Best of Feeds – 45 links – programming, blogging, humor, blogs, geek, tips

Best of Feeds is a regular series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted as asides daily at 7pm EST and then collected together in a single post once a week (usually Saturday).

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This time I have 45 links from: anecdota, blog.guykawasaki, blog.labnotes, blog.washingtonpost, canonical, codinghorror, destraynor, devinreams, dilbertblog.typepad, drivl, emacs, engtech, gapingvoid, informit, labnol.blogspot, mega64, meiert, meta.wikimedia, mikeomatic, nbrightside, neomeme, nytimes, orble, poignantguide, problogger, radar.oreilly, removingalldoubt, ricksegal.typepad, sethgodin.typepad, stevepavlina, thelocal.se, themulife, torrentfreak, typies.blogspot, violentacres, webomatica, wordyard, youtube

• Typies: 15 tips to choose a good text type (typies.blogspot.com, 1264 saves)
  • (typography, design, fonts, tips, font)
  • From the article: “How to choose correct text typography design in different cases. Legibility is as important as the character of the type.”
• 7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output (stevepavlina.com, 518 saves)
  • (creativity, productivity, motivation, lifehacks, flow, howto, learning, psychology, programming, inspiration)
  • From the article: “How to enter this highly creative flow state, the state where you lose all sense of time, your ego vanishes, and you become one with the task in front of you. Is this peak creative state a rare chance event, or can it be achieved consistently?”
• The Tao Of Programming (canonical.org, 486 saves)
  • (programming, humor, tao, philosophy, geek, humour, code, coding)
  • From the article: ” When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.”
• Mega64 (mega64.com, 238 saves)
  • (video, humor, games, videogames, funny, gaming, geek, geeks, humour)
  • Live action skits based on popular video games.
• LinkedIn Profile Extreme MakeoverLinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover (blog.guykawasaki.com, 220 saves)
  • (linkedin, networking, profile, business, career, management, tips)
  • My profile is in the 99.99th percentile of profiles viewed. She insisted that I should make it good–or at least suck less. So I enlisted her and LinkedIn’s designer to do an –extreme makeover– of my profile. This is what was wrong with my original pro
• Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (poignantguide.net, 125 saves)
  • (ruby, programming, tutorial, software, funny, comic, computer, developer, humour, tutorials, learning, manual, reference, documentation)
  • A “how to learn out to program in Ruby” book done with comic strips and lots of humour. This is how documentation should be written.
• Fatherly Advice to New Programmers (removingalldoubt.com, 102 saves)
  • (programming, productivity, methodology, learning, howto, career, tutorials, software, advice, tips, development)
  • From the article: “Truly excellent: If you are newly embarking on the journey that is becoming a programmer, here is advice your father would tell you if he was a programmer. These are things I had to learn the hard way.”
• Web design: 15 important research findings you should know (meiert.com, 86 saves)
  • (webdesign, blogs, css, design, accessibility, usability)
  • From the article: “Small selection of web design, usability, and accessibility related results of research, most of them derived from Human Factors International.”
• random notes on blogging (gapingvoid.com, 75 saves)
  • (blogging, marketing, business, blogs, networking)
  • hugh macleod of gapingvoid throws out some tips about blogging. Some good.
• Web4 (sethgodin.typepad.com, 72 saves)
  • (web4, future, web, sethgodin, social, trends)
  • Going beyond the semantic web to the future of real interactive agents that allow collaboration.
• Why Johnny Can’t Program – teaching coding to kids (radar.oreilly.com, 67 saves)
  • (programming, education, kids, oreilly, lego, mindstorms, school, learning, teaching, technology)
  • From the article: ” Kids that age can type, they can use the web, they open and close windows, but saving and switching windows and remembering the #! incarnation and … all that crap gets in the way of teaching programming.”
• minor emacs wizardry (emacs.wordpress.com, 51 saves)
  • (editor, editors, Emacs, geek, programming, lisp, blog)
  • A wordpress.com blog devoted to emacs tips and tricks. Good resource for those of us who spend 10 hours a day inside emacs.
• Love, Shame, and the Human Pecking Order (violentacres.com, 51 saves)
  • (nerd, geek, dork, women)
  • Violent Acres explains why young women want attention from all men, not just the ones they are interested in.
