Robert Denton - web strategist and designer

freesound :: home page
Interesting free sound project. Snips, snaps, samples, cracks, pops… not songs — for effect.

Bowdoin College
Google, why can’t you include Bowdoin College in your index sooner?
We had an incident whereby you deleted our entire site from your index… there was no way to cancel the operation. The remove URL function is not super friendly.
We bought a Google Mini to rectify the lack of internal search engine (we were using [...]

Ning is a free online service (yeah but if it’s a service how’ll it remain free?) allowing one to easily build and use social applications.
What is social software?
It tends to be a web application enabling one to post content, e.g., photos, bookmarks, reviews, and easily match, transact, or communicate with other people. The matching/transacting/communicating [...]

This is the Adobe Help Center window (another “product annoyance” is that Adobe ships with an Opera installation rather than use IE & WebKit). I searched for “corner radius” because I thought the only way to change the radius of a corner on a box was to option-click with the tool and use the dialog.
I [...]

TimesSelect: Overview
Don’t forget to mark your calendars — September 19th is when the New York Times closes its doors on the web. Well, they are calling it “TimesSelect” which will be:

new service from The New York Times providing exclusive online access to Op-Ed columnists, The Archive, Web tools and more.
It was nice knowing you Mr. [...]

Gasoline Price History

Paul Graham on open source and blogging | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
This is a great recounting of what sounds like a fun keynote to listen to.
Here are some excerpts:

People work harder on things they like
The standard office is unproductive
Bottom-up works better than top-down

I hope this becomes an essay because there’s lots in it that’s [...]

Anything But iPod – About
With the iPod there are no decisions to make; you give up your right to choose. You are just another face in the crowd, with the same player and the same service. With other mp3 players you have the right to choose from several different services and with those services you [...]

Copyright Timeline
Since the Statute of Anne almost three hundred years ago, U.S. law has been revised to broaden the scope of copyright, to change the term of copyright protection, and to address new technologies. For several years, the U.S. has considered and acted on copyright reform. The Canadian government is considering copyright reform as well.
A [...]

With the impending lock down of content at the New York Times (editorial section will require a subscription starting in September) I thought it was a decent time to make note of this and speak an opinion or forecast what I believe will be the outcome.
Two thoughts: obsolescence and class.
The New York Times Gets Greedy, [...]

E Ink
In addition to its paper-thin package, a typical Ink-In-Motion display can animate continuously for up to 6 months using just two AA batteries. These displays are ideal for high-impact POP signs in retail environments where access to power outlets are often limited. In addition to long battery life, these displays can be [...]

My Way News
CNN.com will make its existing online video offerings available for free beginning June 20 as it prepares a new video package that will cost money to watch.
CNN is redesigning its home page to prominently feature the free video, which currently can be found by clicking on small links marked “video.”
Yeah so, they mention [...]

I haven’t really ever dug into the wordpress templates… mostly because it required time and wading through someone else’s script.
MovableType has a very good data dictionary of sorts and I’ve wrangled the tags and plug-ins beyond what they ought to be in some cases.
Wordpress seems delightful but it has always left me with a [...]

I had a message here about upgrading WP, broken templates, blah blah… Now I’ll provide pointers to other places:
ERD blog, DAM site, BaseCamp ERD Projects (nascent).
Cheers… until I get time my canned templates will remain broken and un-customized for this scratch pad.

Some recent spam attempts on this web site:
BuckHouston.com, party poker, texas hold-em, all you farkers can go back to farkerville where you came from…

139.184.48.55 – - [12/Apr/2005:05:24:22 -0400] “GET /blog/archives/2002/02/will.shtml HTTP/1.0″ 200 5224 “http://www.buckhouston.com/pacific-poker.html” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)”
146.191.34.92 – - [12/Apr/2005:05:47:57 -0400] “GET /netscape7divoutline.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 8037 “http://www.queryguild.com/party-poker.html” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; [...]