I heart identicons

June 11th, 2008 catnip

9 block identicon

I’ve noticed these cool aztec looking icons around the web over the past few weeks. They represent someone’s Globally Recognized Avatar when they haven’t yet uploaded one of their own via gravitar.com.

So anyway, I figured there were say a couple of dozen of these things that were assigned randomly to users. And I thought they’d look pretty cool on a tshirt. So I went to look for them and found out that they’re waaaaaay cooler than I thought. They are generated from your IP address and so there are thousands um millions um a shedload of them!

Anyway, as I have a floating IP address, I just picked a random one that I liked and made a tshirt online, can’t wait for it to arrive.

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Slash Diction

March 22nd, 2007 catnip

I’ve been doing a lot of Search Engine Optimisation in work lately and this led me to wonder how one would blog about something one didn’t like without inadvertantly promoting it by increasing its web presence. “No publicity is bad publicity” as the saying goes. So I came up with an idea: what if I were to put a slash between each letter, let’s say for example R/o/b/b/i/e W/i/l/l/i/a/m/s.

It could have been any character I suppose, but with the slashes it’s still quite easy to read and slashes also have quite a negative connotation, appropriately. Let’s measure web presence as the number of results a name returns in Google. Try it for yourself if you like: search for R/o/b/b/i/e W/i/l/l/i/a/m/s in Google and you’ll get a grand total of zero hits, yay! but without the slashes a Google search of ‘the web’ returns over two million results (at the time of writing).

Hmm, I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before on the web, maybe I’ve started a brand new interweblog meme phenomenom! I’m gonna call it “Slash Diction”. Of course this could eventually backfire on me and all the R/o/b/b/i/e W/i/l/l/i/a/m/s fans could start including Slash Diction in their fan sites too! Oh well, it’ll be interesting to see if this takes off, I’ve always wanted to invent something!!

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