December 2004 Archive
Bop It Extreme 2
I wanted to share my joy for the excellent Bop It Extreme 2 that I gave to my step-son for Christmas. The toy is designed for children 8 years and up, but (I’m not embarrassed to admit) Janine and I have been enjoying it more than Eliam.
The idea behind the Bop It is to respond to the instructions that a voice gives you in between an ever changing beat. For example, if you hear, “Bop it!” you need to hit the big button in the middle of the toy. If you hear, “Spin it!” you need to spin the wheel on the corner, and so on. There are five different parts that you have to bop, spin, pull, flick and twist. The longer you keep up, the faster and more difficult the game gets. (Use the “See it in action” link on Amazon to try it out.) However, it’s more than just a game you can play by yourself. It also has one-on-one and pass-it modes, which allow you to easily play head to head or with a large group of people.
The beauty of the toy is the details. Being in its third iteration, the Bop It Extreme 2 is one seriously refined toy. First, the “Spin It!” wheel also doubles as a volume adjustment. Miss the high score? You can easily hear it at any time by twisting the “Twist It!” knob. The best part: it has a headphone jack. So you can actually play it in the car and not drive your parents or friends insane!
Overall, I highly recommend the Bop It Extreme 2 for anyone who loves fast paced, frantic fun. This is definitely one of the best handheld electronic toys on the market today. Buy one for yourself and your best friend.
Posted Elsewhere and the poofing sidebar
I’m trying something new and copying my comments on other weblogs to a new category I set up called “Elsewhere.” This comes after using the stand-alone TrackBack implementation along with a separate weblog to aggregate my comments in a separate section (which no longer exists). The old technique worked, but I wanted to archive the comments and also display them in the context of my other entries. With some inspiration from Kottke, and some help from Compare and ExcludeCategories, my comments will now be published on the homepage (as with the entry directly previous to this one) and archived in my monthly archives along with my regular entries.
While I’m talking new features: I’m also playing around with automatically hiding the sidebar on every page except the homepage. You’re probably not interested in seeing most of its contents every time you visit anyways, and I’d like to keep the design as minimal as possible. So sidebar goes poof. Note that if you want to see it at any time, you can always select the little plus sign (Show sidebar) below the main navigation. I’m a little concerned that new visitors may want to contact me and won’t know how to open the sidebar to find my email, but we’ll see how it goes. A new contact section may be warranted.
Any feedback on these new features is welcome. Have a very happy holiday everyone!
Update: Well, that didn’t go over well. After some more serious thought, I realized that I shouldn’t be grouping comments with entries because they’re so different in nature. Posted Elsewhere will eventually have its own blog, which will also be integrated with the rest of the site, but I can’t say when.
Movable Type undiscussion
The Movable Type support forums, which used to be the nexus of activity in the heyday of Movable Type, has slowed to a dying crawl. Over the past few months, I’ve posted several topics. One topic received a handful of replies, but two others received absolutely none. A year ago the same topics would have generated at least twice the number of replies and probably even more.
I realize that the popularity of Movable Type has relatively decreased since the backlash over pricing in MT 3.0, but surely the dropoff couldn’t have been so bad as to render the support forum lifeless.
I was surprised how a once buzzing forum could go so quiet so quickly, but after I made a quick journey through the Movable Type site, it became easier to understand.
First, the prominent homepage link “Support,” which used to point directly to the discussion forums, now points to a support overview page listing different support options. Six Apart has significantly updated the Movable Type service offerings since MT 3.0, so it seems natural for this to happen. However, the support forums have been dramatically deemphasized on the page. One must scroll half way down the page to find the link and even then, it’s very easy to miss.
As a company that most know the value of community, I find it difficult to understand this sudden change in emphasis. I suggest Six Apart take some notes from the pages of Apple, and make it clear that community discussion is an important part of their support service.
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