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‘Bag of the week’ for November 10, 2008: MyHalton—New forum for Halton residents

MyHalton.com is a new forum for Halton residents to share information and post comments about their respective communities.

What has impressed me most about MyHalton is, despite the fact that it is a young forum, knowledgable moderators ensure that virtually every posting had a response in a day or so.

This has enabled anyone to find Halton-specific information from others who live and work in the area. They share information fast with a lot of collaboration—every post or question that I came across had a minimum of one reply.

Comprehensive what’s on listings for Burlington, Oakville, Milton, Georgetown and Acton include theatre, arts, comedy, clubs, music, classes, special events and more! The site also provides a handy event calendar. All members are invited to post upcoming events.

Its aggregation system aggregates feeds from multiple sources, providing updated buy and sell listings from Craigslist, job postings from Randstad, news updates from the Burlington Post, Oakville Beaver and Milton Canadian Champion. The site’s format allows for quick and easy commentary and its small but active community is an encouraging one, eliciting viewpoints from both new and old members.

These aggregated listings provide the backbone for Halton’s largest and most visited free classifieds area. Categories include buy & sell listings, real estate, jobs, et al.

Restaurant reviews are provided by Menuism, making MyHalton the only source you need to find and recommend restaurants in Halton Region. Menus, restaurant guides, reviews and more are provided for Burlington, Oakville, Milton, Georgetown and Acton. You are also encouraged to post your own reviews, comments and criticisms.

The forum also provides an area for new or visiting residents. Whether you are considering Halton as a destination for your next vacation, to come as a tourist to one of the many Halton festivals, or are a visitor currently in the Halton area this forum is designed to provide a fun, user friendly way of discussing and discovering information!

Discovered via dsendecki’s LinkBag—bagged under Random Links.

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‘Bag of the week’ for November 3, 2008: Long Awkward Pose!

Never stop smiling! This link has been around for a while, but it’s still killing us.

It’s an oft-repeated experience: Your buddy picks up a digicam or cameraphone, and you obligingly assume a your ‘cheese’ stance. How long do you hold the frozen smile, though, before suspicion creeps into your mind? How long before you wonder: Hey, what’s going on here? The clips presented at ‘Long Awkwared Pose’ made us cry with laughter, and begged more questions than they answered:

• How many times will a husband say “cheese”?
• How long will a friend pose holding a football?
• And when will a man begin to say demandingly: “Do you really know what you’re doing?”

Site owner Katie Dippold reveals the hilarity that ensues when people start thinking that way. Katie has hoodwinked friends and pranked family. Now she invites you in on the hoax. “Tell your loved ones you would like to take their photo,” she coaxes, and “then secretly videotape them.”

Check out Long Awkward Pose. Discovered via dsendecki’s LinkBag—bagged under Funny Links.

Remember, nothing left to do but smile!

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‘Bag of the week’ for October 13, 2008: Ready-to-print TEFL handouts for overworked teachers!

Okay, ESL teachers, you’ll love this site: AZQQ.com.

Ready-to-print TEFL handouts for overworked teachers! AZQQ.com is a general English language site, specializing in ESL (English as a Second Language) with a wide range of resources for learners and teachers of English, and has been running since the beginning of 2008. Different varieties of English are used; there are contributors from the United States, Canada, Britain and non-native speakers.

With many years experience of EFL in a variety of Asian countries, the members of AZQQ know what makes good supplementary material, what works in a classroom and what may not, as well as the pressures of teaching that often require ‘easy to teach’ lessons with minimum preparation.

They have many differentmaterials for English as a Second Language (ESL) students and teachers, which include resource pages, handouts, and exercises. You can also get printer-friendly and Adobe PDF versions of these handouts and exercises in our printer-friendly handouts section. You can also get a printer friendly Theyb page or PDF version of each handout or exercise by clicking the links on each page. Over 60 other handouts and exercises concerning grammar are also available in our grammar handouts section.

For students (and teachers), They have a page with links to resources that assist ESL students by ansTheyring general questions about the English language and helping with grammar problems, idioms, and academic conventions. It also has pointers to several listservs and MOOs, as Theyll as some online English courses.

For teachers, They have a page with links to various pedagogical resources, including online journals, lists of other online resources, and an annotated bibliography for ESL instructors.These resources should be especially useful for educators new to ESL settings.

