Sam Davyson

There are more copies of the Bible than any other book. But it has been read by relatively few people in full. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible is a full version of the Bible with all the inconsistencies, and less well known teachings highlighted. This makes for excellent reading. Don’t worry, the good bits are marked out too, and it is suggested that maybe the Holy Book should be stripped down to these alone. The organisation of the website is such that you can view by each individual verse, or by topic instead. There are some great pages of contradicting quotes too.

To get a better idea regarding what it is all about, then you can read the excellent preface to the website. There is also a similar guide to the Quran. With once again everything that is somewhat perculiar pointed out.

I also found this superb Lego guide to the Bible.

The blog was down for most of the first half of November. A backup has been made on Blogger.com for if it ever happens again.

This is a new blog that calls for the saving of the Ask Jeeves character. Apparently Interactive Corp. (the new owners of Ask Jeeves) what to dump the butler figure.

The blog was created and is written by an ex-Jeeves worker who feels that dropping the Butler would be the worst move the company could take. In the extremely long posts he says “the butler commands loyalty” and claims that Ask.com has a user base that is quite seperate from the big name engines of Google and the like.

I find this all rather amusing after yesterday I got a visitor to my site (infact to this very blog) who had searched for “the worlds best mathematician” on Ask Jeeves. The second result was this post which does not provide the answer to the question at all. I think Ask Jeeves need to concentrate on their results and not their icon.

Search Engine Watch (my post) offers suggestions to changes to other engines logos.

Pie charts and bar graphs have been used to represent numbers for centuries. And they do a good job at it. But wouldn’t it be cooler if it was a bit jazzed up? Visitor Ville certainly thinks so. Instead of graphs and tables the site provides a program that shows your website as a city. In the city you see your visitors walking around as people moving from building to building (page to page). There are also buses that are decorated up with “Google” or “Yahoo!” which guide users to a building. In addition the program involves passports, taxis and (in the future) bicycles and other vehicles. It is rather like Sim City.

Overall this gives you quite an amazing representation of your sites traffic. And it updates in real time. So you can actually view your few visitors move around or even 3000 visitors if your popular. It is well and truly awesome.

Wait a second don’t you really like StatCounter (my post)? Yes I do. And I am not switching. Visitor Ville is glossy but expensive and fairly impractical. Rather than viewing stats on a website you have to be using the program so you’d only be able to get at the stats from one PC. Also there are very tight restrictions on the meagre free accounts. To add to that I don’t like the lack of organisation. The pages on your site are just scattered. It would be much better if directories in the site were reflected in roads and subdirectories were sidestreets. Finally the program is very slow to run on my computer and it is boring looking at an empty city.

Well, empty until you just drove in.

This is a truly excellent site that clears up a lot of nonsense about chain letters. Specifically it deals with chain emails that clutter your inbox as the are forwarded from one person to another.

Whether the email deals with the fortunes of a Nigerian or your driving licence this website gives the full lowdown on the messages. Including sample emails and discussions relating to the possible damage the continued forwarding will cause. The site also has a page about emails you may get about Hotmail Closure.

And after every article is one solid piece of advice: “Break this Chain!”

Ever wanted to add an actual feedback form to your site rather than just having an email address printed on the page? Well now you can, and for free. Form-Mail.com provides users with a mechanism for getting input placed in forms by users delivered straight to your inbox. It works with a remotely hosted server-side-script which shoves the info from the form into and email and sends it to you.

You have to be competent with HTML as you have to be able to create your own forms. You also have to have a link to Form-Mail on your feedback page. But this can be fairly discrete as it is with my feedback form. The final downside is that there are stirct usage limits. You can have a maximum of two forms with 50 submissions between them per month. If you need more than that you better host your own script (like I am testing here).

I have known about and used this site for months but somehow it escaped mention on this blog.

I said I would do a post about Search Engine Watch so now I will. Search Engine Watch is a very sensibly titled website. It watches Search Engines.

But that doesn’t mean that all of the staff spend day after day staring into the Google Homepage to make sure that nothing untoward happens, instead they provide excellent commentary and comment on all of thge latest search related news. They also often have the news before it is news giving you a preview of what is to come.

