A Blog Not Limited

Links from last week's tweets that referenced web design/development resources, interesting products, things that made me laugh and other stuff I (loosely) deem "useful."

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March 1–8, 2009

When I was a kid, I had an album (vinyl) of several Dr. Seuss stories. I swear I listened to it non-stop. And my favorite story was about the Star-belly Sneetches. At that age, I had no concrete concept that the story is, basically, about discrimination and tolerance. Now, as an adult, the story has greater resonance. In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday last week, here's a clip from the animated Sneetches.

Original tweet

Web development as a ham sandwich. No wonder I'm such a fan of cheese (and microformats). And I can see taking this further … If the markup is the bread, then different DOCTYPES can be different types of bread. Like multi-grain bread for XHTML Strict (because both are so good for you) and good old Wonder bread for HTML 4.

Original tweet

I don't use Facebook much these days. But when I was a regular user, certain aspects of the social network bugged me (like "poking") … maybe they still bug me and that's why I don't use it. Anyway, I can certainly relate to these 25 Things I Hate About Facebook. And Facebook in Reality cracks me up every time.

Original tweet

Interesting placement of the blow-up valve on this Wolverine punching bag. Product designers should really take greater care. Or maybe this is a not–so–subtle joke. Either way, I love it. I mean, what superhero wouldn't love a blow job?

Original tweet

GMail recently made a few design changes, including to their "custom buttons." But along with those changes, they dropped the option to search the web from GMail … a feature I used all the time. I was most distressed. Much to my happiness, they've brought it back. I'm still celebrating.

Original tweet

Growing up, my mom was pretty strict about sweets. The only (albeit infrequent) exception was breakfast cereals. So this tribute to discontinued cereals takes me blissfully back to the days of Smurf-Berry Crunch.

Original tweet

I only recently became a fan of MGMT, and I particularly like their "Kids" song. This cover by The Mentalists is so cool … it only uses iPods and iPhones.

Original tweet

One thing that makes me truly happy is clean and lean markup. This content–to–markup ratio bookmarklet calculates how much crap is in your HTML and how much of the good stuff (content) you've got. I'm sportin' a content–to–markup ratio of 0.25, with a fair ratio of 0.42.

Original tweet

I don't buy crap (AKA shit I don't need) anymore. But I'm having a hard time filing these totally fucking awesome Photoshop and Illustrator magnet kits as "crap." Must. Use. Self. Control.

Original tweet