Nate Koechley

Dotrush 2006 – Hurry, whatever.youwant@yahoo.com going fast.

Over the last few weeks, Yahoo! Mail has started offering a “dot” within your Yahoo ID. Instead of nate98317ab, you can now be firstname.lastname, or anything else containing a dot. I was triz_n, but now I’m nate.koechley. This new namespace offers many great names that have been grabbed long ago in the dot-less namespace. Here’s what the Yahoo Mail blog has to say about it:

Well, you’re in luck. We’ve just opened up new “dot” addresses to all Mail users. Now get an extra email address like stunt.racer@yahoo.com or poetry.stud@yahoo.com or whatever.youwant@yahoo.com. It’s absolutely free. Use it just as you would your primary address (which of course you can still use). To make things handy, even use one Inbox to send and receive messages to and from both addresses. But hurry, the good names are going fast!

Click here to claim your dot username.

Firefox Extension: X-Ray

Stuart Robertson makes good on one of his New Year’s Resolutions by creating and publishing his X-Ray extension for Firefox.

It’s a nifty little extension that uses CSS’s :before and :after pseudo-classes to expose the markup on a page without needing to view source. By seeing the markup in use on a page, in context, it’s easier to see what’s doing what, especially I imagine for non-webdevs.

As I suggested in the comments on his blog post, I’d use this even more if it allows me to X-Ray just a section of the page, in much the way “View Selected Source” lets me examine just a subset of the page’s source.

Ouch! Where did the Wow go?

In 2004, Google could do no wrong. I don’t have a Lexus/Nexus account, but I bet one would be hard-pressed to find any negative coverage about them in 2004. In 2005, they built on gmail, the quintessential-wow product, and rocked the industry with gmaps (in the process making Ajax one of the top memes of the year).

But throughout 2005, the negative press began to appear. There were many flareups over privacy and copyright (Print, Desktop Search, AdSense). Many products fizzled (Talk, Base), lost steam (Orkut), or didn’t do much of anything (personalized homepage, Froogle). And to many pundit’s dismay, they continued to move away from their core competencies and into seemingly *every* business around.

But today marks, for me, some of the most scathing words I’ve read about them. A sense of frustration and disappointment. Not that it’s the most egregious thing they’ve done, but CES and the Google Video launch (with DRM) seem to have backfired a bit. Take a look at the roundup of the press that Techdirt’s Mike offers in his “We Sat Around Waiting For Google Video And All We Got Was This?” post.

(For even more, look at the cluster around this topic on Memeorandum.)

Late Xmas Gift? 30-inch LCD!

Dell is to start offering a 30-inch widescreen digital flat-panel monitor tomorrow. If you didn’t get what you wanted for the holidays, or have a year-end bonus to spend, this might be what you’ve been looking for. It’s stats are pretty amazing, beating Apple’s Cinema Display in all categories (e.g.; resolution, response time, contrast ratio, etc).

Here’s the promo link for the Dell 30-inch widescreen LCD.

AllPeers Filesharing Extension for Firefox, a TechCrunch Review

Michael Arrington points to a forthcoming Firefox bittorrent extension called AllPeers for sharing files with your friends and family. Sounds pretty good, I could use a tool like this.

I signed up for the beta, and you can too via the link towards the end of his TechCrunch review.

wg:List – Best Web Development Articles of 2005

Alessandro Fulciniti reported his Top 20 Bookmarks of 2005 on the Web-Graphics blog. Some great stuff, in particular On having layout (a must-read for anybody trying to get CSS to work in browsers). If you’re doing web development or design, I recommend being familiar with all 20 of his list.