Brian Cook Presents

After seeing numerous end-of-year lists around the web, I thought it fitting to sum up my Top 5 in each category of The Cookblog. And so, without further ado, here they are:

Art
These are the best web sites and artists that I discovered during the past year.

Edward Gorey - I’ve posted about him before, but the […]

I spend hours each day working on a computer, so when I get home, it’s usually a relief to read, exercise, visit friends or watch TV. However, I’ve got some side projects that also require me to use a computer. All work and no play makes Brian a dull boy, so short gaming breaks are […]

I don’t like to brag, but I’m 1/4 of the most dynamic company with the best prospects in the world. I’m talking, of course, about Borgamo LLC, a board game business that is now expanding into all sorts of areas including travel and video games.

These sites will very soon turn into outstanding repositories of information […]

Happy Birthday John, you magnificent bastard.

John Mayer - Kid A (Radiohead cover)
John Hartford - Indian War Whoop
Paul McCartney - Dance Tonight

Thanks to bad directions from the worst hosting company ever, plus my own carelessness, I deleted The Cookblog’s MySQL database yesterday. After exporting the database, deleting it, and recreating it, my attempts to import all of the tables back in met with failure due to an error. Further study showed that the export contained an […]

More people have websites these days than ever before. Blogs, family photo albums and online resumes are just some of reasons for this growth in web publishing. Fortunately, the proliferation of blogging engines, templates and apps has continued apace, meaning that virtually anyone who’s pointed in the right direction can make a website that is […]

One basic design decision when creating copy for print or web is typeface. I recently discovered a nifty cheat sheet at The Thinking Blog that summarizes complementary fonts in a simple table. As useful as the PDF document is, I thought it could be improved by applying the actual fonts to their respective names. At […]

There’s a lot of talk these days about Web 2.0. What is “Web 2.0″ exactly? What do people mean when apply the label to something? Web 2.0 is a buzzword, a sensibility and a revolution all in one. At its root, Web 2.0 is a combination of style and substance. For most people, the term […]

News: You can now view my Technorati Profile.

In recent weeks, blogs like Lifehacker have championed tactics and services aimed at increasing a person’s online visibility. While this may be useful for a future President of the United States, a far more useful lesson would be how to create an [online] alter ego.

Take Henry Chinaski and Kilgore Trout. Doppelgängers like Bukowski and Vonnegut’s […]