Kevin Smith

Shouts & Hollers is an online "ezine" of sorts that is published by Charleston, WV, area bloggers.  Bill Gardner got in contact with me to answer a few questions regarding a recent sideproject of mine.  Read it here.

Thanks Bill!

Via http://www.polyp.org.uk

My roommate lives off Chinese takeout and McDonalds.  Here's a menu with an amusing typo.

Going home for the first time in a while this weekend.  Happy Birthday, Dad!

Discovered this via StumbleUpon but the site quit working when I sent it to a friend.  Too much traffic from SU, I'm guessing.

I had thought it was impossible until now:
Here's a screenshot of the ad taken directly from the adwords panel:

And here's a screenshot of the ad showing up in my adsense:

So just to be sure someone hadn't magically used the exact same wording and punctuation as me, I click on my own ad (and another thing: I know google doesn't count your own clicks but do they penalize you?  I'm often curious about where the ads on my site link to but don't want to click and risk google penalizing me somehow) and it takes me to my own site!  WTF?  Doesn't really bother me but this totally shouldn't be happening.

For the past several months, www.KevinSmithDesigns.com forwarded to /blog (where you are now).  I decided to change that and turn the root directory into a sort of a one-stop resource for everything me.  It's just something quick that I threw together just to get the information out there.  So, check it out; if I'm on any of the social sites you are, follow me/friend me/add me/etc.  :)

I recently downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 5 (the supposed last stage of beta for the new browser) and, after a few hours of usage, decided to note a few things about it.  I'm no professional developer or anything; I'm just sharing my opinion on things.

What I'm Sure I Like:
GMail is much faster.

The Applications tab in Options.  Makes me happy.

The new Page Info options.
The new Malware Protection.  ThumbsUp!

Multiple text selects via the control key.

The new download manager.  It's clean and you can pause/resume downloads efficiently...awesome.

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What I'm Sure I Don't Like:
Folder menus seem to lag quite heavily sometimes.  This might have been my computer having a blonde moment, though.
Only one of my extensions for FF2 had an upgrade...but this has nothing to do with Firefox..I just don't like it lol.

The default theme's back-forward navigation buttons -- They're soooo close together I found myself repeatedly hitting back instead of forward (and forward instead of back).  Eventually, I went to Backspace and Shift+Backspace.

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What I'm Unsure About:
Smart Bookmarks -- While it's a nice idea, put most used bookmarks and recently visited sites in a folder on the quick links bar totally eliminates the usefullness for me.  I have most most visited sites on my quicklinks bar already.  And if they would have left the recently visited/address bar alone, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place.  Which leads me to my next point:

The new recently visited dropdown address bar

Tabscrolling forward and reverse.  It just doesn't seem efficient to me.

Bookmark tagging (just like del.icio.us and other services) -- Good idea for webservices but I'd rather stick to the basics with my applications.

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What I'm Indifferent About:

The hyped "One-Click Site Info!" -- this was available before (with two clicks) and really doesn't have that much of an impact on me.

I'm upgrading wordpress so things might be hairy for a few hours..

Just upgraded from wordpress 2.3 to 2.5 -- the admin area has a few changes.  The biggest change is the style and placement of everything.  I like it and will adjust quickly but I really wish I could move my category selection box to the side nav again...I hate having it at the bottom.  Other than that, I'm pleased...I really like the new autoupdate feature for plugins (is this new or have I overlooked it for this long?)...

I started on this last night around 10pm and had the basic code finished around midnight. It's fairly simple (and yes, another Twitter application): a user goes to www.SecretTweet.com and types in a secret. Their secret "tweet" is then published to @secrettweet. It's kind of like postsectret but for Twitter. I might add some features to it in the future...it all depends on the popularity.

I want to keep this as free as possibly from my other online activities; therefor, I have created a tumblr account that will host all of my twitter updates, all of my photoblog updates, all of my del.icio.us bookmarks, all of my youtube videos (rare), and all of the posts to this blog in one single place. It's very simple and rather unorganized....it gets the job done, though.

mozunk.tumblr.com