Happy Father's Day!
In honor of Father's Day I decided to do a post all of links I thought my own dad would appreciate. Here they are:
- In honor of my own Dad's enthusiasm to helping others with their trouble shooting problems I offer up Qunu. This is a site where people can get help with their technical problems from "experts" in that area. It works by having people sign up to be experts and others signup saying they have a problem. Then Qunu connects them together in real time. YEAH!
- For all you game lovers out there you just need to check out Arcaplay. This is web games gone Web 2.0 very nifty. It's clearly still in the early stages but none the less very functional, and a very good way to waste time. Because clearly we all need more of that!
- For all you news connoisseurs out there, there's Newsvine. This is a place that has users submit stories from the popular press to be published on the site (much like digg), but also allows users to write their own stories (much like blogs), and then allows for tagging (much like Technorati). As well they include wire posts from the AP. Of course just like digg, the homepage is determined by how much people vote for an article.
- Need to create a personalized map. Well Google Maps mashups are the new "hot" item, because in my humble opinion the API is easy to leverage and everyone knows what maps are about. Unfortunately, as with any new fad, this results in a lot of just bad services. Luckily, there are a few great ones out there. My favorite right now being Wayfaring. Simply put this is Google Maps on Web 2.0 Steroids. It does everything you should be able to do with a web based mapping service on the web. Create midway points, move the marker, add descriptions, add links, add pictures, etc. This allows you to do it. And then it allows you to tag it and share it with the world!
- My Dad being a writer I thought he might appreciate Writely. Recently bought up by Google, this is a web based word processor for collaborative writing. Not as much fun as some of the other links but very impressive, and is for sure a very modern web service.
- Do you like music? Then if you haven't heard of Last.fm or Pandora you need to go there right now! You simply let them know what sort of music you like (say a particular artist or a particular song) and then they make and play suggestions for other music you might like. Check it out!
- The first two being apps for the services I just mentioned. One is the Last.fm player which is made by the people at Last.fm. The second is PandoraMan, which is a small MacOSX app for playing your Pandora channels.
- Now in honor of my Dad's troubleshooting tradition I'll mention my favorite MacOSX utility: AppleJack. This is a command-line app that you can run when you start your computer in Single User Mode. It does all that fsck does and more. If you've got a problem it's a good starting point. Or at least I think so, but I guess that sort of recommendation is more my Dad's territory.
- The last is THE Tool for understanding the CSS behind ANY web page: Xyle scope. Basically you load a URL, or a local file into it's browser window (it uses Apple's WebKit to render the page), then you can select any element on the page and it tell's you what parts of the css code is effecting it's style, as well as showing you how the cascade works on that element. Finally it also shows you the document's DOM structure. Overall this is any web designers gift from heaven so to speak. Allowing you to both find nifty tricks others have used, as well as trouble shoot your own code.
