The non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation, creators of Wikipedia among other projects, is having a fund-raising drive. If you want to support this awesome web resource, you can get information on donating here. If you have a PayPal account, donating is point-and-click painless… so no excuses.
A9, Amazon’s search service, is hiring ‘Block View Drivers.’ These are the folks that drive around major cities talking street-level pictures of businesses for A9’s Yellow Page service. Here’s a bit of the job description:
While on the job, you will drive a specially equipped vehicle with GPS, a digital camera, and computer hardware/software to collect geo-referenced imagery. The ideal candidate will have experience with all of these technologies, and will be confident in his or her ability to troubleshoot any hardware and software problems that may arise.
For a little background on how they took these pictures, check out this.
Google recently purchased Keyhole, so I am sure they have something cooking along the same lines. For a ‘preview’ of what might be coming, check out Microsoft’s TerraServer. I’ve noticed that they have updated some of the urban landscape photos recently. Here’s a shot of the Baja Fresh location in Palo Alto, CA. How about a Double-Double from In-n-Out? Some trick stuff is coming…
I’ve been doing some revamping of the site this morning. I changed my CSS style sheet a bit to eliminate underlining of links. I found that the links were already distinctive enough, since they are a different color than normal text. A good site for learning CSS is W3School’s CSS site.
I’ve also been playing around with adding a favicon for the site. I thought that Photoshop would support .ico files, but no luck. Alternatively, I felt like this feels like a web ‘service’ — upload an image file, and get it back in .ico format. Indeed, such a service does exist here — very trick.
BTW, I found the favicon site using Yahoo! Search. For some reason, I was having no luck on Google/A9 (which is not to say that you couldn’t find it on Google, just that my query style was more efficient on Yahoo!). Lesson = using multiple search sites pays off.
Update: 2005_20_02
I changed the format for blockquote tags in my CSS file to:
.content blockquote {
line-height: 150%;
border: 0.5px solid #666666;
padding: 5px 15px 5px 15px;
background-color: #FFFFFF
}
This adds a box around the blockquoted text. I found this style here. I’m going to try this out for a while.
Update: 2005_20_02
I changed the css file for the sidebar background color to a light shade of gray to separate it from the main content window.
.sidebar {
padding: 15px;
background-color: #F3F3F3;
}
I changed the banner id’s: 1) background color in the css to C0C0C0, 2) reduced the banner height to 22px and 3) changed the padding to 5px.
And I removed the ‘blog description’ (i.e., <h2></h2>) from the Main templates.