Your bookmarks: interesting websites

Some of the sites that help me with my online endeavours:


http://www.mixpod.com/ This one is for making an online music player to embed music on my website. I still haven't found the perfect instrument for this so for the moment MixPod is the best solution. How does it work: I upload an .mp3 track on my hosting, extract the direct URL address of the file, paste it on MixPod, which creates a player for my music, and I can embed it on my site. Here's such a blog post: http://www.harmonium.ro/2009/09/22/dodheimsgard-supervillain-outcast/ (the player is at the end of the article). Pros: the player looks fine and it is very easy to create. Cons: all MixPod users have access to my playlists and can listen to the music and embed it on their websites, which consumes the bandwidth of my blog (that I pay for). But I think that for experimental and progressive music this isn't a major problem
Also, sometimes the playlist restarts after the end instead of stopping, which is annoying and bandwidth consuming.

SoundCloud is much better (perfect, actually) but it costs a hell lot! Also, tried to implement the same player that PA uses but it's much too complicated for me.

http://www.dailymotion.com/gb I use DailyMotion for uploading videos and embedding them. It has the advantage over YouTube that it can support videos longer than 10 minutes (up to 20 minutes and more if you become a "creative content" provider"). Also, it has the advantage that the embedded video starts on highquality, unlike YouTube where you need to go and set yourself the preferred resolution (and many people don't know this).
Vimeo would be perfect (it has unlimited video length and incredible HD support), but it also costs.

http://www.flickr.com/ I use Flickr for uploading my photos. It is the only service that I pay. If you don't pay, the upload space is limited to 200 MB. The reason I decided to pay for this service is that it has the best compression (which is important for me), it looks better than any other such site and it doesn't need to install an annoying and intrusive software like Picassa needs.
If you're not pretentious about image quality, Picassa (Google's photo share site) is excellent. Easy to use and unlimited upload space... for free.

I made a comparison between Flickr's compression and that of Picassa. I uploaded the same photo on both sites and compared it at the most similar size that I could find. Here's how they look:



and

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The one with the sharper forms and more saturated colours is from Flickr.


http://www.goodreads.com/ This was very popular some time ago on the Shred Room but I think it wasn't mentioned in other threads. It's a site that does for your books what RateYourMusic does for your music collection. I lost interest in it very fast but it's still a good site.

Other funny or useful pages:

The best page in the universe: http://maddox.xmission.com/. For a decade long, this site was the best one-man trolling / satire site. It's not very active any more but its legacy is great, providing many current websites with inspiration. Masterliness!

Speaking of Flickr, they have a section dedicated to archive images that are now part of the public domain: http://www.flickr.com/commons There's amazing stuff in there!

This is based on the same idea, but for scanned manuscripts, ancient maps, illuminations, etc: http://www.wdl.org/en/

http://www.imsdb.com/ - here you can read movie scripts for a lot of films.

I'll think of some more.


Edited by harmonium.ro - June 25 2010 at 07:58

Forget about my bookmarks...all the sites I frequent, (this being one) are saved in my search bar so I can get to them quick and easy.

Most of my bookmarks are old and I really only go on 2 now. Here are ALL of them

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastall.shtml  The National Hurricane Center page off the NOAA website. Back from when I was into meteorology.    .... !
http://www.rcdb.com/   Gotta stay on top of all the latest coaster news
http://drummerworld.com/   Drummerworld, nuff said
http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/   Guitar Tabs
http://www.ivona.com/online/editor.php  This site which has a really awesome/weird British voice thing. A friend and I like to use it and mess around with people on PSN.

Well, there's a look into my private, disturbing life