onfocus

"I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year." Great idea, a physical copy of your Pinboard/Delicious links.

"After using all the UI richness available for such a long time to make beautiful and differentiated products, app designers have realized that the user's work, not their own, is the star of the show."

I'm talking weblogs with a few other old fogey edge cases.

Interesting method for storing scroll position in window.name so it can be set via the back button.

lia put together this record of a Twitter conversation about the current state of Flickr and photo-sharing in general. Depressing: "...nobody cares about lasting value anymore. it's all about what's going on right this second."

Sharing music one track at a time. This is a fun site.

This app is a good replacement for the cumbersome iTunes podcast manager. It downloads podcasts directly, no syncing required.

Handy tool for cleaning up data in a CSV file or spreadsheet. Tasks like removing columns are a bit tedious, but GREL is an interesting way to transform data.

A list of companies that have become successful without VC funding.

Excellent thoughts on community moderation. "This is why community moderators have real power; they need that power to intervene, educate, and refocus the community's exuberance on more substantive content. People will fight you almost literally to the death over their right to be entertained, and to entertain others."

Hilarious gallery of terrifying horse mask pictures contributed by Amazon users. [via mlkshk]

Handy query to get a quick inventory of a database.

Everyday Carry. Pictures of what people carry in their pockets. [via torrez]

I agree that cutesy error messages are irritating. I'd rather see a more serious "we're on it" notice.

Great collection of miscellaneous tech tips. I have a bunch of these in a text file too. I should make them public like this.

"So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform."

Russ Cox explains how the retired Google Code Search used to work. It includes links to a similar project you can install locally to search code using the same method.

Great talk from Clay Shirky that tells some of the history behind SOPA and why it's dangerous. "They [media companies] want us all back on the couch: just consume."