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Say hello to Pacecar:

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Pacecar is an online reading tool, designed to help you read faster and with more focus. It masks the distracting elements on the page, giving you a reading window that follows your mouse.

If you’ve ever read a book on speed-reading, you know one of the main techniques is to use a pacer, something that helps guide your eyes down the page, and prevents you from wasting time re-reading. Pacecar is like that, but for the Web!

I built this for fun in my spare time, and I haven’t tested it on anything other than FF for Mac, so please let me know if you find bugs/problems.

Well, I wanted to learn how to write a Facebook application, so I though Teacherly’s wordsearch creator would be a fun one to port. Check out Wordsearchtastic! on Facebook; it runs on the same codebase as Teacherly (using CommunityEngine, of course, was a cinch).

Wordsearchtastic makes it fun and easy to create wordsearch puzzles on Facebook, share them with your friends and see who can finish them fastest. Enjoy!

Here at Curbly headquarters, we’re using DiggDong, a Mac OS X dashboard widget that keeps track of Diggs your stories have gotten. It refreshes periodically in the background, and will let you know (using Growl, if you have it) when there are new Diggs. So you take your fingers off of Command-R and take a bathroom break.

UPDATE: New Version posted! (12/14/06 12:15pm)

Download the DiggDong! widget for Mac OS X

It looks like this:

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Ah, rounded corners, how I loathe thee…

It goes without saying (so I’m saying it) that you can’t really do a Web2.0 site these days without having some rounded corners. And I’m fine with that, I think they’re a popular and appealing design tactic for a reason: they work. They give some visual interest and dimension while softening the look of your site.

But are they ever a pain in the ass to implement. Let me count the ways:

- CSS rounded corners are lightweight, but require extraneous markup.

- Image-based corners are prettiest, but aren’t very flexible and also add non-semantic markup.

- Javascript corners are slow. Period. They look good and they’re flexible and they don’t add markup, but they’re eye-glazingly slow.

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Justin Palmer has the rundown on the latest in a series of pretty significant updates to everyone’s favorite Javascript library. As usual, he’s got an in-depth breakdown of what’s new. I encourage you to read it if you do any Javascript programming at all, as it shows the direction the library is going in.

Among the coolest new features is traversing the DOM with simple Element methods:

$(‘element‘).up();
$(‘element‘).down();
$(‘element‘).next();
$(‘element‘).previous();