The be all and end all of Bittorrent sites (pre-PiateBay.org that is), SuperNova.org, has been relaunched thanks to the happy Sweedish pirates over at The Pirate Bay. Besides offering yet another site to grab your warez, the members responsible for the reincarnation have a message for the “non-internet loving companies” out there:

This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

Yarr! Those pirates are bold!

October 15th is Blog Action Day where bloggers across the globe will focus on one specific topic – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. This is all in hopes that the focused mass commotion will start the ball rolling towards a better environment for the future.

How do you participate? Simple. Just register your blog at BlogActionDay.org and write up an entry about the environment on October 15th. If you want to do more you can donate your blog’s earnings for that day or promote the event with their banners. Check out everyone that is participating and I hope that you add your blog to the list.

Ok so this IQ test is available online and it mainly involves deciphering visual puzzles. At first it is a piece of cake. But the ones near the end are real brain-busters. Block out some time to get through this, they give you 40 minutes to solve 39 puzzles. Good luck and post your scores in the comments. Bet you don’t have a higher IQ than me.

via Pammy Smith

You scream, I scream, we all scream for LoremIpscream.com? Because using a regular lorem ipsum generator is so dull these days, Matt Thompson created a site to spice things up a bit. Besides offering the standard vanilla flavor of dummy text, Lorem Ipscream offers a variety of other mashed-up, random bits including the inaugural addresses of every president and about 23,000 punk and emo song lyrics. Clicking the same flavor produces different results each time. How valuable the random bits of text are may be another question entirely.

Why do we need this? Matt claims “it is essentially just a tool, the performance art aspect will come with how the community of web developers, hackers, and general lurkers use it.” I may not understand it to the fullest, but it sure is a delicious design just like Matt’s site.

For a long time I have noticed well designed pullquotes that only had the beginning quote. The alternative was a standard text quote that was more bland but had both beginning and ending quotes. Here are some examples I found on SmileyCat.com to better illustrate what I am talking about.

The last example is a nice compromise but I prefer pullquotes with a little bit more style. It really bugs me how there is no easy, pure-CSS way of including the ending quotes. That is until now.

WebMasterWall.com has a tutorial featuring a simple method to create “double quotes” (as they call them) using CSS. The trick is to attach the ending quote background image to the

tag and use the pseudo-element :first-letter for the beginning quote graphic. The reason we can get away using this trick without any JavaScript is because IE 5.5+ actually recognizes :first-letter when applied to any block element. Huzzah, this is my second favorite pseudo-element after :hover.

The only gotcha to this is according to W3C specs “Unless you’re using a transitional doctype, text should not be placed directly inside a blockquote element without block-level tags surrounding it.” In other words the text within a

should be wrapped in

tags which would break the blockquote:first-letter styling. This could easily be corrected by using blockquote p as a selector and assuming you don’t have multi paragraph pullquotes. I think that is a reasonable compromise.

Open web services allow people to play with a set of data in their own way encouraging experimentation and new ideas. This is what allows amaztype to be what it is, providing Amazon book search in a whole new way. When you enter in a search term, the site will query Amazon for pictures of the book cover which it then arranges to form the words you were searching for. Check out what the search for “blog” brings up…

Clicking on a part of the search term allows you to zoom in to see the cover a bit better as well as more information which is dynamically brought to you from Amazon including the authors, price, and even the 5 star ratings. While not very useful if you are looking for a specific book, this data visualization presents a familiar set of information in a new way.

Everyone likes to look at pretty things, designers just get a little more involved. There are a host of design inspiration sites out there but Faveup.com divys their content up into logos, business cards, flash websites, and CSS websites; something for everyone. I love browsing through creative offerings and this site keeps my imagination going in the online side and the print side of things.

What was meant to be a quick weekend project turned into a month-long undertaking. TXT2LOL.com, is my pet project for converting regular speak to the grammatically incorrect and misspelled LOL. LOL became popular thanks to cat macros, or LOL cats, and I wanted an easy way to create authentic-sounding LOL captions. Think I’m going a bit overboard? Anil Dash from SixApart.com did an in-depth analysis of the LOL grammar.

At any rate, I just made a tool that hopes to make peoples lives a little bit easier so they can make many others smile with their ridiculous LOL captions.

Please take a look at the site and let me know of any translations I missed by using the ‘Submit a Word’ link.

Phishing can be tricky stuff with only the smallest of details being out of place. Would you recognize a fake site when you visited one? McAfee lets you find the answer without putting yourself at risk with this 10 question quiz. Can you pick the authentic site?

I got 9 right out of 10 and you wouldn’t believe the site I got wrong.

Sometimes I just like to look for random domain names at DomainsBot.com. Here is what I came up with…

CyborgSuperHuman.com or SuperHumanCyborg.com – For those ultra powerful hybrid humans that probably blog. SuperHumanCyborg.org is pretty funny too.

GordPorn.com – For some hot gord on gord action.

SnowPow.com – Like snowplow but hipper!

OuterRouter.com – For those far out Internet switches.

Hunged.com or Hungd.com – Hunged sounds like a cool company name.

iWillVomit.com – Just so you know…

Dizmizz.com – Hipster version of dismiss.

Techsie.com – A tech site for girls.

Loooong.com – extra emphasis on the oooong.

733tr.com – Like Flickr for the leet.

PinkPoop.com – No one will easily forget you with this one.