Thematic Units for ESL Learners. These packages include teaching suggestions, plus all student manual materials and transparencies for English as a second language educators. Each unit contains everything a teacher needs to teach a complete theme unit — including teacher objectives, student objectives, reproducible student work sheets, integrated lesson plans, review activities, enrichment activities. You can use these units with complete confidence: AZQQ has been providing theme-based, teacher-friendly units and lesson plans for teachers internationally. Each unit is written by educators for educators!

Also includes Discussion Prompts. A list of conversation prompts that are available to print and copy for your students. If you have any ideas on how to use question sheets like this or if you have a list of questions that you want made into a worksheet, let us know!

Would you like some new EFL, ESL games and activities for your classroom ? Are you looking to add some spark to your English teaching? This category is dedicated to EFL, ESL language teaching and learning games and activities for children.

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‘Bag of the week’ for September 22, 2008: Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

Again, thanks to our favourite user, i1135t, comes another great service. This one was posted to their “Online Web Utilities” bag. It’s called, “Down For Everyone Or Just Me?” and serves a singular and useful purpose: to see if that web site you’re trying to reach is actually down, or if your busted-up computer or network filters is the problem. When you can’t get your Gmail or hit your favorite (hint, hint) weblog, just go to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com, type in the address of the site that’s MIA, and find out if it’s really, you know, down for everyone or just you. I imagine this wouldn’t work perfectly in a multi-server situation—like if some Google servers were up but not others. Still, a quick and easy way to see whether your problem is widespread.

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Way overdue New Year’s resolutions!

We’ve been terribly busy: since our announcement last november of our hundredth signup, another two hundred users have joined the fun. And because of this, we’ve been more quiet then I would like, and I want to apologize.

It feels that we’ve spent almost all of our time uncomfortably bursting at the seams; we’ve always been at pretty much close to capacity, as this project is not our day job! We’ve worked very hard to keep the system asusable as possible in that time.

However, I feel that during this very exciting time for the team I’ve personally had less capacity for talking more openly to the our small but growing community about what’s been going on. Given that we’ve undergone a lot of changes and have a lot more in store in the future, I want to resolve to be better about communicating.

More soon from all of us!

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‘Bag of the week’ for January 28, 2008

This week, a great selection of links from user i1135t. It’s a great way to resume our weekly feature articles after a brief impromptu fall/winter break.

i1135t offers up a pretty eclectic mix of bags featuring Firefox, Music, Lifehacker, Online TV, Online Web Utilities, GMAIL Tweaks, Techie Resources, Freeware, Linux, and Ubuntu! Whew!

A brief sampling reveals a slew of useful links, chief among them this Lifehacker link. Not only do the editors over at Lifehacker feed our heads with a feast of posts every day, every once in a while they put their programming chops to good use and build custom software for their readers. Check out all the open soure goodness here.

In i1135t’s music bag we happened upon Music Map—the tourist map of music. Even if you don’t know what you are looking for—the music map will find it. Music Map is a self-adapting system that learns about the outer world by asking its visitors what they like and what they don’t like. It is a kind of a search engine for music you don’t know about. It will ask you what music you like and then think about what you might like too.

Last but not least is the Techie Resources bag. Chief among these links is Ask the Admin—a site dedicated to answering your technical related questions. As a collective they have loads of information stored away in their ‘meat computers’ but occasionally they will have to go out and search the interwebs for an answer. They also review new products, services and pretty much anything that will improve our quality of life.

Thanks i1135t! A great bag o’ links—a great way. Check the rest of ‘em out here.

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RSS feeds your head!

Bet you didn’t know that well over 50 per cent of the requests seen by LinkBag are for RSS feeds! That means that users cruising around our site with browsers are actually in the minority when it comes down to pure traffic. Instead, our heaviest resource users include personalized home pages and desktop news aggregators.

With that in mind, it makes sense to remember that even the smallest changes can have a really big impact. Thus, given that our feeds have been doing a decent job this far, they haven’t changed much from their simple beginnings.

Decent isn’t perfect, though. So, our team’s been working on some small improvements. We’ve been looking into how our feeds are used and how to better streamline and present our information in different contexts. These improvements include features like:

• Offering the ability to save bookmarks straight from your feed reader.
• Building more useful feed content with links to people, tags, and more bookmark details;
• Providing more metadata where it seems useful, or less where it appears redundant.

