I’m sure you’ve been seeing a major slow-down of the DarkNews.com site as of lately. I apologize - my host has been having some issues with the server and they have been taking quite a long time to resolve the lag. It’s getting much better, but I’ll soon be moving this site again off to a VPS this time. If you have suggestions on a good host like MediaTemple, please do let me know!

Alright - I’m way behind with the new textures that I promised! I have actually moved servers since and am in the middle of designing the new darknews.com web site which is almost done, I just need to wrap it up and get it in. Stay tuned!

I’ll be adding a new batch of textures I took a few weekends ago while at a timeshare in Oceanside, CA. I’ll try to have them up either tonight or tomorrow. Stay tuned!

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t browse web sites often enough. I just learned about this site yesterday, and of all places, I discovered it through my referral logs. This site is apparently a monster, with over 4 million users as of 12/11/07 and I am sure that count is already out of date. I can believe that number, considering my daily traffic skyrocketed, and I seriously thought it was a hoax.

I’ve been trying it out, and it is a pretty interesting site. I’ve been a fan of Digg.com and have also checked out sites such as del.icio.us, but haven’t really been too into using them.

It lets you enter in tags that you’re interested in, such as role-playing games, or textures, and you can click on a button on your browser that will take you to a random site out of your interests.

Check it out sometime. It supports IE and FF.

I’ve posted around 30 new high-resolution textures to the High-Resolution Textures page. Hopefully you can use them for whatever projects you might be working on, whether they are for Maya in 3D, Photoshop experiments, wallpaper, reference, flash games, etc. Have fun with them — Remember; Free to use for commercial and non-commercial uses, just don’t sell them outright on any CDs or photo sites, please. I won’t be too happy.

If you have any special requests for textures, drop me a comment. I might be able to get one together.

Some samples from the new textures:

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I’ve updated the Industry Events Schedule — it needed quite a bit of cleaning up. If you’d like to have one added that you typically attend, please let me know via comments with the name of the event.

The event coming up quickly that I am eye-balling is ETech, put on by the folks at O’Reilly. It’s a general tech conference that has a bit of everything from around the industry, but generally focused on web technologies and anything else “emerging” I’ve heard some good things about it.

I’m hoping to have another batch up tonight. Lots of vines and many new rock/stone textures.

If you have any special requests for textures, please email me. I’m always up for ideas.

The folks at The Webby Awards have extended the deadline for entry to January 25th for those of you who couldn’t get your purchase orders completed in time (or if you’re lucky and don’t have to worry about them, you hadn’t used your credit card just yet).

It’ll be my third year participating in the Webby Awards - I am looking forward to the results. Some great work (albeit some of it is really lousy… umm…judges…?), and it’s a great to see the sites and the authors get recognition for their work.

Did anyone ever go to the WebbyConnect Summit put on by the IADAS last October? I’m curious if it’s even worth considering this year.

Drop on by and register your site for Webby Awards if you haven’t already. You’ll feel better about yourself.

I think on a weekly basis I complain about how awful the internet experience has become when you have to register for nearly everything these days — even at times to rate a video you just viewed on a site you’re probably only going to visit once because a friend sent you the URL! I can’t count the number of times I’ve just closed the window in frustration.

Life would be so much easier if you could get away with using a single password for all of your sites — but we should all understand the dangers in doing so. Many sites do not encrypt your password in the database field, and administrators of forums, blogs and pretty much nearly every site have access to view your username, email address and password. All they’d need to do is try the same information on more secure web sites and they now have access to things they shouldn’t. Scary stuff - which is why I always make my passwords unique, and try not to make them slight variations. This is why it’s so difficult to keep track of the many sites we register today, and why it’s such a painful and unforgiving experience.

So - of course I am registered with many sites… from LinkedIn and Plaxo to Facebook and MySpace. I started using Plaxo years ago when it first came around and thought it was an awesome invention. I was able to keep up with co-workers (current and former). Then came LinkedIn, and I left Plaxo behind. It was a surprising split for quite some time, where some of my co-workers that I’d invite to try out LinkedIn, said they preferred Plaxo - but they had no idea what LinkedIn was all about. I finally kept bugging them to try LinkedIn, and now there are only a few co-workers who still use Plaxo, and most others are now using LinkedIn to manage their contacts.

Plaxo was very much a thing of the past for me. It reminds me of my days using Webcrawler [look back] as my search engine in? ‘91 or so? until I met Yahoo and Google Yesterday, a friend and I were joking about how many different mediums there are these days that you need to keep track of for managing contacts and even friends. You have Outlook, LinkedIn, Instant Messengers, Home Email, PDAs/Mobile Phones, Business Cards, MySpace and Facebook just to name a few. While we were chatting, he mentioned that Plaxo has wised up and is helping you aggregate this information from other sites and applications you use… they are calling it Plaxo 3.0 and Plaxo Pulse. It supports Outlook contacts, LinkedIn, Google Calendars (Gmail contact sync coming), Yahoo address and calendars, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Check out the Plaxo video tour on YouTube (gasp, just don’t try to rate the video or you’ll have to register!)

So, it looks like Plaxo has taken it upon themselves to make an effort to clean up the mess all of us web site creators are making =) I am now off to try to find my password for Flixter, since apparently someone I don’t know just sent me a message and I’ve only logged in once.

This has been a little over-due.? Here are the upcoming events for web related expos and conferences. You can view them below, or reference them on the Industry? Events page:?

An Event Apart
Chicago, IL
August 27-28, 2007
www.aneventapart.com

Photoshop World 07
Las Vegas, NV
September 6-8, 2007
www.photoshopworld.com

Flash Forward
Boston, MA
September 19-21, 2007
www.flashforwardconference.com

Adobe MAX 2007
Chicago, IL
September 30 - October 3, 2007
www.adobe.com/events/max/

Web 2.0 Summit
San Francisco, CA
October 17-19, 2007
www.web2con.com

FITC
Hollywood, CA
October 22-23, 2007
www.fitc.ca

Dx3 has been Canceled
www.dx3conference.com

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