There are very few pages that do not have RSS feeds available but every once and a while I come across one.  This handy little website turns any web page into a live RSS feed.  All you have to do is enter in the URL and it creates an RSS feed for you to subscribe to.

MorningStar is a website that I have never heard about that one of my teammates in my accounting class turned me to.  We used the site to pull down financial statements for some companies for a paper we had to write.  This site is great for pulling and comparing financial statements and does a lot of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to some of the accounting ratios.

Looks like Mozilla has gone through with their promise and spun off Thunderbird to its own development team.  I think this is a good thing so that Thunderbird can get the attention it needs to become its own awesome application.  I also noted Spicebird is a fork of Thunderbird’s code as well.  Looks like they just released another beta version a few days ago so I will have to keep an eye on that one as well.  I use Thunderbird mainly as an email archiving application and use Yahoo Web Mail for most of my emails.

So today thanks to the help of a gift card from my girlfriend for Valentines Day I made my first purchases of MP3’s from Amazon’s site.  I must say it was a great experience.  After a short download of their download app (very very small) I was up and running and downloading MP3’s.  Amazon grabbed my attention a while ago as the first ones to sell non-DRM MP3’s and for a cheaper price than iTunes.  Everything about that last sentence should tell you why I love the service. 

You can download full CD’s for $9.99.  After download you can go out and grab the MP3 files and do whatever you want with them like move them to your external hard drive or put them on your MP3 player.  You can also setup the application to automatically add the files to your iTunes Library but I turned that feature off because I store all my MP3’s on a separate hard drive and wanted to do a little tag modification before adding it to my collection.

It is safe to say that this is where all my music will be purchased because it was such an easy and good experience.  The files quickly downloaded and were already setup with album art as well as all the ID3 tag information.  Plus the fact that there is no DRM on them makes them actually worth something to me! 

This is how downloading music should be…

Grubhub has a great idea to be a central repository for take out menus for many restaurants.  I think this makes a great idea as it helps also give you a selection of what you could eat for dinner.

As of right now it is only centralized around Chicago but I think the website has a promising idea and I would expect that its regions will grow as time goes on.  Or maybe the site will fail before it has a chance to expand…who knows these days

I had to look around today for a Hex color code to change the default color of a hyperlink on my blog today and ran across this sight and thought it was worth noting.  It makes finding a hex color super easy!

Looks like another video streaming site has shown up.  I wonder how long it is until this stuff goes main stream and everything is on demand.  I haven’t had a chance to try out the site myself but looks like from the reviews it gives Hulu some good competition which is pretty amazing because I was impressed with Hulu.  It looks like they have implemented a tagging system similar to, oh say, what everyone else has.  But tagging adds a nice level of taxonomy to a site and allows for easier searching, I am not sure this is a competitive advantage anymore I think it is more the norm of what is expected.

Currently its offering is: ‘There look to be episodes from more than 100 different shows, many of which are currently on the air, such as Heroes, CSI, and Power of Ten. There are also 22 vintage episodes of Miami Vice for you Don Johnson fans, plus 32 episodes of Arrested Development’

This post has some great links to some very nice WordPress themes, and since I am always wanting to update my site you can never have too many places to choose from!

Top 100 Word Press Themes

So I finally got accepted into private beta for Hulu and got able to play around with it today.  Hulu blows Joost away with embedable episodes as well as a completely web based application without any download.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of shows that they offer but was sad to see that they didn’t have the first few episodes of The Office, for some reason I cannot find episodes 1-3 online for season 4.  Not even NBC.com has it.  So far Hulu seems to be ahead of the game with the online TV idea!

Looks like phpBB3 is finally out of beta today and ready for production.  I have been running this all semester for my classes and had no issues and updated all the way through the development process.  Its super easy to use and has a nice clean interface and easy to manage.  My only qualm is the lack of RSS feeds from the forum but I can survive without that.  I have come across a website that has free Templates for you to use instead of the default one (phpBB3Styles).  With some minor modifications it now more closely resembles my blog template.  Amazing what software you can get for free these days.  This was a super easy repository to use for school and very helpful for keeping all teammates on the same page as to where the project is.  Also provides an easy medium to share documents and keep everyone on the same version.