• A Peaceful Marriage is Not Always 50/50 (violentacres.com, 42 saves)
  • (marriage, life, advice, relationships, communication, stories)
  • From the article: “Our marriage is not a 50/50 split like I first envisioned it. But there is definitely less bitching, nagging, and fighting. No one is a victim and no one is a martyr.”
• Understanding The Rules of Great Content (problogger.net, 24 saves)
  • (problogger, blogging)
  • From the article: “1% create content, 9% enrich content, 90% consume content. You can’t always be in the top 1% but try to be in the top 10%.”
• Bandwidth spikes (anecdota.org, 16 saves)
  • (digg, slashdot, traffic, bandwidth, stumbleupon, fark, socialsoftware)
  • True accounts of bloggers/webadmins getting traffic spikes from social media sites.
• Orble (orble.com, 15 saves)
  • (digg, socialsoftware, clone)
  • Social bookmarking site specifically aimed at bloggers.
• If You Don’t Have the Balls to be Hated, Then You Don’t Deserve to be Loved (violentacres.com, 14 saves)
  • (blog, writing, advice, blogging, blogs, essay)
  • From the article: “When you spend your life ‘me too-ing’ your peers, you cease to become an individual with your own thoughts and feelings and turn into a mirror in some asshole’s pocket. When you continually censor yourselves the end result is that people quit reading what”
• Its Called WordPress (devinreams.com, 13 saves)
  • (wordpress, video, music)
  • WordPress fan song + video.
• Users don’t care about you (codinghorror.com, 11 saves)
  • (blog, blogging, usability, writing, audience)
  • From the article: “Users just aren’t that into you. It’s not personal. It’s business. Unless what you’re writing .. * solves their problem * provides useful information * entertains them * makes them feel like they rule .. it’s irrational to expect users to care about it.”
• How to Reduce RSS Stress In Your Online Life (labnol.blogspot.com, 10 saves)
  • (rss, tips)
  • From the article: ” Do you subscribe to tons of RSS feeds ? Are there hundreds of unread items in your newsreader ? Do you end up spending more time inside the RSS reader than you would want to ?”
• Possible Locations for the New The Pirate Bay HQ (torrentfreak.com, 10 saves)
  • (micronation, thepiratebay, bittorrent)
  • Popular illegal filesharing site the Pirate Bay is looking to buy it’s own micronation.
• Shhhh – The Promise Not To Tell (ricksegal.typepad.com, 7 saves)
  • (VC, startups, innovation)
  • From the article: “Never say anything confidential in the first meeting with a Venture Capitalist. . The first meeting should be treated as an introduction.”
• Does Blog Design Matter in an Age of Feed Readers? (problogger.net, 7 saves)
  • (blog, blogs, problogger, design, rss, subscription)
  • From the article: “Why do you emphasize blog design? After all, many users follow blogs via news readers. Is it known what fraction of users use a news reader as opposed to regularly accessing blog sites?”
• Digg.com’s Lesser Known RSS Features (themulife.com, 7 saves)
  • (digg, rss)
  • From the article: “This article covers the use of RSS on Digg and how you can use it to monitor submissions from your website to Digg.com. — and to get email updates on interesting tops.”
• Baffled by Romance (dilbertblog.typepad.com, 5 saves)
  • (romance, relationships)
  • From the article: ” –Set the bar low. Otherwise, you have no chance.– Romance, I’m told, is the delta between your selfish asshole baseline and the occasional deviations from that baseline.”
• Do Away With HTML Based E-mail (blog.washingtonpost.com, 4 saves)
  • (email, spam, phishing, html)
  • From the article: “Viewing your e-mail in anything other than plain text mode is asking for trouble on a Windows computer.”
• Lessons from MySpace: Success is a bug (wordyard.com, 4 saves)
  • (myspace, web2.0)
  • From the article: “Your site’s massive success gets treated as a bug by your server; and the feature your users love best is something your programmers forgot to block.”
• The Programming Gender Gap (mikeomatic.net, 3 saves)
  • (programming, gender)
  • Mike deconstructs the reason why there are less women then men in high tech and suggests it might not be such a bad thing.
