Think about the ultimate journey you want them to take. Entice them in, make them actively want to scroll and read on, and on, and on. Guide them with your excellent content and let them explore your site. Tell a story with your content. Space it out a little and you will have some happy visitors who actually want to be there!

Not a terribly well-written article, but I like what the author is trying to say. I do believe that there needs to be something "above the fold" to grab the user's attention... to answer the age old question: "what's all this then?"

I also like how the author designs an entire layout (albeit a little scattered and unpolished) around his blog posts. Golly, as if writing blog posts weren't time consuming enough.

So I frequent two active sports blogs: The Crawfish Boxes (a Houston Astros blog), and Blazersedge (a Portland Trailblazers blog). In case you don't know, the former is a baseball blog and the latter is a basketball one.

Take a look at the chart above. It's Samuel Garvacio's pitch locations against a left handed batter. While each pitch location is relatively unimportant by itself, chart them all and you can come to the conclusion that he doesn't like pitching inside to left handed batters. That is, you don't see a lot of pitches to the right of the strike zone.

There are lots of charts and stats in baseball, more than I can even pretend to understand. I find it fascinating that baseball inspires people to track things like this.

I wonder if it's because the outside variables are limited in baseball. For every play there's one pitcher, one batter. Both are focused and poised. They are standing in the exact same position with no distractions. In basketball, however, a similar chart would have too many variables: shot tendencies for a specific player on a particular part of the court, with a particular amount of time left, with a particular defender on him, and whether or not his team is behind or ahead at the time, and by how much.

Most sports are this way... too fast and active to draw stats on. Baseball's a pretty unique sport in this regard.

I have a confession: I don't keep up with the news nearly as much as I should. Between my day job and my side job, I don't have a lot of extra time, and I'd rather spend it playing Mario Bros. than reading about health care reform.

Because of this, I check the headlines on news.google.com about once a week, attempt to read the articles, and then give up. I give up because there's very little context in articles. Authors always assume you know the back story and don't mention the hows and whys behind everything.

Not that they should, mind you, each article would be a small novel if that were the case.

Because of my lack of context, I've always wanted a timeline of news surrounding an article. (Well, I say "always"... I really mean ever since the inception of Newsvine, which I was hoping would have such a feature.) You'd read an article, not understand what's going on, and simply go back in time, so to speak, to catch up on everything you missed.

This is exactly what Google has built, and I love it. Thank you.

I'm a video game nerd, let's make that clear. Specifically I'm a classic video game nerd. I was happy but curbed my enthusiasm when Sega announced Project Needlemouse: a new Sonic game that was "back to basics".

In case you don't know anything about modern Sonic games this image sums up the past decade or so quite nicely:

Essentially every time Sega releases a Sonic game, it seems like they "get" it and are finally delivering a good post-Genesis Sonic game. Then all hopes are smashed upon the rocks of extra characters, stupid gimmicks, poor gameplay and a horrid camera system. (I still maintain that Sonic and the Secret Rings was a good game, though)

So we, the fans, waited for the same cycle to happen with Project Needlemouse. Which new stupid characters would we be introduced to this time? What stupid world will we be in now? Will Sonic make out with a human again?

But it seems like we really are going back to basics. No supporting characters. Robot badnicks.

That's not to say it won't be terrible still, but at least the team in charge seems to be catering to the classic Sonic fans. NSMBWii is proving that there is a place for 2D platforms in this generation after all.

In other words, it's not just a matter of offering extra food aid for two or three years.

Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more. 

A sobering thought. Prayers out to those in Haiti, hopefully something good can come of all of this.

So TwitPic makes $1.5M a year.

This brings a couple of things to mind. One: If I recall correctly, TwitPic sprang up after Summize was acquired. This means that someone probably said something to the effect of "Wow, Twitter will acquire features instead of building them! Twitter doesn't support uploading pictures. Ergo, I should build a picture plugin for Twitter."

Turns out it works, even if you're not acquired. People are building ecosystems and money-making software surrounding a company that is (as far as I know) not making money. This is so bizarre and meta that no one could have ever predicted a market like this.

The second thing that springs to mind is they're doing it all on advertising. It still bugs me a bit that this is a defacto way of making money online. Expectations are that software will be free and ad supported. Just like the Yellow Pages or the Thrifty Nickel. And everyone loves the Yellow Pages and the Thrifty Nickel, right?

jQuery 1.4 Released

In celebration of jQuery’s 4th birthday, the jQuery team is pleased to release the latest major release of the jQuery JavaScript library! A lot of coding, testing, and documenting has gone into this release, and we’re really quite proud of it.

I want to personally thank Brandon Aaron, Ben Alman, Louis-Rémi Babe, Ariel Flesler, Paul Irish, Robert Katić, Yehuda Katz, Dave Methvin, Justin Meyer, Karl Swedberg, and Aaron Quint who put a lot of work into fixing bugs and getting the release out the door.

The site is ugly but jQuery 1.4 woo! The entire thing is worth reading if you're into jQ.

I posted a ridiculous thread at work essentially insisting that everyone in Portland is a "cow lipped hippy long hair" and that they are lacking because they have never had a kolache before.

So I invited my entire work, all of my PDX friends and all of twitter to partake in kolaches with me at this fine establishment this past Saturday. This is literally the only place in Portland where you can get a kolache. Naturally I was a little skeptical about how they would turn out; half-expecting then to be like "surprise! It's Thai kolaches!" or something suitably Portland like that.

However I was pleasantly surprised. The kolaches are delicious there. Genuine Texas stuff. Sweet bread, smoked sausages, creamy cheese. I will definitely be returning. If you'd like to meet me there some time, just let me know!

How much to charge for your Web App?

The great thing about working in an Internet start-up is the learning we get to do every single day of our lives. We don’t always know the right answers to every question we face, but the very nature of the Web lets us try out new ideas and quickly adapt them to achieve the best results for our online businesses.

A nice rundown on how Creately picked how much to charge for their web app. Since web apps exist "in the cloud" it's a hard value prop for some customers. We had a terrible time figuring out pricing for Jotlet.

Hard to believe that it's been only 5 years since people would ask us questions like "why would I want a calendar on the web?" as if we were absolutely insane for offering such a service.

The New York Times offers some additional tidbits that might come in the rumored Apple Tablet.

According to former Apple employees, Apple has been working on advanced multi-touch gesturing that was originally pioneered by Fingerworks. Apple acquired Fingerworks a number of years ago and has been leveraging their multi-touch technology in their latest products. This news shouldn't be particularly surprising for anyone who has been following Apple for the past few years.

The most interesting report from the article is that Apple is said to have "spent the past couple of years working on a multitouch version of iWork". Such a version of iWork would presumably allow the upcoming Apple tablet to be used for document creation rather than solely content consumption. It would also blur the lines between the functions of tablet and that of a more traditional laptop computer.

Apple is rumored to be introducing their tablet computer later this month.

I know this is just a rumor, but I continue to be hyped. I don't have a laptop (heck, I don't even have an iPhone) so the tablet is right up my alley. I was just lamenting that the tablet has gotten all of the hype, and a potential iLife / iWork 2010 seems to be relatively ignored.

iWork means iLife; they wouldn't release one without the other, right? And I love me some iLife upgrades. Put iLife on a tablet and put an SD slot in it and I'm ever so happy.