The site has news, a blog, forums and loads of other bits and bobs. It is seriously recommended if you want to know anything ever about search.

You can submit comments to the team and sometimes editor Danny Sulivan will even mention you in an article. Which is nice.

I have started a new Site Update Blog to deal with all (minor and major) updates to the website. Obviously key events may still make this blog.

I have managed to design a system by which the updates to different areas can be colour-coded by their link colours and post titles. This has been largely successful. The layout used is like for like with this one with a different (“site theme” – gray) colour scheme.

Posts will tend to be shorter and very frequent.

Update // Now that I have updated this blog to the WordPress software. I am thinking that I may remerge the two blogs. Maybe using a different style for the site related posts. We’ll see.

Today Opera made a big decision. They’re going ad-free, for free. Previously a subscription was required to remove the otherwise unremovable ad-banner from the interface. This has all gone. It is now 100% freeware for the desktop.

The obvious question is how this is going to work out cash-wise for Opera, given that they are mainly only a desktop browser company. Where is their money going to come from? Apparently if going ad-free can seriously up their percentage share on the browser market then deals with companies (like Google & Amazon in the search box) will still provide profits.

I started to use Opera when it became free for a day on it’s 10th Birthday. I think they were a little startled by the number of people that went in for the offer, and this helped to cause to permanent waiving of the fee.

On the one free day Asa Doltzer from the Firefox team said on his blog:

“Opera Software should do what the mainstream browsers, Firefox and IE, have done, and give away an ad-free version of the application — for free, 365 days a year, not just one.”

And now his request has been fulfilled.

Gmail changed Webmail forever when it launched over a year ago. With a proper 1 GB quota of storage, a good interface and subtle adverts it redefined what users who aren’t paying can expect from their email. The service was significantly better than the premium (paid) services being offered by rivals Yahoo! Mail and MSN Hotmail.

These rivals obviously needed to respond if they were going to maintain their user base. They were helped a bit because Gmail was not available on general release (only on an invitation basis) so these competitors had time to offer bonuses to keep their users. Hotmail announced 250 MB for everyone. Over 100 times its previous limit. After sometime (and several smaller increments) Yahoo! went up to 1 GB. Gmail immediately saw its service superiority being threatened and within a week Google announced unlimited storage for Gmail. Of course this is not really the case. Instead the quota is on a counter that is continually increasing. At the moment it is at 2.5+ GB.

But Gmail still lead the interface game. It was built for accessing mail, and not for viewing adverts as many people could easily mistake the design of Hotmail for. But it wasn’t just the adverts. Gmail was dynamic. It’s all written in JavaScript, making it feel much more like a Desktop application than a webpage. Rather the reloading a page to see a message, you call a JavaScript function. This is quicker and extremely smooth.

Yet Yahoo! and MSN are not about to give in. Both have recently announced brand new interfaces for their services and MSN will raise its storage to 2 GB when the new design is unleashed in a few months time. Both have opted for much more dynamic inboxes, with preview screens, keyboard shortcuts and drag-and-drop options. Unfortunately both are in testing and are not available to the general public.

The questions is: Will the new services be better than Gmail? And if they are better will I switch. Admittedly probably not. It is a hassle and Gmail is very, very good.

Perhaps the more interesting question is: What will Gmail do? And possibly most importantly when?

So you’ve seen the Parent Trap and you wonder if it is ever possible that something similar could ever happen in real life. Well thanks to a pair of twins, you can now find out. One of them is doing a psychological study on twins and whether people can notice the difference, and whether the twin can maintain pretence. For the practical study work she has swapped places with her sister. The results are extrodinarily entertaining. It is like a book where absolutely anything could happen. And it is free.

Through double insulated writing (email & then blogging by a friend) the secrecy of the twins is being maintained. Read the latest from them on their blog.

It is currently featured as a Blogger “Blog of Note”. And it is certainly noteworthy. Another particularly interesting blog is that of the DitchMonkey who is living without a house for 12 months.