• Win Free WordPress.com Upgrade Credits (engtech.wordpress.com, 3 saves)
  • (contests, wordpress, wordpress.com, freeware)
  • From the article: “This is a test of the del.icio.us daily post feature.”
• Blog = Dog? (webomatica.com, 3 saves)
  • (blogging, funny, humor)
  • Is having a blog like having a dog? Webomatica chimes in.
• The Local – The Local’s Blog — Blog Archive — The humour of IKEA (thelocal.se, 2 saves)
  • (sweden, ikea, commercial, funny, video)
  • NSFW, several European commercials.
• Crediting Sources of Stories – Do You Do it? (problogger.net, 2 saves)
  • (blogs, blogging, credit)
  • From the article: “The actual content had been re-written in their own words but the bones of their posts were very similar to mine and this was happening on a daily basis. In fact it was very obvious that they were using my own posts as a basis for theirs – however there w”
• Wikipedia is an MMORPG (meta.wikimedia.org, 2 saves)
  • (humor, wiki, mmorpg, games, gamers)
  • From the article: “One theory that explains the addictive quality of Wikipedia and its tendency to produce Wikipediholics is that Wikipedia is essentially a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). After all, the ‘Pedia shares many characteristics with MMORP”
• Code 2 HTML web app (destraynor.com, 1 saves)
  • (code, html, programming, web)
  • Cut and paste a code sample into a text box and get HTML out.
• Dirty Tricks to get Dugg (neomeme.wordpress.com, 1 saves)
  • (digg, socialengineering, socialsoftware)
  • From the article: “Neomeme gives his tips on how to a post to the front page of digg and socially engineer the site.”
• two one-way tickets to Dublin, please (nbrightside.com, 1 saves)
  • (humor, flying, booking)
  • From the article: “I had something similar happen to me once where my return flight was a July 25th instead of June 25th. Uh, I wasn’t planning on staying a month.”
• How to Make an Angry Peasant (drivl.com, 1 saves)
  • (humor, geek, medieval, peasant)
  • From the article: “Matt shows the world how to properly cook up an angry, desperate, loathing, starved, and utterly hopeless peasant. Makes 1 serving.”
• Ship or Shut Up (destraynor.com, 1 saves)
  • (technology, tech, shipping, startups)
  • Des explains why you shouldn’t promote vaporware and how letting customers drive feature development ensures failure. With pictures.
• Debunking ‘Why do people submit their stories on digg?’ (themulife.com, 1 saves)
  • (digg, submit, socialsoftware, traffic, blog)
  • From the article: “1. Sharing a story 2. Ad revenue 3. Blog traffic 4. Popularity 5. Achieving something 6. Advertising a product”
• Find Your Identity: How to Design a Logo That Suits Your Business > What Makes a Good Logo? (informit.com, 0 saves)
  • (design, logo, tips, graphics, howto)
  • From the article: “A successful logo can’t be just creative or clever. Because a logo ends up being an important guest at many occasions, it absolutely must perform and behave well no matter what.”
• If It’s Not in Google, Does Your Website Really Exist? (codinghorror.com, 0 saves)
  • (google, seo, traffic)
  • From the article: “But what happens when the start page for the internet– the source of more than 70 percent of your traffic– decides it will no longer index your web site?”
• Some Bling for Your Blog (nytimes.com, 0 saves)
  • (blogs, blogging, widgets)
  • NYT writes about blogs and widgets. Facts are a bit dicey, I really doubt Fred Wilson has one of the largest collections of web widgets out there.
• YouTube – Heart failure from being sad? Get “Kitten” (youtube.com, 0 saves)
  • (video, youtube)
  • From the article: “I’d go to the doctor more often if this was real. (video clip from Scrubs — may go down because of copyright violation)”
• Solid State Disk Changes The Game (blog.labnotes.org, 0 saves)
  • (gadgets, ces, solidstate, ssd, sandisk, harddrives)
  • From the article: “Solid State Disks (SSD) don’t mind when your notebook loses balance and hits the floor. But even better, they eat up less battery when running, and can quickly suspend to disk instead of suspending to RAM. So what do you do with all this new found batte”

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