BrainFuel

How many BrainFuel readers do we have in Arizona? Go here.

I know BrainFuel isn’t considered a leading web site, however we can at least pretend we are. Sampling of some recent statistics on BrainFuel are as follows: 114,890 sessions (2005 to date) and 206,718 page views (2005 to date). That all wraps up to 990 sessions a day. Cool!

Update: Ok, this is interesting. We’ve had a big increase in traffic here at BrainFuel this year. I’m going to credit the great writing and superb caption contests. Hehe. Really, we’ve had a huge traffic increase and we have proof to back it up.

Compare 2004 trends to 2005 (to date). In just a few months this year we’ve had 500 more average daily sessions compared to last year, and in another month or two will easily pass 2004 in its 12 month whole. That’s great!

Welcome to all of our new readers.

In my last post from the Going Hybrid series (at least for April) I wanted to just comment on something I noticed in the Mail application that comes standard with Apple’s OSX application.

First things first: I liked the program for its simplicity. Even though it probably has 1/10th the features of Outlook, I didn’t feel like anything was missing. It was very easy to use and simple to configure. After using Outlook for years it is refreshing. Their is a new version of Mail coming out in just a few weeks and perhaps it will be even better.

Ok, so what was my problem with it? It can’t handle the concept of a default email account. When you create a new message it uses the last received message as the from address or whichever one you last clicked on. Anybody know how to fix this?

For example, if somebody emails my bob@bobsBBQ.com address and I received that message it would change my default sending address to the bobsBBQ address. But let’s just say I also run a vegetarian web site at the same time (it’s a long shot I know). If I clicked to create a new message to my vegetable loving friends the message by default would be coming from my bobsBBQ address. That’s insane! I shouldn’t have to change my email account every time I write a new message.

So I stopped using it and used Entourage which is very nice and has about half the features of the regular Outlook (and Entourage is much nicer I might add). So that’s the story, it’s not the end of the world but it was really surprising that default didn’t mean default.

Going even further, I’m going to guess that there is a plugin you can install that will solve this problem. I just did a search and found this page which shows me a bunch of plugins and scripts to do various things. Here’s an article with some interesting plugins as well.

Thesis topics that just don’t work:

#1: Dogs and Cats and Skyscraper Engineering

#2: Running a Bike Business & AIDS Crisis

#3: Online Search Engines & Sandpaper Manufacturing Trends

#4: Drill Bit Design & Hair Styles Around the World During the 19th Century

So who here besides Jeff and I think that 24 is the best tv show ever? I mean, come on, how many shows that you watch have this happen: (possible spoilers) First a massive train wreck in the first 10 seconds of the season, followed by the Secretary of Defense being kidnapped and taken to a bunker, followed by a mission to rescue, a convenience store hold up, followed by the risk of a nuclear meltdown, followed by a electromagnetic pulse, followed by a gunfight at a gun store, followed by a ——- ——- being stolen, followed by — —– — crashing, followed by the ——– being stolen, followed by Chloe shooting a terrorist! Yahoo! Can it get better? Tune in Mondays!

Hacking together
Meaningless words and verbs
Birds chirping go tweet

Here’s a quick tip for making your photos look better online and in your web site designs. After you resize a photo down to your final size, use the sharpen filter in Photoshop to add an extra level of crispness. Resizing photos introduces a slight blur that can’t be prevented. When you are printing your images it doesn’t make a difference, but for on screen display the images need to be sharpened so they look their best.

The benefits: Your images won’t look blurry. In people photos the eyes will shine more. Overall, it just adds a level of crispness to the photos you place online.

I’ve prepared two samples. Sample #1 and sample #2.

Update: Two more images for you to see. #3 is a clown and #4 is Todd.