Oh great, now my browser has advertising.
Creating a new tab in Chrome this morning resulted in me seeing this:
Previously I would see something like the below, a useful screen providing one click access to the websites I visit most regularly and the last few tabs I had closed.
It looks to me as if this new “new tab” screen has been rushed out to promote Angry Birds without much thought given to its usability.
This page now has three tabs. The central tab branded “Apps”- set as the default – contains the not particularly well branded Angry Birds advert on the “App” tab. The the “Most visited” tab features now significantly more blurry screenshots of webpages I regularly visit – with access to recently closed tabs now a step further away, hidden behind an expandable menu rather than the previous one-click access. And the third “Bookmarks” tab? Well the Google Gods haven’t even made that yet “Bookmarks coming soon…” it reads.
So now without warning I get adverts in my browser, slower access to recently accessed tabs and an incomplete non-functioning “bookmarks” page. Thanks Google.
The BBC, who had the rights to show F1 for the next year, gave them to Sky and instead will show only half the races going forward. If you want to watch all the 2012 races you will need to pay minimum of £383 a year to Sky according to the Telegraph. This is a pretty good comment on the whole situation and I pretty much agree with it except that I might not follow any of the races at all. But hey, the teams get an extra £1 million a year so what do they care. Hope their sponsors and the written press do.
Spamming a forum dedicated to prank phone calls a link to your SEO client isn’t the brightest thing to do. PLA is a pretty decent site so do check it out, there’s hours of funny things on there including free podcast downloads.
Boris unveils 60ft long Bendy Bike via spoof news site NewsBiscuit. The Boris comments are actually quite believable!
A little something I made using AJAX, PHP, SQL and HTML during the last week of the Tour de France.
How many Tour de France teams can you name?
The 22 teams participating in cycling’s biggest race change from year to year with the inclusion of 4 wildcard teams, changes to the ProTour teams and ever-changing sponsorship deals which dictate team names.
I had to build in a degree of flexibility to the names people entered as getting a 100% match to an official team name is really rather hard – especially with all the European sponsors. Think I got the balance about right between accepting near-matches whilst not letting gibberish or plainly wrong team names through.
