Feaverish

MacZOT! is a good idea I can’t believe someone hasn’t thought of before. Every day they offer a sale price on a different piece of Mac shareware. The deal only lasts for one day, and they only offer a set number of licenses (they usually sell them all before the day’s over, so shop early). In a way I feel bad shortchanging Mac programmers, but I suppose any per-item loss of profit is made up for in quantity and publicity.

Speaking of great ideas, have you heard of Blingo? It’s a search engine (based on Google) that you get prizes for using. Better still, you can refer your friends and get prizes when they win, too! So if I sign you up, and you win a video iPod, I also win a video iPod. It’s all totally free; all you have to do is click the image below to be added to my friends. Once you’ve signed up yourself, send invitations to all your friends and wait for the prizes to roll in. The more people you sign up, the better your chances of winning. Yeah, it’s basically a pyramid scheme, but it’s free and no one has to buy any knife sets or anything to participate.

So far I’ve won a $10 iTunes gift certificate, but I’m really hoping for one of those video iPods. Don’t let me down, people.

Oh, and a couple of notes: I think Blingo’s only open to U.S. residents, and only your first 10 searches per day count towards prize-winning.

Updates: Thanks to everyone who’s signed up as a Blingo friend. I forgot to mention that there are instructions for adding Blingo search to Firefox or Internet Explorer. If you’re using Safari, you can install the excellent AcidSearch plugin. Besides letting you add different search engines to your search toolbar, AcidSearch has a great Firefox-esque find-as-you-type feature. You’ll need OS X 10.3 or better.

Finally, I thought I should mention that today’s (Thursday, March 9th) macZOT! special is one of my favorite programs, Xyle scope. It’s a Safari-based browser and web inspector that breaks down a web page into easy-to-read HTML and CSS, letting you see how any page is built. Click on a page element and Xyle scope shows you the corresponding HTML and CSS. It’s pretty much completely replaced the also-excellent Web Developer Extension for Firefox on my computer.