Check it out: Relevant finally posted their redesigned web site. It took them six months longer than originally announced, but it’s up. I can certainly commiserate with a long and massive redesign project, though a six month delay seems pretty brutal. Let’s just hope it’s worth it.

It’s interesting to see what they include and what they don’t. They’ve got a podcast. They don’t have a blog (unless you count the blog-like Slices on the homepage, but with no comments and no permanent links, it’s hard to get the benefits of a blog out of that feature). I’d also be curious about their ad situation. They run banner ads, which seem like some of the least successful online ads. Text ads seem to be a lot more effective right now, or so the hype would have you believe.

Anyway, I’m always intrigued to see what they’re doing. Some of it’s cool, and some of it bewilders me.

This is probably a bit odd, but I thought it was funny. I was searching for “Shake the Sheets” on Amazon. It’s the latest release from Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, which I was linking to over at I Like Music.

The third search result struck me as a bit odd: Intercessory Prayer: How God Can Use Your Prayers to Move Heaven and Earth by Dutch Sheets

Wanna buy a Christian search engine? The bidding starts at $8,500 for Faithfound.com, a religious search engine with more than 90,000 categorized web sites. The site received 3,600 unique visitors in February.

So Relevant Magazine hyped their upcoming redesign, originally saying it would post March 1. Then March 15. Then April 1. They even had a fancy widget counting down the hours to the redesign.

Well, April 1 came and went (and the counter started over at 30 days), and today the old site is still up, the counter is gone, and no word on an update. The lesson? Never publicize a date for a launch unless you already have everything finished.

But interestingly enough, Steve Knight points to a supposed beta version of the new Relevant site. Nothing really works, but you can get an idea of what they might be trying to do.

Lest you think I’m obsessed with Relevant, let me just say that I’m curious about what they’re doing online. Relevant has done a lot of cool stuff, but I’ve never been entirely impressed with their site. I do check it out every day, but I rarely ever read their articles, and I’ve been amazed at their lack of blog-like functionality. They have some blog-like updates, but they don’t archive them well or offer the commenting/trackbacking features that make blogging so popular. The redesign has blogs in a few places, though I’m curious to see what that really means.

Back in the dark ages when I used a PC I turned to Firefox when Internet Explorer became too much of a pain. But since becoming a Mac user over a year ago I’ve been happily using the default Mac browser, Safari. I’ve been quite happy with it’s fluid motion and the pleasing way it displays web sites.

But lately I’ve noticed it running slowly. It happens when I’m running several tabs and/or windows: suddenly everything stops and the cursor turns into that little rainbow ball and spins for a while. After six or eight seconds it stops and I can do something again. It only slows Safari–every other program is fine–but it keeps me from being as productive as I could be in Safari.

This spinning rainbow finally got on my nerves in the past week or two and I decided to give Firefox a shot. So far I’m liking it.

Continue reading Firefox vs. Safari →

Here’s an interesting insight into the world of comment spam. Apparently I should take solace in the fact that it’s not personal, though the acrobatics to avoid the ethical and legal questions are amazing.

I’ve been especially annoyed at Spammers lately. Not just e-mail spam, but the irritating assortment of higher tech spam like content spam and referral spam. Since installing MTBlacklist sometime last year I’ve stopped over 18,000 content spams. That’s a lot jerks.

The other day I finally got sick of it and started moderating comments on entries older than 60 days. It doesn’t immediately stop the spam, but it does keep it from being posted on the site. I’ve also installed the nofollow plug in, which essentially makes comment spam ineffective. That doesn’t stop them though. Stupid spammers.

I’ve also been getting tons of referral spam. I don’t even know what it is, but there’s tons of it. Ain’t technology grand?

As the wonders of a Gmail invitation were extended to me (thanks Nick!), so I extend them to you. Anyone interested in getting their own Gmail account, let me know. I’ve got six invitations to share.

And if you’re wondering what the big deal is, Gmail is basically Google’s free, web-based e-mail offering. Only instead of some paltry 3 or 6 MB of space, you get 1000 MB. Yep, that’s 1 GB. They also have a nifty new way of handling and sorting e-mail, as well as a kick-butt spam filter. Even if you use a web-based account simply to sign up for stuff and protect your real e-mail address (like I do), Gmail is the way to go. Plus, since it’s new you have a much better chance of getting an address you like. Much better than kev_d_hendricks2004634@hotmail.com.

Speaking of excessive e-mail accounts, how many do all of you have? (different interations of the same account only count once, and if you have your own domain that only counts as one). I only have four five right now, which I think is an all-time low (MonkeyOuttaNowhere, ReALMagazine, Bethel, Gmail, and my ISP). Once upon a time I had a Hotmail and a Yahoo, but they’ve become green and crusty with spam long ago. I also had bgea.org and nps.gov e-mail addresses once upon a time.

OK, I understand what RSS is and the whole syndication deal. It sounds brilliant. Yet I don’t use it. I don’t know any of my friends who use it (at least they don’t talk about it much). But it still sounds brilliant. Every day, multiple times a day, I go through every blog in my list of bookmarks (30+ sites) looking for interesting tidbits. Every time at least 50% of those blogs haven’t been updated. Seems like I’m a prime candidate for a news reader.

So today I signed up with Bloglines, a web based news reader. For those of you who I’ve lost, basically it works like this. Most blogs publish a file that has their most recent updates in addition to the entries you read. A news reader takes this file and displays the newest updates to you. So you have the advantage of only having to see what’s new and updated. You don’t have to go the news, it comes to you.

So I signed up with that today and subscribed to most of the blogs I read. Yet it seems a bit weird. This blog, for example, only gave entries from last month, as if my blog had stopped publishing a news feed last month. I’m not sure if it’s just funky because it’s new and it needs to be whipped into shape or what. Several blogs were like that, not always giving me the newest posts. I know Bloglines only crawls sites at most once an hour, but I think it’d do better than once a month.

Anybody have any insights? Anybody use a news reader to keep on their favorite blogs? Anybody reading this blog in a news reader? Anybody know of a better newsreader than bloglines? Anybody know what I’m talking about? Anybody listening?

It’s amazing to me how difficult it is to track down my old high school friends compared to my college friends. I’ve been on this kick all weekend, but it’s just amazing how consistently true that statement is. Granted there’s certainly more distance between now and high school verses now and college, but I’d expect to have a least some success finding high school folks.

A simple Google search almost always pulls up something for my college friends that would allow me to track them down, if not their own personal web site or blog near the top of the results. That’s only true for one of my high school friends. Is it possible that not everyone in the world is as plugged in and as Internet-addicted as me and my college friends? Is it possible I’m somehow the techno-geekiest of all my high school friends? Or am I just that bad at searching Google and this is all a fluke? Or is that my college friends all have unique names while my high school friends tend to share names with lacrosse stars, actresses, and race car drivers?

What I find most depressing about this whole search is that every classmates/reunion/high school site I could find that allows alumni to connect charges you to get the most basic info. I realize they have to make a dime, but I can’t believe somehow hasn’t developed a totally free site that manages to subsist of ads. Or perhaps the basic info (e-mail address? hello?) is free and you can pay to get more. What’s with giving me their country, pets, and political leanings? Who cares? I would think some business-minded genius would make a free reunion site and rake in the advertising dough. It might not make as much as a fee-based site, but I have to believe it’d pay for itself and then some.

Sheesh.

On a stranger note, googling my dad brings up pigeon pages (photos of baby pigeons, a pigeon photo from 1975 and pigeon genetics).