Slashdot Mirror

Tech:
I, Cringley http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/rss2.xml
Freedom to Tinker http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?feed=rss2
Freenode staffblog http://blog.freenode.net/?feed=rss2
Gentoo Monthly Newsletter http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/rss.xml
Xaprb (MySQL) http://www.xaprb.com/blog/feed/atom/

Games:
Cruise Elroy ("Intelligent discussion of video games") http://cruiseelroy.net/feed/
Jonathan Drain's D20 Source http://d20.jonnydigital.com/feed
Socratic Design http://socratesrpg.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Stephen's Weblog (NDS homebrew) http://blog.akkit.org/feed/
StupidRanger http://feeds.feedburner.com/Stupidrangercom
Zero Punctuation http://www.escapistmagazine.com/rss/articles/editorials/zeropunctuation
Zelda Reorchestrated http://www.zreomusic.com/feed/
Used to read The Escapist, quite enjoying the magazine format, but seven or so articles all on the same day each week became too much (once a month please!). The format has changed since then, it just isn't the same.

And the Comics:
xkcd comic & blag
Penny Arcade
and no feed, but 8-bit Theater

And a number of various personal feeds

Slashdot I just check every few hours, I can be assured there is going to be a new article to read

I'm seeing a lot of this anti-4e sentiment, but what's interesting to note is that a lot of this is coming from the same people who swore they wouldn't upgrade to 3.5, and now they're defending it.

The issue here is that 3.5 was rushed, unnecessary and disappointing, leaving players doubting the next edition. In reality, 4e is making all the changes they were afraid to make in 3.5. This edition is literally the version that the 3.5e revision failed to live up to. Rather than saying "4e will suck because 3.5e sucked", we should rather be saying, "Because 3.5e sucked, 4e will be awesome."

I don't know about you, but I'm going to at least give it the benefit of the doubt until release day. http://d20.jonnydigital.com/

Head loppers, eh? Now we know what games Miyamoto takes his inspiration from!

Get a hold of yourself, JD. Nobody's going to get the KillerQuake/Headlopper reference. ;)

• Make sure your site has an easy to spell, easy to remember address. A minor problem with my own is people misspelling Jonny as Johnny when typing the URL. Don't choose a name that can be misconstrued in any way.
• Check your site in multiple browsers. A lot of sites look just fine in IE, but totally b0rk up in a text-based browser or Netscape. Make sure your website looks exactly as intended in IE, Netscape, Opera and Lynx before publishing it.
• Don't use Java(script) when you don't have to. Scrolly text and shiny buttons might look clever, but remember that a Java applet takes longer to download than a simple image or text link. Besides which, IE doesn't always render Javascript properly.
• Update regularly. People will come to your site often if they're sure they'll see new and interesting content. Regular updates can make the difference between Mitsukai and Slashdot.
• Keep images small! Large images can take a while to download on a slow connection, and remember that if you pay for bandwidth, large files can start costing you a lot of money. (Especially if your site gets slashdotted ^_^) Keep filesizes small - JPEGs for photographs, PNG for buttons.

Happy to share these with you!

• Make sure your site has an easy to spell, easy to remember address. A minor problem with my own is people misspelling Jonny as Johnny when typing the URL. Don't choose a name that can be misconstrued in any way.
• Check your site in multiple browsers. A lot of sites look just fine in IE, but totally b0rk up in a text-based browser or Netscape. Make sure your website looks exactly as intended in IE, Netscape, Opera and Lynx before publishing it.
• Don't use Java(script) when you don't have to. Scrolly text and shiny buttons might look clever, but remember that a Java applet takes longer to download than a simple image or text link. Besides which, IE doesn't always render Javascript properly.
• Update regularly. People will come to your site often if they're sure they'll see new and interesting content. Regular updates can make the difference between Mitsukai and Slashdot.
• Keep images small! Large images can take a while to download on a slow connection, and remember that if you pay for bandwidth, large files can start costing you a lot of money. (Especially if your site gets slashdotted ^_^) Keep filesizes small - JPEGs for photographs, PNG for buttons.

Happy to share these with you!

Nielsen writes: Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue.

Since half of the Internet at any one time are newbies - who probably don't know HOW to change the traditional link colour - does this mean that only 10% of homepages still use blue? ;)

I'm proud to say that I'm one of that sixty (or was it ten?) percent... check out my homepage, http://www.jonnydigital.com to see why I stick to good old blue unvisited links. (Site also here if the first page won't work.)

Of course, my visited links aren't purple... they're blue, too - but a darker blue. Purple wouldn't fit into my colour scheme...

It's just like I always say - "If links are blue, users know what to do!" ;)

I registered the domain jonnydigital.co.uk over two years ago with FreeNetName, a company who figured they could make money by giving out free domains. The only catch was that you had to dial into their ISP at least once every 90 days or you lose the domain - not a problem, since I was careful to dial in every few months - and they charge £95 (about US $135) to buy back the domain or transfer it to a different domain.

Unfortunately, I slipped up and lost the domain. I didn't mind because by that stage I had moved my site to jonnydigital.com, and the domain was going to expire in two weeks anyway so I was pretty confident that I could buy it back dirt-cheap with another company when it expired.

It would seem that they've renewed my domain and they're now squatting it. It's been registered by Freenetname again under a different name. I know it can't have been registered by another freenetname user because the company has stopped giving out free domains.

I'm currently the proud owner of JonnyDigital.com - it's named so because I go by the nick of JonnyDigital online, and so many individuals have registered the dot-com domain for a personal homepage that it no longer stands for 'commercial organisation'.

There's no way I'd buy jonnydigital.name, though. For one, JonnyDigital isn't my name - it's my online nick. For two, there are a bunch of sites out there that are neither for a person or an organisation... what are they supposed to use?

The domain name system kinda sucks... still, at least .net domains are only a dollar apiece, if the seventy spam per week my Hotmail address gets are anything to go by... ;)

The school only has one domain name, rathmoregrammarschool.org.uk. Instead of buying domains from its students, they've simply threatened to expel anyone who registers a domain with the school's name in its domain - despite the fact that a search on Whois.org reveals 75 sites including the name Rathmore. A search on Google reveals four thousand pre-existing unrelated pages containing the name Rathmore, yet only 176 pages about the school itself.

It's not just domain names - a kid was threatened with expulsion after putting up a website named 'Rathmore Chat'. I've been personally threatened with expulsion after my website, on which I mentioned that I went to that school, contained a hidden link to a porn site as a joke.