Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I’ve always thought about starting a user-moderated quotations site myself, but the market seemed too “niche” to front the development time. So it’s always nice to come across a nice quotes site, like http://www.onlinediscountmart.com/quotable-quotes.html. I’m not entirely sure who did their selection, but they have some great quotes. For example, on love:

“When love is not madness it is not love.” Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Now, this is classy stuff. I’ve actually read the original text this comes from–Calderón de la Barca’s epic play, La vida es sueño, written in 17th century Spanish.

They seem to have a lot of Christian/Inspirational/Bible quotes, so if you’re a hardcore leftist aetheist, the site might not be for you. However, their secular categories are sweet, well done, and classical:

“One word frees us
From all the weight and pain in life,
That word is love.” Sophocles

In a desperate move to copy Digg’s successful v3 redesign, Technorati added some new features of its own. According to a news release on their blog, the new features are:

We’ve added in lots of features to help you make sense of the blogosphere, including Discover, which is topic-based, Favorites, which gives YOU the power to pick your favorite blogs, and Popular, which algorithmically derives the most linked-to items in the last few days.

They also claim to have improved link-counting, back end search systems, ease of use, and other basic core improvements. However, let’s take a look at their Discover feature v.s. Digg v3:

The homepage is a mess of random boxes incoherently placed at random. If there’s some feature or way Technorati can organize data, or pull stats, it’s in one of these boxes. They have a box for Discover, a tag box, a favorite blogs box, ad boxes, your blogs boxes, featured bloggers boxes, and what everyone is blogging about boxes:

There’s some good news for the redesign, though. Search results look very clean! For a company specializing in search, that’s a good thing…

You might have noticed that the main page of this domain just got a facelift. If not, I heartily suggest you go check it out. I spent the last 2 days whipping it up, and while it’s not 100% awesome, and has too much ad filler in the left column, it’s way better than the old theme. Allow me to present, Zephyr:

It features asides randomly pulled from across the network and pasted into the top bar, making sure, of course, not to let them clip off the edges, a blue color scheme, a large header logo, a number of informative pages, advertising space, a featured blog area, and a list of all our blog properties! I’m not by any means a web designer, so if you can leave suggestions in the comments, go for it!