And, this is just the start. We’re putting out these changes gradually, on a per-user basis, and we’re planning for more. So, if you don’t see any improvements in your favourite feed reader yet—or if the changes haven’t quite hit their mark for you—be sure to contact us and let us know!

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‘Bag of the week’ for November 20, 2007

Aside from stuffing our faces with 7,000 calories worth of food on Thanksgiving, Americans (and Canadians but one month earlier) are supposed to reflect on what we’re most thankful for. While things like LOLcatz and coffee definitely make the list (oh right, and our families and friends, we guess), we wanted to show a little appreciation for the our users as well.

The LinkBag staff would link to thank all of of users!

As an extra special holiday treat, we present to you a turkey-flavoured Tuesday feature — our third installment of the ‘bag of the week’. The ‘bag of the week’ features interesting, provocative, and irreverent web sites culled from linkbag’s users. Each week we feature a new ‘bag’.

This week, we’re featuring “Playable Web Games” via diggsby’s linkbag. This is a bag of “Fun free online games to play during your office coffee break or when you are in the zone at home.”

This offbeat bag includes —

1. Play hundreds of classic Nintendo 8-bit games on-line
   Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, Mega Man, Castle-Vania and most of the other classic Nintendo titles playable directly in the browser without download.
2. The most incredibly messed up “Choose Your Own Adventure” you’ll ever play
   Join the circus. Start a nuclear war. Go back in time and sleep with your mother. Play the first two levels of Castlevania. I don’t remember the books being like this when I was a kid!
3. Play Lemmings in your browser
   Remake of lemmings that can be played in your browser. Bringing the old school to the new school.
4. The Weirdest Flash Game You Will Play All Day
   There is no way to explain this one.

Thanks to diggsby for putting together such a cool collection. Thanks and stay tuned for next week’s ‘bag of the week’!

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LinkBag Wordpress Widget almost ready!

Many blogging platforms work well with linkbag, thanks to our RSS feeds. But if you are looking for a really simple way to have your latest linkbag bookmarks displayed as part of your wordpress blog, you might want to try our widget. Using it is as simple as uploading a widget to your wordpress blog!

Instead of forcing a specific style, we’ve tried to make them unobtrusive enough that they should blend in with the look of your blog. We’re almost done testing — but you can see it in operation here and on our own sidebar.

More soon from us!

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‘Bag of the week’ for November 6, 2007

Welcome to our regular Tuesday feature, and now, our second-ever ‘bag of the week’. The ‘bag of the week’ features interesting, provocative, and irreverent web sites culled from linkbag’s users. Each week we feature a new ‘bag’. This week, we’re featuring “Offbeat News” via stevenl’s linkbag. This is a bag of “weird, odd, strange, funny, offbeat, or crazy, but true news stories in the US and around the world provided by various news sites like Yahoo, Reuters and, [stevenl's] favorite, Digg!”

This offbeat bag includes —

1. 16 Headstones That Make You Go Hmmmm…
   Benjamin Franklin said: “Show me your cemeteries, and I will tell you what kind of people you have.” Some must-see stuff here.
2. 8-year-old Ohio twins gain fame for anti-wedgie underwear design using fabric fastener
   Using rigged boxers and fabric fasteners to hold together some seams, Jared and Justin Serovich came up with the Rip Away 1000. “When the person tries to grab you – like the bully or the person tries to give you a wedgie – they just rip away,” Justin explained on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
3. Student finds baroque painting inside old sofa
   Berlin student who bought a second-hand sofa bed at a flea market learned she had been sitting on a small fortune when she found a baroque painting hidden inside the couch.
4. Lawn-watering spat leads to death
   A 66-year-old man was bashed to death while watering his lawn in an argument over Sydney’s water restrictions, police and media said Thursday.
5. New species of ‘giant wild pig’ discovered hidden in the Amazon jungle
   A new species of wild pig previously unknown to science has been discovered in the Brazilian jungle. The large creature grows to a length of more than four feet and is almost twice as heavy as its nearest relative. Named the ‘giant peccary’, the creature was unknown until the skins and bones of animals were found by a biologist.

Thanks and stay tuned for next week’s ‘bag of the week’. Same blog time, same blog channel!

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