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In case you haven’t noticed, i switched layouts. I loved my old one but it had a lot of bugs and i wanted to test out new Wordpress Widgets which my old layout didn’t support. I may switch back at some point if a new version is released tho. You may see some weirdness when visiting as I’ve been playing around with alot of new plugins and widgets lately.

Got my first Where’s George dollar from change at Dunkin Donuts. Entered it into the website and I was the first one with that serial number. Oh well, was hoping for a more well traveled one but still pretty cool none the less. Send him off today to continue his travels.

While rummaging through some files tonight i came across some old webpages of mine. Found some old personal pages, some stuff from work, incomplete sites i had started and even some old school linux pages, not sites, pages from as far back as 1998. While most are too embarrassing to show you, i thought I’d share two with you. One is my first �blog� before i even knew what a blog was and another is a Mac theme i made for Windows 98 when the original iMac’s were released.

My first blog

iTheme for Windows

Some links may still work while others are long gone. You’re milage may vary

Here are a few websites you probably don’t know about but should.

1) Digg - http://www.digg.com
“Digg is a technology news website that gives editorial control back to the community. Most technology websites allow users to suggest content by submitting links or stories to an editor. If the editor believes the story to be relevant to the masses, he or she moves the story to the homepage. With digg, users also submit links for review. But rather than allowing an editor to decide which links go on the homepage, the users do.”

Basically what these means is that users submit stories then users “digg” them. If a story is dug enough it gets moved from the digg area to the front page and into its category page. I find myself getting almost all my tech based news from digg these days. Whats nice is you will pick up some less “newsworthy” stories that you might miss on the big sites. At the very least, throw a LiveBookmark in Firefox of the frontpage news.

2) Audioscrobbler - http://www.audioscrobbler.com
“Audioscrobbler is a computer system that builds up a detailed profile of your musical taste. After installing an Audioscrobbler Plugin, your computer sends the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler Server. With this information, the Audioscrobbler server builds you a ‘Musical Profile’. Statistics from your Musical Profile are shown on your Audioscrobbler User Page, available for everyone to view.

There are lots of people using Audioscrobbler, but you probably won’t be interested in most of them. The Audioscrobbler Server calculates which people are most similar to you, based on shared musical taste, so you can take a look at what your peers are listening to.

With this information, Audioscrobbler is able to automatically generate suggestions for new songs/artists you might like. These suggestions are based on the same principles as Amazon’s “People who bought this also bought X,Y,Z”, but because the Audioscrobbler data is what people are actually listening to, the suggestions tend to make more sense than Amazon.

It’s not just pure statistics and recommendations, there are active forums, groups, weekly charts… The system is being worked on full time, and we plan to roll out many more exciting features. “

Audioscrobbler is a neat little opensource project. You install a plugin from there site into your favorite media player and from then every song you play is sent to audioscrobbler and compiles everything for you on your own user page. Such stuff as Recently Played, Top Artists and Top Tracks are all compiled for you. From these you are shown your Musical Neighbors which are other users that have similar musical tastes as you. There are forums for bands, topics, songs. Pretty cool to just see what your listening habits are.

3) Bloglines - http://www.bloglines.com
“Bloglines is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. With Bloglines, there is no software to download or install — simply register as a new user and you can instantly begin accessing your account any time, from any computer or mobile device. And it’s FREE!

Bloglines is a window to a whole new world of dynamic content that is being created and distributed over the new “live” web. You can make your own personalized news page tailored to your unique interests from our index of tens of millions of live internet content feeds, including articles, blogs, images and audio. And it’s FREE!

Bloglines shields you from the confusion of news feed standards — RSS, Atom, and others. Bloglines allows you to search for, read and share any updates from your favorite news feed or blog regardless of its authoring technology. And it’s FREE! “

Ok, chances are you have heard of bloglines but if your not using it, you should be. Get access to any and all RSS feed all in one fast easy and convenient way. All you do its either search for feeds or manually add your own, then you can log into your account and see when there are new items. You never miss a new article and never have to read an article you already read. There are multiply notifiers so you know the sec a few item is posted on your favorite webpage. One of the biggest features i use is there mobile page. If you visit the homepage with a mobile browser, you get a mobile version so you keep up with your news on the go. There are other features such as blogging and blogrolls too. Bloglines, live it, learn it, love it.