July 14, 2004

Tibetan mandalas, drawn by fifth-graders — don't miss Nick's inspired description (via) #

The history of Tired.com (via) #

Julie Fidler's transcribed teen diaries from the 1970s — on my birthday, she watched Sonny & Cher's "Good Times" #

Jimmy Carter's diaries of daily minutiae — on my birthday, he watched Robert Altman's "Nashville" #

Why Is Antifreeze So Delicious? (via) #

July 13, 2004

Cassini, the open-source Sega Saturn emulator — new, powerful, and supports many commercial games #

Wizard of Oz world for Second Life — the game community is endlessly creative #

Blocking MT comment spam with mod_rewrite — spammers can spoof referers, but most probably don't #

Google Predictions — some great ideas here #

PHP 5.0.0 released (via) #

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention — use PHP and mod_rewrite to redirect hotlinks to a targeted page (via) #

BBC on Poly Play, the Cold War-era German arcade machine — it's one of the few legal MAME ROMs (via) #

S&M Barbie — where's the Submissive Ken doll? (via) #

Sony to unveil Playstation 2 (sic) next May — whoops (via) #

MT-Blacklist v2.0 coming soon — Jay entered it in the MovableType 3.0 plugin contest (via) #

Google acquires Picasa — their foray into the online photo management and storage market #

Sony shows wireless multiplayer, Talkman translation software — 16 person ad-hoc LAN play (via) #

Bitoogle, the BitTorrent search engine — public trackers aren't safe, but here you go (via) #

Flash: They Might Be Giants' "Experimental Film" — created by the Homestar Runner guys #

Video Game Breaks & Sound Effects Volumes 1 & 2 (via) #

July 12, 2004

Big list of MP3 musicblogs — use these links with Alf's MP3-to-M3U playlist bookmarklet #

Porno 8-Tracks — the audio companion to Custer's Revenge (via) #

Word Clock — clockbar that displays the time in plaintext (via) #

Passing Gmail's 1GB limit (via) #

All Music Guide redesign is live — oy vey, read my critique #

New All Music Guide Launches

Posted July 12, 2004 by Andy Baio

One of my favorite music-related websites is All Music Guide, the most comprehensive reference source for music online. (Think IMDB for music.)

So when I heard they were redesigning, I was excited to see if they’d fix my laundry list of complaints with the existing site: the inadequate search engine, their convoluted URL structure, inaccessible and confusing Javascript tricks (like showing/hiding biography text and blocking right-click URL copying), and the frequent server timeouts.

Their redesign launched moments ago. (~~The old site can still be viewed here.~~ It’s offline now.) They not only failed to fix any of my complaints, but they made it worse. Much worse.

Most frustrating, the site only displays properly in Internet Explorer. (In Firefox, Safari, IE Mac, and Opera, you get a big banner warning that the site is IE Windows-only.) Worse, display bugs make many features of the site unreadable and unuseable in other browsers. All tables are broken, like the search results, track listings and discographies. Some pages, like the New Releases, reposition content off the screen. I can’t tell what’s a hyperlink, because the cursor doesn’t change in anything except Internet Explorer. (July 15, 2004: Almost all of these rendering bugs have been resolved now.)

The problems aren’t limited to display bugs. The URLs are worse than before, now so long that they can’t be sent by e-mail. Biographies, discographies and album reviews are no longer a single page, so you’re forced to click through to multiple pages to view the content you want. And the site’s slower than ever, and I’m periodically getting server timeouts and connection delay error messages. (Oh, and the spinning Flash navigation is a waste of space.)

What a disappointment. As an early beta tester, I sent them a long e-mail outlining my new complaints. Let’s hope they listen. Does anyone know anyone on staff at AMG? I’d love to ask their web guys a few questions.

July 13, 2004: One commenter recommends using MP3.com, which licenses a near-complete database of AMG’s content. The only problems are the missing band member and “worked with” information, individual musician/producer/contributor profiles, genre information, AMG’s Editor Picks, browsing by genre or mood, and a few other features. For most daily usage, it’s a good drop-in replacement for Allmusic.com.

July 13, 2004:: AMG responds! An AMG employee e-mailed me their response to the criticism.

National Lampoon's "Emergency Fathering" — from June 1979 (via) #

Gawker Media traffic stats — Fleshbot is doing very well (via) #

Insane comic book collection for sale on eBay — Superman #1, Batman #1, and almost every Silver Age comic ever published (via) #

Michael Moore publishing his sources for Fahrenheit 9/11 — I'm sure that will satisfy all his critics (via) #

Delaware stoner gets lost in Connecticut — Dreamworks to option the movie rights (via) #

Profile of Williams Street and the success of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim (via) #

The Man with the Head of Saturn — "worst. transportation device. ever." #

Playstation 3, new Nintendo set to debut at E3 2005 — related: Xbox 2 may be announced in September (via) #

Everything I Learned at MIT — insane course notes from four years of study (via) #

Flipped off by the President — the photo isn't very clear, but it's a good story (via) #

NYT's amazing profile on the modern graphic novel — with audio commentary by Spiegelman, Seth, Sacco, Chester Brown, and Chris Ware (via) #

Wired on Friendster's "Anchorman" campaign — with a quote from yours truly #

July 10, 2004

Nintendo Breakz, Volume 1 — 40 short remixes of original Nintendo soundtracks (via) #

Gwyneth Paltrow's spotted back — ancient Chinese hickeys (via) #

Googlebot indexing unlinked URLs — like about, contact, and stats? #

Mozilla gains on Internet Explorer's market share — 1% ain't much, but it's something (via) #

Pocketster, turn your iPod into a wireless file-swapping jukebox — requires a PDA with a host USB port (via) #

Homebrew Game & Watch-style games — for the new PDRoms competition #

July 9, 2004

Oddpost bought by Yahoo — Yahoo responds to Google's Gmail (via) #

Google Pagerank plugin for Firefox — unlike PRGoogleBar, doesn't rely on an outside server #

Post to Del.icio.us from Sharpreader — Ilya wrote this in about an hour #

Video: Riordan's "Stupid Dirty Girl" video — it sounds worse in print than in person (via) #

Underbunny, amazing photos by a Seattle mortuary worker — upsetting, absorbing, and more #