Google added something new and slick recently – the ability to embed non-standard fonts in web pages as a web service called the Google Font API. It’s pretty easy to tweak a CSS file and your page headers to use this. I added the following to my headers on GonZoville:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=IM+Fell+English' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

and then changed the CSS for the various headers to include:

    font-family: 'IM Fell English', arial, serif;

and voila, I have nice old-world style text in my article and sidebar headers. Awesome. For headers and the like this is a great way to do something fancy and/or unique without relying on a Flash-based plugin or off-screen rendering techniques.

As a freelance developer I usually have 3 or more projects going on at once. Plus requests from established clients to do touch ups. Plus other ventures. Plus all the other daily tasks that one has. For a long while I struggled with keeping it all together – managing the To-Do lists for so many activities. Different priorities, different timelines – finding a way to see it all is a problem too.

Outlook is overkill. The Palm is nice, but I type so much faster than Graffiti works. And any solution that stores the data on my PC means I have to sync between desktop, laptop, and PDA.

Enter RememberTheMilk.com, a small start-up in Australia. It’s a fine example of what Web 2.0 can do. RtM lets you arrange your tasks by category, assign priorities, and mark things as done or postponed (adds a day to the due date). And…

The latest versions of all the IM clients are starting to border on bloatware and adware … in some cases, both. In my cruising for new technology I came across meebo. An AJAX-based multi-protocol IM client. It doesn’t do all the wizzy things like video and file transfers. But it sends and receives messages, and it archives everything in one place you can get at from any machine you’re logged into. Ain’t that what IM is supposed to do?

Plus, it logs you into all your IM accounts at once and it seems to grab and manage all the contacts you have everywhere just fine. Being AJAX-based, you basically turn a browser window into an MDI (multiple document interface) for all your chat windows. Which I guess isn’t as “nice” as having them all on your desktop. But there’s no ads, no spyware, and it loads as fast as a web page – nice.

Some pretty weird doings up in Silicon Valley this week.

First, Sun buys StorageTek for $4B … yes, Billion. Sun, who once dominated the workstation space – crushing Apollo and DEC in the process – went and bought a tape storage company. In 2005. For four billion dollars. Say what!? For that kind of money they could have bought half a dozen very profitable software companies and had a multitude of options in terms of strategies. Instead they are going down the path that DEC went down twenty years prior. Clinging to institutional and Big Business support contracts. Didn’t work then. Won’t work now. What a waste.

That news probably didn’t wake many people up, though. But the news that Apple was going to switch to Intel microprocessors was right out of science fiction. The Apple/Motorola vs. Microsoft/Intel war is finally, more or less, over. Why didn’t they do this sooner is the only question. Switching to a lower cost…

(Note: As of April, 2006 I have started using Performancing Metrics for my blog site(s). It’s a service, but it’s free, and pretty powerful. It doesn’t have quite the flexibility that TraceWatch does, but it’s also one less system I need to maintain.)

I run quite a number of sites and, up to now, I really wasn’t too concerned with the usage statistics. Partly because I didn’t like any of the scripts for tracking such information. They were either too much bother, didn’t give enough information, or weren’t flexible enough to cope with CMS-based sites like I have. This week I found TraceWatch. A really nice script written by a guy who, I guess, is in Iran or from Iran – based on where he has his demo running, anyway.

This script is nice and fast, does path analysis, integrates by JavaScript or PHP, looks great, and provides a wonderful dashboard…