smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Speaking of busy people, Michael Heilemann has been sneakily building what looks to be a fantastic user interface for Habari.

… a few weeks back, I went AWOL and started crunching away on a complete design for the administration interface for Habari, in an effort to create a set of blueprints, from which this thing can be built in proper.

He provides a good run-down of the where and whys via a screen-cast showcase of the design and there is also a snazzy flickr set — which is in stark contrast to the totally abortive drive-by-design wordpress 2.5 is still currently sporting.

Lovely work by a sharp-as-tacks pixel pusher — and it’s great to see community involvement habari being taken in the spirit it is given.

Bill Israel has been busy of late (and now I know why) whom announces:

In an effort to bring good music to the tumbling masses, Richard and I have started a music tumblelog called Tuneage.

Richard and Bill both have a great sense of what makes music worth getting out of (or rather, into) bed for. Tunage sports a snazzy yet simple design, great tunes and fantastic visuals — well done lads.

Perhaps proving that yet again, tumblr can be more than just a re-blogged nirvana — in this case a music-lover’s co-production.

Being a New Zealand National, I forfeited the right to vote in the recent Australian Federal Elections — in losing that right as a free citizen I can only echo Cameron’s call to vote.

“Vote with whatever criteria you deem important, but please, vote.”

Never take the right to instigate change for granted, it’s a rare chance to shape the future and all it takes is stepping out the front door and pressing pen to ballot paper.

Mr Hunt has re-launched cameron i/o.

“I’ve run this website on Tumblr since May 2007. But starting today I’m switching to Chyrp, a new lightweight blogging engine. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, or browse my photos on Flickr, you probably have no idea I’ve been planning this.”

Grey hues never looked so good — the refresh brings subtle improvements to imagery and typography alike — resulting in a more polished presentation.

It’s also great to see that chyrp is still quietly achieving very cool things in the self-hosted tumble log space, boasting features and functionality similar to that of tumblr and like services.

Looks great Cameron - props on the change and design!

Richard has updated his typographic tumblr theme to version 2.

“I’ve made all the changes outlined in the previous post now. I’ve also moved a few things around — I’ve applied the theme here, if you want to see the changes.”

A typographically focused tumblr theme, made finer still, with exceptional font choices — it’s great seeing bold use of larger font sizes.

Jesper provides a translation of the highly-spun SQL Server 2008 Launch and Release Dates.

“Where by “goal”, we mean the new goal, not the old goal. Not that the new goal wasn’t the old goal all along.”

The original public relations masterpiece in double-talk and nothingness spun into 400+ words is right here.

I must confess, by the second-to-last paragraph I actually believed stabbing my eyes out with a plastic spork, repeatedly, would provide relief.

Alas, I can still see and the original article is still just as full of nondescript horse-shit — at least the Waffle was an entertaining read.

Shawn Blanc writes one of the best review pieces I’ve had the pleasure to read in a long time:

For the past several weeks as I’ve been writing this article I have used nothing but Coda for web designing, and it has broken my age-old habits of CMD TABbing between multiple apps.

It’s an absolute epic. It will take you some time to read through the entire article — indeed i read it thrice — but the result is an intimate understanding of why Coda is stealing hearts everywhere. And yet to call it a review somehow still lands short of the mark.

The best insight into Coda you will read, ever.

Mr Hunt, with help from Mr Blanc, has been busy minting an icon for your iPhone:

Most people have Mint in a subdirectory like /mint. This is a problem if you want to set an iPhone favicon for your root domain but change the favicon in subdirectories. This is because the iPhone looks in the root directory for the icon. That is, unless you tell it different.

I watched the idea bounce back-and-forth over twitter and then realised how a) twitter allows for such free form conversations and b) how the iPhone has become such an integral, every-day part of peoples lives.

Sometimes I wish I had an editor, perhaps Jason could do with one too:

“After all, Matt Drudge is teasing the story with an invented quote: “STRAIN OF SUPERBUG ‘MAY BE NEW HIV’…” But that language doesn’t actually appear anywhere, much less in the Reuters summary to which he links..”

Says Kottke who prefaces the exposé on Drudge’s take on the Reuters story (queue editor) with the headline “The Mania Over Gay Flesh-Eating Super-Staph” — which doesn’t appear in his own commentary either.

Indeed the original source article does suggest possible bias and the need for further study and investigation as part of it’s preface.

No offence Jason, or more correctly, Choire — if you’re going to call-to-task inflammatory headlining and inventive story-telling, using such a title yourself calls into question your supposed indignation of the same.

Mr Drudge may well be inventing quotes, but I call pot-kettle-black on your headline in return — it’s no less “sensationalised”.

Update: .. and I’ll call mea-culpa on this — thanks brett — apologies to Jason Kottke, this was a piece written by Choire Sicha. The comment still stands, but I didn’t notice it was a guest writer opinion piece.

Dougal notes that he has ditched the daily Twitter posts:

“Just as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary.”

By all that is precious in this world, thank-you. If I want to read your tweets, I’ll follow you. If I want to see your daily del.icio.us hoarding, I’ll subscribe to that feed too.

Blogs that I once read every day — often with quite some anticipation — have become at best a catch-all for random comment, pointless new-media fads and scraped mindless regurgitation, all of which have their own place and time.

I cannot help but echo Shawn Blanc, who perhaps said it best — “I want to read what you have to say.”

Bill Israel on learning better RSS management:

“I treat RSS with undeserving priority, and this causes two big problems: 1) I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to read, flag, or ‘mark as read’ all new RSS items as they come in, and 2) I’ll go to absurd lengths to ensure I have zero unread items whenever I walk away from a computer.”

“This compulsion has reached the point of being a real problem, and I’m finally taking steps to rectify it.”

So begins Bill’s quest to tame the inbox and regain some control. Whilst I have cut down a lot of redundant technology related feeds, I’m still in the denial stage.

I can stop when ever I want. Honestly.. I can. Oooh, Google Reader you’ve got more stuff for me to read? Marvellous.

— d’oh.