I'm in this week's Free Pint Newsletter writing about my five favourite tipples. No, despite the 'pint' in the name, I don't mean mojito, rum'n'coke, frappé with Baileys, tequila or 'any fizzy lager will do', but my five favourite websites.
Frankly, upon realising that I wasn't going to be able to list any websites for downloading music, video, pr0n or cracked software, I was slightly stuck as to remember what else the interweb was for ;-)
In the end I opted to list sites that had been useful for me in the last couple of months, which meant the list centred a little bit around getting my MacBook set up and running with gorgeous free goodies. You can read why in the newsletter itself, but the five sites I nominated were:
That also meant that I didn't list loads of great and useful websites that I use all of the time, but that are like the 'background radiation' of my interwebs. So hat-tips are due to Google (and Gmail, Analytics, AdSense), Bloglines, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Times Online, Chipwrapper, Fancy A Pint, Wikipedia, IMDB, UK Nova, Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Amazon, LinkedIn, Expedia, Last Minute, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Outpost Gallifrey, Bytemark, Mycroft Project, Feedburner, Typepad, StumbleUpon etc etc etc...
A 'guest' review of the Miami Herald site
Whilst I was staying in Miami for the IA Summit, I couldn't help notice the building for the Miami Herald. It is near the waterfront on Bayside, and looms out at you as you cross the bridge from Miami Beach to 'Downtown'. So I thought, since I was a guest in their city, maybe they could do a guest spot in my newspaper website reviews. I had a quick look around the site to see what sort of online presence...
Looking at the 'new and improved' Telegraph news section
Last week The Telegraph launched the latest part of the re-vamp of their site. Ian Douglas posted a blog entry about it, making the point that it wasn't just about the design, but about changes at the back-end as well: "It’s much more efficient and easy to use, and the news team has been very pleased to get rid of the old system that was fiddly and demanded too much messing around with XML tags." Like The Guardian and the...
'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 2
A comment when I started my recent 'Newspaper Site Search Smackdown' series of posts prompted me to go and have a look at which British newspapers use sitemap.xml files. As it turned out, it was only the Daily Mail and The Scotsman which I noticed, although The Telegraph and The Mirror and Metro have them as well. It meant that I got to have a close look at the 404 error pages generated by the others. I thought it might...
'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 1
A comment when I started my recent 'Newspaper Site Search Smackdown' series of posts prompted me to go and have a look at which British newspapers use sitemap.xml files. As it turned out, it was only the Daily Mail and The Scotsman which did (well, and The Telegraph and The Mirror and Metro), which meant that I got to have a close look at the 404 error pages generated by the others. I thought it might be worth running through...
Wonderful Wifi at Walthamstow Central Library
The ratio of moaning and complaining to praise on this blog is always far too much of the former and not enough of the latter, so I thought I'd just write a few words in praise of the web services offered at Walthamstow Central Library by the London Borough of Waltham Forest. The heart of the library is a listed building. It was where, in the 1970s, I first started getting addicted to reading the Doctor Who Target books. The...
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About Martin Belam
I'm an internet consultant and writer, with 8 years experience in product management, information architecture, and user experience design for global brands like Sony, Vodafone and the BBC. I specialise in advising on search, widgets, online news publishing and bulk email delivery.
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email: martin.belam@currybet.net
tel: +44 (0) 7801 828718
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