I performed the search that I actually searched within the “subscribe” textbox, which is above the fold. The “search” textbox is on the site, but it’s below the fold (which takes searching for, sometimes!)

I don’t know about others, but while I understand the desire to stick the subscribe button where it’s easily found, I don’t think it does much for usability. And usability should come first. It makes me feel that the web designer forgot to keep the user in mind because the goal is an immediate conversion rather than satisfying the user’s needs.

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Internet Marketing Best [Blog] Posts of 2006: The Year in Review

December 25, 2006

Given that I’ve only recently become involved in Internet Marketing, it still is something that I am learning more and more about, and there are a lot of blog posts and books that have helped me along the way. In light of my anti-Digg post, I wanted to take this moment to appreciate the best [blog] posts in the Internet Marketing world of the year — those that have significantly increased my awareness of this exciting field. That said, these are mostly how-to and tips/secrets posts, where some come from a beginner’s level and others are more advanced. I’ve done a lot of digging (this was mostly by hand rather than from existing bookmarks!) and am hoping I have included a huge chunk of them, though I realize that this has been a tremendous undertaking and there are simply too many blog posts out there (thanks, guys!). Since I started reading SEO blogs mid-year (and I can’t possibly read all of them on a regular basis), I know I’m missing more! If anyone has any essential posts to add, please feel free to leave them in the comments. :)

Without further ado, here are some of my favorite posts of 2006.

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