Here's a good one about the power of simple text files:
As Danny O'Brien discovered during his research into effective organizational habits of geeks,
text is the simplest, most platform-independent, fastest-to-search format we have for storing information.
Right. It's 10:30 PM and about the right time to clean up my ToBlog list a bit.
Joel Spolsky has always been a PR wizard of a kind. His latest is a good example of how he manages to get attention to his company/product by (I assume) intentionally making provoking statements that get people talking. And here I am, giving Joel a couple of more click-throughs... My motivation is, of course, to draw some attention to exactly what Brad is saying in his blog entry--that Joel either doesn't know **** about XP or is knowingly seeking attention by throwing flamebaits at "the XP crowd."
Someone on my blogroll--or someone who's on the blogroll of someone who's on my blogroll--brought URL123.com to my attention. URL123 is a competing service for TinyURL.com, i.e. they generate you a short link that forwards to a longer URL making it easier to embed, for example, links to emails and so forth. Even though URL123.com seems to boast about having more features than TinyURL.com, I find the additional features rather irrelevant. What matters most is not that I can create "personalized short URLs" but that I remember where to get the service I want--the short URLs. An important factor is whether such a service can be integrated into the browser. URL123.com and TinyURL.com both offer a JavaScript link that you can import into your "personal toolbar", for example, and from thereon create the short URLs a bit easier. I just wonder how many services are losing customer because they do not have such integrations available? I mean, those JavaScript snippets are hardly rocket science...