Favorite Web Sites

Lots of web sites are interesting, but I find myself returning to a small number of them quite often. Wired magazine is one of them. I confess I am letting my print subscription expire because I prefer to read it on line. Their print edition uses extremely small fonts and they have the nasty habit of using black pages with white text, an abomination that should be outlawed both in print and on the web.

The science and technology section of The Economist has stuff you can't find elsewhere. And, unlike Scientific American magazine, they are apolitical.

A periodic look at World Architecture News is fun. They picture and describe virtually every new important architectural design in the world. I gather that the design firms themselves provide the material. They also review architectural prizes. The Australian Institute of Architects gave their 2008 prize to an Australian firm for the Watercube National Swimming Centre at the Beijing Olympics.

Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, better than Google for many purposes. Contributing to Wikipedia is a bit of fun, too. I got some small pleasure this morning in updating the article on Raymond Lowey to note that his daughter Laurence died in October. I added the "mandatory" pointer to her obituary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of course.

WikiDashboard is an interesting recent appendage to Wikipedia. It's a project at PARC, the folks who brought you the mouse, the GUI, Ethernet, and laser printing. WikiDashboard indexes changes to Wikipedia in real time so you can see who modified an article and when, or you can see a list of mods made by a particular individual.

Then there's the lesser-known Wiktionary, the free dictionary. It includes etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations, as well as a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, and phrase books. Given time, it could rival the OED and Roget's. Worth checking daily just for the 'word of the day.' Today it's nychthemeron. Unfortunately, not a very useful word - unless you are Greek.

Another favorite, though little needed web site is the WaybackMachine. This site, unbelievable as it may seem, makes a copy of every page of every known web site and saves it. You can retrieve the list of snapshots as well as the snapshot itself if you know the old URL. Talk about archiving!

I often use Google for a spell checker. It loads faster than Word.

Least favorite sites? Digg.com and similar (too messy.)

Of course the blogs of friends and family and the pictures of my granddaughter are always surfed.