greg.g blog

Tim Maly has some good advice about eliminating the amount of crap you post on all the social networks you are on. You know what I'm talking about. I don't need to hear about the great sandwich you ate for lunch on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Buzz, or whatever stupid new network you're dipping your toes in this week.

Post the best stuff you can manage, tailor it to each context and audience, and really work at increasing the level of signal to noise. Remember that a message that’s really appropriate for one service is probably garbage on another. Think of your friends. Think of yourself.

Seriously, the Internet isn't a dump truck and it's not a fucking echo chamber either, so stop treating it that way. Oh, and this goes double for posting your Foursquare crap on Twitter. Stop it. No one cares that you're the mayor of Subway.

I'm going on record as saying I hate the above image when it appears on sites that serve up primarily text based articles. I was trying to read an article on a well known print magazine's website and encountered this little obstacle of the "click through to read the rest of this article". Normally this would be fine if it appeared on the front page and the click through took you to the whole article, but no, this was from the permalink. To read the entire article you need to click through 7 pages. There is no technical reason for this other than the site is trying to collect more page views to increase their ad revenue. What's most annoying about it, other than the fact that they are greedy assholes, is that it prevents you from using a service like Read Later or Instapaper, which is exactly the kind of service I would normally use to read something this long. 

I haven't said much (publicly) regarding the whole flash vs. html5 debacle, but check out this example of html5 video by Jilian. Notice how fast the video loads? Now try to jump further ahead in the video; notice how it starts to buffer from that point instantly. You can even scale the video live to fullscreen, and resize it using the pinch-out features of a multi-touch trackpad.

My friend Kyle just launched his new webcomic, Lolable Comics. Kyle has a unique (and sometimes odd) sense of humor that I think people will enjoy and it shows in his work on Lolable Comics.

The site has some cool new features that I've never seen used by a webcomic before. You can rate each comic based on a five star scale, and then in the archives comics can be organized by your rating, so as to make it easier to find old comics that you really love.

I encourage you all to go check out the site.