my webgems
A webgem is a website that we use or visit often, that offers something interesting to the site's visitor. For now there's just one, but throughout the next few months I'l be adding one a week so check back soon!
12-9-10
This website creates a radio station for you based on your preference, you can select either a song or an artist for it to base it’s selection off of. The site then creates a radio station/playlist of similar songs. For each songs played, you have to option to rate it thumbs up or thumbs down, so that you can specify your songs even more. The also have song lyrics and a history of the band playing. You can also click “quickmix” and pandora will create a station that incorporates all of your current stations. For the holidays, they have Christmas music stations as well.
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12-1-10
Google is a brilliant search engine, and today’s logo is in memory of Rosa Parks not giving up her seat 55 years ago. Google is both a verb and a person (ex: ask Mr. Google), and is a pretty important cultural and useful feature. The new google has results as you type, which makes the search go even faster. Google has google images, a search that even lets you specify pictures by color and size. Google maps, mail, documents, and more are invaluable tools for everything. The robotics team uses google docs to complete applications and the spreadsheets to keep track of cad progress, so that the whole team has access to them whenever they want. Google search also has and I’m feling lucky button, that takes you right to the first google result for your query.
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11-23-10
I think everyone in existence knows and loves this site. They usually host the five most recent episodes to air on tv from most major primetime shows. Over the summer they sometimes host the full season so you can catch up on what you missed over the year. They also offer hulu plus, where you pay a monthly fee to get access to full seasons year round, as well as multiple seasons. They also host movies, old and classic tv series, anime, and more. You have to watch the ads, unlike a dvr where you can record the show and then skip the commercials completely, which some people see as a minus, but sometimes they allow you to choose to watch one long commercial and then watch the rest of the show without any.
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11-19-10
This is one of my all time favorite websites. I’m a complete movie fanatic and this website has data and pages on basically every movie ever made, including old silent movies as well as tv series and miniseries. The top 250 ranks all time best movies according to an algorithm, the current tops are The Shawshank Redemption and the Godfather parts 1 and 2. Along with this, there is also a bottom 100 list, a good place to go if you’re looking for a world’s worst movie marathon. Each movie title contains screenshots and posters, trailers and videos, cast and crew, trivia, memorable quotes, forums and more to see everything there is to know about that particular movie.
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11-9-10
http://www.dearblankpleaseblank.com/
This is a website that my friend Charlie got me hooked on a while ago, and there was practically an entire week where all of my friends were talking in the "dear blank please blank" format. The website is just people posting funny or sadly true requests that they have for the world such as “dear Noah, we could have sworn you said the arc wasn’t leaving until five. sincerely, unicorns.” The site allows you to look at all time, monthly, weekly, or daily tops as voted by users in all of the categories, how dare they, you're a douche, hilarious, and umm, wtf?. Or you can just keep hitting "random."
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11-5-10
http://fractured-simplicity.net/daydreaming/
This website is a rescource for anyone who likes to create graphics for anything, but it specifies on television shows. The website contains screenshots of many shows, most in high quality and some taken from blu-ray discs. In addition, under downloads she has backgrounds to use as well as brushes, patterns, and gradients to download into photoshop. She also has tutorials explaining how to so certain things in photoshop, like adding effects to pictures or creating new kinds of graphics. She periodically changes her layout of the website, always with new graphics of her own. She also does her own version of webgems, where she features a website she thinks is particularly interesting.
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10-20-10
This a a great website for tv addicts, but be warned the entire site is a spoiler alert. It gives daily scoops about most major tv shows, and some minor ones too. The main writer is actually planning on leaving entertainment weekly soon, to start up another website on his own. The column covers the premieres of new shows, cancellations of old shows, and casting changes to ongoing ones. In addition, there is a weekly question and answer post for scoop on readers favorite. He also occasionally posts "blind items," where he describes a major plot twist, but not the show in question, instead choosing to give hints and let the readers guess. You can choose to browse elsewhere on the EW site for things like the EW popwatch, which is an overview of all kinds of pop culture, not just tv. It covers celebrity scandals (which I usually skip), movie casting reports and rumours, and interviews. I use it to keep up with my current shows and find out about some new ones that I might enjoy based on the recommendations. Every year during April he puts out a “scorecard” with how many of what kind of event (weddings, deaths, breakups, etc.) there will be across all the tv shows, and then fills it in slowly every week.
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10-20-10
This is a video that I absolutely love to listen to all the time. The Fratellis are a recent addition to my music play list, but I'm very very glad that pandora suggested them to me. I addition to this song, I also love creepin up the backstairs, chelsea dagger and vince the lovable stoner. They're actually a Scottish band, which makes me very happy because my grandma's family is also from Scotland, and also further proof that Scotland is better than England. The band has a pretty broad variety throughout their music, and they have a decent number of acoustic versions of their songs. This song, whistle for the choir gets stuck in my head all the time, and I love both the acoustic and non-acoustic version. The song always calms me down, and almost lulls me into a trance. This version just has the guitar, and it always makes the words stand out to me, and I love music where the words really matter. I also enjoy that the video’s simplicity matches the simplicity of the song. I makes me think of my sister, because she used to not be able to whistle, and I would always whistle around her just to drive her crazy. |
