New Sidebar Section of Interesting (to some) Site Links

For some time I have been thinking about adding a new sidebar section to my site containing a selection of the sites I usually visit. Tonight I finally decided to do it. If you scroll down through the sidebar you will find it. It looks like the image capture at left.

As you might expect, each tile links to the site indicated.

Don’t forget to use Ctrl+Click if you want to open the site in a new Tab (and that would be Shift+Click for those people using Opera).

The first tile links over to Paul Thurrott’s Windows Supersite, which, as the name might suggest, contains lots of information about Microsoft Windows and Windows products such as Office and SQL Server. There are also items on Paul’s site about Windows Phone, Zune, and Xbox.

The next tile, Dvorak, links to John C. Dvorak’s blog called “Dvorak Uncensored” where John posts up news items that take his fancy, usually with a suitable Dvorak-style remark appended.

The Telegraph tile links to the UK Telegraph, one of my favourite on-line newspapers, and thankfully the UK Telegraph has not started charging (yet) as you open the news items.

Almost everyone has probably come across Cracked.com where you can learn about vital things such as “5 Things You Don’t Learn About High School Until Too Late”, “6 Horrifying Implications of the Harry Potter Universe”, and “7 Scientific Reasons You’ll Turn Out Just Like Your Parents”.

Regular readers of my site will have come across Goodshit, the 5th tile in my list, before. Goodshit is sort of a news aggregator (a site that pulls together interesting news stories) but Fred Lapides, who runs Goodshit, also sprinkles in some eye candy (for males) to break up the grief and depression caused by readying all that bad news. In between the eye candy Fred posts up some seriously interesting things to link to and read about or study.

A tiny example of the eye candy from Goodshit is shown at right—you’ll have to go to Goodshit using my new sidebar section to see the large version.

The 6th tile is TWiT (This Week in Tech) and I have mentioned TWiT many times before so I won’t try and think up any more things to say.

Seventh is the Daily Rotation. The Daily Rotation is another news aggregator but they focus on technology news from various sources including Slashdot, C|Net, Wired, InfoWorld, and How-to Geek.

Trey Ratcliff’s “Stuck in Customs” is the 8th tile. This is a photography site where Trey posts a new one of his awesome HDR processed images every day. For anyone into photography Trey also has on line tutorials and conducts semi-regular Google+ Hangouts.

Following is one of Trey’s HDR images where he takes a relatively normal ‘boring-ish’ scene and makes it into something eye-catching that you would gladly hang on your wall (well I would anyway).

I am currently ‘reading’ (via an Audible book) a book that was recommended by Trey called “Name of the Wind”.

Ninth is Big Think. I guess in a way Big Think is a news aggregator but the news that Big Think finds and features is sort of the news underneath the news. They cover some of the big questions like “What is Love?” and “What Do Women Really Want?” Or “Breakthroughs: Cancer” and “The Mystery of Memory”.

My final tile links over to TED (Ideas Worth Spreading). If you have not been to TED and watched some of the videos there then I recommend that you do. A couple of suggestions of mine to break you into TED would be “The Intelligence of Crows” (here) and “Schools Kill Creativity” (here).

If anyone watches a particularly interesting TED talk then you could post a comment here so others can check it out.