You've no doubt heard the buzz about the new photo element added to A9's yellow pages search, but did you hear about A9's attempt to create buzz on the OC? I mean, c'mon - "I a9.com'd him."? Seriously? Like, no way!

Lame yes, but a harbinger of a new advertising age focused on TiVo-beating in-script product placement. Now I know what your thinking, but don't worry - you'll never hear "I coinz.org'd him" on the O.C. Never. EVER.

Our friends over at 37signals have built another sweet application called Ta-da List. While the functionality is a subset of the list management functionality inherent in Basecamp, the tools is free for anyone to use and the lists you create are sharable. If you have Post-It notes and to-do lists cluttering your desks at work and/or at home, why not consolidate and make them available wherever you are?

Now why didn't I think of the global white space reset when spending all of those hours tweaking countless CSS elements to pacify browser deficiencies? Never again!

Having just dealt with a barage of comment spam on Big Ten Drunks earlier this week, I found it ironic that the folks at Six Apart developed the Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam. While I was able to uncover and implement a number of Six Apart's suggestions (renaming the comments processor, installing MT-Blacklist, Javascript form validation, etc.) by hunting and pecking through Google query results, it looks like I've got a bit more work to do.

Gurunet (which was free), which became Atomica (which was not) has recently morphed into Answers.com (which is free). I used the Gurunet client on a daily basis during its free days, and am definitely looking forward to Alt-Clicking my way to answers using their 1-Click Answers utility.

Who would of thought that A Million Monkey's Typing could come up with such a fine collection of time management templates? While version 1.0 is based heavily upon David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' methodologies, Doug isn't trying to limit users of his templates in any way. Way to begin with the end (user) in mind.

Over the past 5 years or so, PC Magazine has published a list of 100 little-known web site essentials. While blandly titled, PC Magazine's 'Top 100 Web Sites' will point you to more than a few sites that you'll soon become a regular visitor of.

Nick Denton and crew have beta released Kinja, their latest 'weblogs-for-the-masses' creation. Kinja is basically an easy to use RSS aggregator geared towards people that don't know/don't care about what RSS is. I like to think of it as a web-based Newsgator. At any rate, I think it's a really good way to introduce news/blog syndication to a new group of people. You might too.

I've been busy working on a Microsoft Exchange 2003 upgrade for the past 6 weeks or so (hence the no posts in February thing) and finally rolled a new front-end server into production yesterday. A couple of minor snags along the way, but no major issues to report. What I do want to share is how I went about customizing the Outlook Web Access form-based authentication logon form to allow users to enter their user ID sans any prefixed domain information.

Those with multiple domains need not apply, as this hack assumes the existence of a single domain. Those of you that are not implementing form-based authentication will find little value in this approach. Keep in mind that future SPs and point releases may change/overwrite this file, so always keep backups. All caveats, aside, open up the logon.asp file located on your Exchange 2003 front-end Exchange server in the Exchsvr/Exchweb/bin/auth/[country] folder and:

1. Rename the 'name' and 'id' attributes of the input element that accepts the user name input to 'username_pre'.
2. Create a new hidden input element with name and id attributes equal to 'username'.
3. Change the username.focus() references to username_pre.focus().
4. Change the label 'username' reference to 'username_pre'
5. Remove references to 'Domain\' in the form label constants
6. Add a JavaScript string manipulation function that cleanses the user input text and concatenates domain information to it.
7. Add an onClick attribute to the submit input element that calls the function above.

Voila! No need for users to worry about the domain. And why should they? It's not important to them - email is. At any rate, hopefully all of this sort of backwoods code manipulation activity goes away when Microsoft realizes the need and creates a simple configuration option in future versions of Exchange. Until then, no reason not to download and implement this hack.

The folks over at Evolt.org have put together another fine article about how touse CSS to speed up download times. Prying under the hood of this site you'll see a number of them at work and a handful of them that need to be applied. What's that song about time in a bottle? I could use some of that about now.