As a born and bred Englishman and thinking the internet is predominantly English speaking (I think this is correct?) I always thought of internet distribution in those terms. But the emulator first made it big in Japan, so much so it almost broke my bandwidth limits, and it found some popularity in Holland and Germany too. Things had gone quiet recently but now it seems to have been picked up again in Denmark and Eastern Europe (Hungary, and the ex Czech republic mainly). Curiously, other than a few quite minor sites (in terms of hits to lazylaces anyway), and with the exception of a few Broadband specific bulletin boards, the English speaking community doesn't seem to have latched on to it. Odd. I would have never have seen it panning out like that.
Anyway as a result of tracking the stats I've seen some quite interesting referring sites, most of which I haven't understood even with the help of my trusty babelfish, but two have really stood out and joined my list of 'frequent destinations'.
Hanazuc's 'not wild style' is in Japanese (I think) and has a similar (once again I think) linklog style to lazylaces, with useful picture links for every post for plebs like me who don't understand the language. It would be awsome to understand some Japanese. I've already stolen a few links from this site, which I really should have credited, and I highly recommend a visit. Quite a nice design too.
Second up is del.icio.us which has a far more minimalist, almost retro, style, but has top quality, and very up to date content (try refreshing, it changes almost every couple of minutes). Also it wins my all time favourite domain name award. The site is collaborative and the content can cover almost anything, although techie links seemed to predominate whenever I browsed by. I haven't explicitly linked any of their content as yet, but here are a few interesting things I found:
The 2003 web design fashion trends in review. Some very interesting points here that you will have seen around. BIG background images and restrained colour schemes rang a lot of bells for me. Most interesting though was one of the things to watch for this year - using CSS for more than just recreating tabular layouts - something we're all (including, very much so, myself) guilty of. This really kicked me off on thinking of some redesigns for this site - TOTALLY forgetting tables, and the table-esque, opens up some interesting design possibilities.
The iCapture tool lets all us PC users see how all the Mac Safari users see our websites. The most eye opening thing for me was how much better my site font (Trebuchet MS by preference) looks on the Mac. I hope to become a dual Mac/PC household this year so I can enjoy this kind of effect, as my Mum & Dad are ditching their 15" iMac in favour of a self built PC. It suits their software needs and it more than suits my desire to have a varied web test/development bed at home.
Finally hiveware provides a very nice way of obscuring e-mail addresses on web pages. I have my own little script for doing this but it involves too much by-hand configuration so I don't always bother. Unfortunately that means when I'm in a rush I just post my addresses in clear test and I now have a whole heap of spam (in Russsian of all things) to testify what a bad idea that is. This is a very efficient obsucuring method and only takes a little typing to configure for any link with it's nice interface.
I'll post more on interesting referrers and their content as and when they arise.
