I’m an avid StumbleUpon fan, user, time-waster, etc. In fact I often spend hours upon hours stumbling, rating, sorting through all the wonderful things the internet has to offer. I always filter out videos and I’ve started to aquire a huge annoyance for image-only stumbles. But I digress.
Here is my short list of interesting things I’ve stumbled lately. I don’t want to hear comments like “this has been around forever”, etc; I’m making this list more for myself to keep track of things, not to turn people on to things that I’m deeming “new” to the internet, when they are most likely not.
1. Aviary - (http://a.viary.com/) Suite of web-based creative apps - and there sure are a LOT of them. I’m looking forward to testing out the BETA and *hopefully* switching over when the time is right. I’m a huge fan of online apps and have completely given up MS Office in favor of Google docs. That’s just how I roll.
I’ve been reading thru the dev blog and the tools look like they perform great. They are cleverly named - Peacock, Eagle, Phoenix, Owl, Penguin, Pigeon, etc. Someone has a thing for birds. The site is beautiful as well. I’m excited about these apps.
2. Brave New Traveler / Matador Travel, etc - This is a whole host of online travel information & goodness. They look to be all separate sites/domains/etc rolled into one big community. Navigating it is slightly confusing but they do a good job keeping identical themes, etc. My huge passion for travel & information made me sign up and I haven’t had an appropriate amount of time to search around as much as I’d like. But for now, I like it. 
WANT!!! Collection #2 rocks. Awesome stuff.
4. 11 Places you should see on an around the world trip (yes please!)
I came across a really cool use of Wordpress today at the web site for Firefly Multimedia - one of the better uses of WP as a CMS, with some really great Flash elements also. I always like to acknowledge great sites that impress me, so great job Firefly!
Check it out…
..apparently. 
There’s a funny new tool “How Bad is Your Blog” that tells you exactly how crappy your blog is (determined by inbound links.) Unfortunately I have only 6 inbound links currently, so apparently I suck. A lot.
THIS much:
The plugin “Deepest Sender” by mozdev.org is a great tool to make blogging easier and faster! If you come across something on the net that you’d like to blog about, now you can just right click on the article, picture, whatever and hit “send to deepest sender” and the plugin will send the information directly to your blog editing page. You can then edit however you’d like and hit “post”. There’s no opening multiple windows, no logging in (it caches your login info after you download it. And you can have multiple blogs too and choose which to send it to) and it is just faster and easier to send things you come across to your blog.
Works only in Firefox though. Which you should be using anyway. And it works for virtually any blogging platform - LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.
StumbleUpon is a new find of mine for 2006 and I’ve enjoyed using it immensely. It is the ultimate boredom tool (preventing boredom, that is) and it’s easy to waste large amounts of time with it. It’s also good for inspiration and development ideas. There are some really great sites added to stumbleupon.
To use StumbleUpon, just go to their web site and register. You will be sent an email confirmation and instruction to download their browser toolbar. It’s very un-intrusive on your system and you don’t have to worry about it carrying spam, etc. You can edit your profile and choose the web site subjects you are interested in and various other things.
Anytime you are bored and want to surf random web sites, just hit the “Sumble!” button in your toolbar and a ramdomly selected web site will come up. You can contribute to the popularity (and traffic generation) for that web site by giving it either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (buttons also in the toolbar). You can also stumble on certain categories, keywords, etc. You can also add any sites that you think should be found, just by clicking a button.
All in all it’s a really great, fun tool, you should check it out.
I’m looking for an image gallery script that will create thumbnails and display larger image (possibly above the thumbnails, etc). The entire thing has to be scaleable to around 460px wide or under and still look functional and display about 4 images across.
I’ve been searching around on Hot Scripts, but I’m getting frustrated because I can’t find what I’m looking for.
If you know of one, please let me know. I suppose it can be Javascript or Flash - but I’d like to keep it as accessible as possible.
I own and run www.parthenontemple.com, and I’m finally starting to add more content to it this week.
I’m a huge ancient western history buff, and I’ve read about and studied Athens and the acropolis for years. My favorite structure obviously being the Parthenon.
When doing research last year, I realized there is a huge lack of central information on the temple. There are pieces here and there, and most of the sites are very old looking and hard to navigate. So I took it on to build an educational resource on the web for the Parthenon.
I update it little by little, but would like to start doing more to it. I actually get a substantial amount of traffic, but I realize that people probably always go elsewhere after a few minutes because I have very little content. I’ve integrated Amazon books on the Parthenon and I have google ads on about 1/2 of the pages. I just need more content.
So, just thinking out loud here, I’ve added 3 articles today (not uploaded yet) and I need to find a good PHP script for a photo gallery. Then I will add the pictures, arch. plans, drawings, etc that I’ve accumulated, and maybe I can keep some of the quality traffic I’m receiving.
After I’m finished with this one, I would love to expand and do a few more on Ancient Greece, possibly ancient Rome, Greek Mythology, maybe even ancient Egypt.
What a weird hobby huh? lol. I’m smiling and shaking my head.