I ended up taking last Thursday and Friday off to go camping and 4-wheeling, I should be posting about that pretty soon, but I realized yesterday that I missed my weekly link post.

Not having the routine made it easy to forget. Sorry about that.

This week, I’m getting spun up to step into my role of Tiger Cub Den Leader for my Son’s Cub Scout Pack, so time may be a little short this week.

I really enjoyed doing the "A Year Ago" post. It let me what I was doing back then, and it highlighted how different things are this year. Of course, I can’t believe that all of that stuff was a year ago, it seems like only months.

1 Year Ago

On the personal side of things, I was having some trouble with the brakes on my CJ-7, and learned a valuable lesson in the process.

I also found a website that let’s you know where you’re favorite sites are hosted, as well as one to let you know who else is hosted on your shared hosting server.

I was also getting ready to switch my blog from the port16.com root to port16.com/blog. Something I wish I had done in the first place, but I was glad that I ended up doing it pretty early on.

I hope everyone has had a good weekend, I know I did.

Posted in WebServices, 1YearAgo, How To, Jeeps, Hosting, CJ-7, WebSites No Comments »

NORAD Tracks Santa (North American Air Defense Command) - In 1955 Sears in Colorado Springs ran an advertisement for a special hotline that kids could call to track where Santa Claus is. In a strange twist, they misprinted the phone number, and the misprinted number turned out to be the Commander in Chief’s operations hotline for NORAD (at the time it was known as CONAD). Read the full story here. NORAD has been using their sophisticated mistle Missile tracking equipment to track Santa ever since. This year NORAD is using Google Maps, and you can even track Santa using Google Earth in 3d.

Google Earth’s Santa Tracker Page - The Google side of the NORAD / Google partnership. Evidently, Santa wants Google to implement naughty and nice data layers into Google earth.

Santa’s GPS - A Downloadable Application for Windows, written by Santa’s Elves to avoid all of those pesky Internet bottlenecks.

If you’re going to be up all night, these will give you a good idea of when you should jump into bed. You know Santa won’t come if your awake, right?

Posted in Christmas, WebServices, WebSites 3 Comments »

One of the really neat things about the Internet is how much data is available right at your fingertips. Zip Skinny takes some of this data, and shows you some demographic information for your neck of the woods.

You enter your zip code (hence the name), and shows you some basic information about your zip code, compared to your state average and the national average.

The basics include Education Level, Marital Status, Income levels, and Occupation, all represented with a graph like the one pictured here.

The statistics are compared with zip codes close by, and clicking on them drills down even farther.

The data is based on Census data, and of course may be a little out of date. You can also see some of the top zip codes for various population attributes, such as population density, median age youngest or oldest.

It’s really neat to see how your zip code stacks up compared to the national average, as well as some of your other neighbors. You should check Zip Skinny out.

Posted in WebServices, Web Tools, WebSites, Distractions No Comments »

This week I made some minor changes to the blog, expanding that right sidebar so that I could fit the Blog Rush Widget on it. I also re-arranged some ads and the other widgets. Visually it wasn’t much of a change.

I’m not sure what happened, but this week I joined a whole slew of web services. Jango, Last.FM, Rescue Time, and Clicky Stats.

Of course, WordPress 2.3 comes out today, so that should eat up a little of my posting time this week.

The Mumbler has been on me to start using tags, and ultimate tag warrior, but I have resisted. I guess one of the big features in WordPress 2.3 is tag support. Although it will require a theme update to support it. I seem to find that sites view my categories as tags, so I’m not terribly excited about that feature.

We’ve started having some cooler weather lately, which reminds me that Winter is coming up. Time to get my Jeeps Winterized, and get my house ready. I’ve heard that during the Summer, there is a slump in blog readers, so I’m curious to see what happens in the next couple of months when it comes to my readers.

Posted in WebServices, Updates, Web Tools, WebSites, WordPress, Themes 4 Comments »

Well, Art has been going a little crazy with his blog, but it looks like he’s finally done. While he was gone on vacation, his router at home decided it was going on vacation too. Which made all of his web sites inaccessible.

What’s worse is that the web sites didn’t know this, and they just thought no one was visiting. Their anxiety over this caused many long term effects. Don’t worry, Art arranged therapy for them, went out and put a new theme on them, and everyone is feeling much better now. I think the final product is very nice indeed.

Unfortunately, I don’t see my beloved tag cloud.

Speaking of tag clouds, I noticed it when first launched, but Phil placed the new  Amazon “Product Cloud” over on Tech Fires. Amazon introduced a number of new widgets recently, and the product cloud is one of them. Of course, you have to be an affiliate, Amazon uses the term associate, to use them.

If you are an affiliate, you should check them out though, some of them look pretty neat. I joined Amazon just so I could recommend books when I write about them, but these new widgets are so snazzy that I may just have to put one up.

Of course, adding widgets isn’t the only thing that Phil has been doing, Scott from My Thermos has joined him in writing his “Rapid Fire Reviews of Hot Technology. Between the two of them, they did 23 posts just in the past 5 weekdays. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering they both have their own blogs, and hold down day jobs.

Hooray! It looks like Pearl is back to her regular posting habits over at Interesting Observations. I didn’t realize it, but it was the Smiley faces anniversary Monday. At least the emoticon smiley face.

Personally, I have been pretty busy this week, so I haven’t had that much time to read my RSS feeds, and less time to leave comments. To make matters worse, Scott sent me an invite to Jango, which is pretty cool. He also sent me an invite to Rescue Time, which has been pretty stable. Once I have more time to play with them, I’ll write something up.

Posted in Affiliate, Random, WebServices, widgets, WebSites, Add-Ons, LinkLove 38 Comments »