This is the second post I’ve written using Zemanta, a blogging tool that recommends content based on what you’re writing. I tried installing their Wordpress plugin and got glitches so I tried the browser extension and am very impressed… it recommends pictures, articles, and links in real time as you write your post. The articles and links seem reasonably intelligent, but need to get better to be truly valuable. The pictures are decent as well… I thought that the pic above was absolutely stunning, not very relevant, but stunning. Lol, I also thought it was funny how a Zemanta logo didn’t pop up. Regardless of the strength of the recommendations, its the UI of the tool that excites me and makes me want to use it again… you realize that all the hype about semantic web technologies is cool, but it’s always a great user experience that paves the way forward.

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Many of you may have noticed the widget in our sidebar that shows the most popular posts.  It was originally built by Alex King and has been a great plugin for our site.  Recently, we upgraded the Grape Thinking website, and one of the items we updated was this widget.  For our non-tech-savvy readers, please feel free to play around with the links, and I apologize for any tech speak.  If you are interested in using the widget for your own sit, The “cool” functionality we created was:

1. It’s a widget… this means you can easily place it in the sidebar of a wordpress blog.
2. It’s smarter !  Depending on what page you are looking at, it displays different posts that are relative to what you are reading.  To see this in action, click a tag, category, archive, or an author in the sidebar, and check out the most popular posts within that section.

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Google recently announced the release of a free safe browsing diagnostic tool. I have been frequently using this as a quick check tool on client’s websites in looking for possible penalties that could be hindering their search engine rankings.

Since it is a useful tool, I figured I would make it easy for you to test your site using Google’s safe browsing diagnostic tool by creating the simple form below. Read the rest of this entry »

Anybody that knows me, knows that I’m a huge supporter of Mozilla, especially Thunderbird. However, after 18 months of wishful thinking, I had to make a change this week; out with Mozilla (Thunderbird) and in with iGoogle and Gmail. I stuck with Thunderbird for a long time because of its unbelievable ease of use, consistency, and open source upgrades all driven by its non-profit culture. I also hoped that they would merge Firefox with Thunderbird and create the all in one application suite they’ve always talked about. Got so pumped up last year when they finally released the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird. However, waiting became too inefficient and switching to iGoogle/Gmail this week has been nothing short of a spiritual experience. Of course, I still use Firefox, but with the new Google setup, I don’t ever need to close the browser.

Here’s how my web worker life has transitioned:

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So I decided to do a quick search on google to find out how the results are panning out for todays primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

My search returned the following result.

I was behind a proxy for Canada.. but.. does this mean Canadians aren’t allow to look at the news?