Category Archives: Web/Tech

Great Tool for Bloggers, Emailers and People Building Pages on TheKnot.com

After a frustrating day trying to get looooooong MapQuest URLs to work in theknot.com’s web page builder interface, I discovered a great free service called TinyURL that shortens ridiculously long URLs.  If you you’ve ever tried to figure out how to email a really long URL without it getting cut off, this is your solution.

Enter a long URL to make tiny:

It made the difference in being able to create the page I really wanted to have, with all the information needed for our guests.   As I said, I can see TinyURL being great for emailing and blogging as well.

Fun With Hyperlinking

You gotta love the way that the Web works, especially the joy that is Wikipedia.

This afternoon at lunch I was doing my usual reading of comics online and The Comics Curmudgeon, when I read this post from Sunday.  In the discussion of the Curtis comic, a link to Omphalos theory was provided.  I had to follow it, since I had never heard of it, and felt… well…. stupid.

Turns out it is a pretty heavy duty theology theory that can be basically boiled down to the question of "did Adam and Eve have belly buttons or not?"  What really caught my eye was in the "See Also" section of the article however, which provided a link to an article on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which turns out to not be a reject from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but a brilliant and hilarious religious parody.

However, I am clearly a little late to the game (though probably still ahead of most people), since there is already a Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and, of course its own web site

The best part about this?  It lead me to a "scientific" report on Pirates vs. Ninjas.

New Ways To Track Your Favorite Bands

I’ve raved about TourFilter before, and now here comes two sites that helps to automate the process based on your iTunes library.  The first is SonicLiving, which take a more manual and web-based approach, where it automatically detects which artists are in your iTunes libraries and you can choose who you want to include. 

The other, slightly easier one to use is iConcertCal, which works as a plug-in to iTunes and creates a visualizer that isn’t a trippy visualizer at all, but a calendar with all your artists on it.

They are both better than Ticketmaster, which continually lets some of my favorite artists slip by while taking great pains to tell me about every Sesame Street on Ice that comes around…

Thought They Needed A Little Publicity

I hate to jump on a bandwagon of any sort, but even though I still don’t own an iPod, I have heard about the new iPhone, and as a loyal Treo user, I found myself drooling over the features shown on the new web site.  The Treo has one of the better interfaces out there, but there are plenty of times I wish it was better.  In typical Apple fashion, they have improved the interface to the point where it is like functional art.  If they make it available through the Verizon network I will be hard pressed to not want to get it instead of a new Treo. 

At the very least one would hope that it will have the same effect on cell phone and cell phone interface design that Macs have had on computer and operating system design: to become more intuitive, attractive, and functional.