Those nanoseconds you save with this tip will surely add several minutes to your life.  What will you ever do with that kind of time.

Microsoft has released a shareware starter kit.  If you haven't used a starter kit, they are just that.  Not quite production ready code, but a great start in the right direction.  Finally, now I can write that cool...uh...something that everyone needs.

Some key features include:
Multi-threaded splash screen
Integrated e-commerce (PayPal)
Product Activation
Product Registration
Product Feedback
Exception Handling Reporting

Unfortunately it is only for .Net 2005. 

This blog entry outlines this information as well as links to downloads and a video walkthrough.

Similar to Yagoohoogle, DoubleTrust gives you search results from Yahoo and Google.  It is quite a bit smarter though.  It gives you the intersection of the two engines, as well as those "outside the join", or orphaned results. 

The results are displayed in a very clean and compacted list. 

This appears to be the sole work of grad student Ashish Gupta at Northwest University.  There is a blog on the topic as well.

This new site is dedicated to the hobbyist developer.  They will have lots of resources that geeks like us can use.  Many of us (like me) are professional developers.  Unfortunately you don't always get to code the "cool and fun stuff" for your paycheck.  So, this should help.

There are several cool sections.
In the Box
Some Assembly Required
Web Coder
Game Development
Cool Applications
XML For Fun

Latest articles RSS Feed

View the new MSDN Coding4Fun site.

We've all seen how cool Google maps are.  There are a few sites making interesting use of these maps (as mentioned on a google blog).   One interesting one is Google Sightseeing.  Their tagline is: Why bother seeing the world for real?

It's really pretty interesting.  There are lots of visible landmarks from the maps.  For example, you can see things such as: stadiums, landmarks, airports, etc.

Yagoohoogle is a nifty little tool that simultaneously (frames) shows google and yahoo results for a given search term.

Try it at: http://yagoohoogle.com

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. You can find URLs by their proximity to a given location. It's currently listing 135,140 sites.  Their site has a world map (pictured below) that shows all the latest entries.  Clicking an area on the map will do a url search in the area of that location.  Pretty cool stuff.  You can add a couple meta tags to your site and get listed too.

boingboing has published a little info on how to get information published on their site.  Why is that important?  They get a lot of traffic.

To sum up:
No e-mail
No fluff
Use the form

Google PageRank is a mystical creature that is a major attribute of how successful your site is found by Google searching.  It's basically Google's rating on the importance of your site.  Largely this is done by "qualified" inbound links to your page.  The more "qualified" links, the better.

Ian Rogers has some good information on explaining what it is and how it works.  It also provides some good references on the original research by the Google guys. 

If you are a webmaster, this topic is well worth your time to master.