A couple of days ago I was chatting with SitePoint’s Managing Editor Matt Magain over instant messenger. That’s a daily occurrence, but what made this chat a bit different than usual is that it was about 3am in Australia where Matt is located. What was he doing up so late? Clearing out his email inbox.

If that sounds like a familiar scenario — it does to me — then you too might be an email addict. The results from AOL’s fourth annual email addiction survey revealed that Americans, at least, are a nation of email addicts, and it’s getting worse. We’d be willing to bet that the same is true in many wired nations.

Interesting article with Terry Hill (chairman of the company I have been working for the past 6 years). The interviewer has tried to capture some of the values, ethos and thought of the company which is nice, but we’re Arupians not Arupites - sort it out :).

See those last 4 letters at the end? Yeah got my confirmation from the IET that my application was accepted for Chartered Engineering status. Those 4 letters are the culmination of 29 years (shy of 1 month) of both studying and working as an engineer.

It’s difficult to describe exactly what it all means consicely unless you’re part of the industry to understand what is expected of you and what you expect of other people that hold that same title, but needless to say I’m seriously happy about it and was one of my two goals that I had to achieve this year. This is partly one of the reasons why I’ve taken a step back from my various online endeavours to persue other things that have/had been put on hold for sometimes years.

Now it’s time to start working for that other thing (hopefully I will be able to talk about that in November sometime).

Almost 11 months after Delicious revealed screen shots of its redesign, the new site is finally live. Del.icio.us now redirects to delicious.com, as well, which the site says is to deal with the “zillion different confusions and misspellings of ‘del.icio.us’” they have seen over the years.

According to the Delicious blog, in addition to the major design overhaul, the site will also now be faster due to a shiny new back end, and they’ve improved search.

Tremor

This theme is a 3 column widget ready theme. It is XHTML Strict and a CSS 2.1 compliant and uses the author’s comment highlight hack.

Birdie’s Blog

Two column, brown WordPress theme with a birdie calling out!

Last week we presented the first results of our study of top blogs. As promised, this week we publish the second part of the survey, including further findings and problem solutions we have found out during the study. In the first part we discussed layout design and typographic settings. What remains to be covered are the navigation design, information architecture, advertisements and functionality (RSS-feeds, tag clouds, pagination etc.).

Reminder: since we wanted to make the survey as objective as possible, we used Technorati Top Blogs and analyzed 50 most popular blogs which appear there. We have identified important design problems and considered solutions for each of the problems separately.

Just two days after Hasbro’s law suit and DMCA take down notice forced the super-popular Scrabble clone application Scrabulous off Facebook, the game’s creators Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla are back with a new application called Wordscraper. With the absence of Scrabulous, the official Scrabble application from Hasbro has enjoyed a surge in users — up from 10,000 or so a couple of days ago (daily active) to 62,000 today. Wordscraper, meanwhile, has about 3,500 users as I write this.

The Agarwallas are clearly hoping that Wordscraper will become the preferred home of Scrabulous refugees. If Scrabulous hadn’t been such a high profile application on Facebook — in many circles it was really treated as the flagship app for the site’s platform — this wouldn’t be such a big story.

WordPress is awesome. Even more awesome is the fact that it can be customized to power any type of site you like! Here, we’ll be learning how to create a featured and “latest posts” section - easily a ‘must-have’ for all good News/Magazine themes. We’ll also go over using the ‘Custom Fields’ to their fullest potential.