Most-useful websites
OUR MONTHLY ROUND-UP OF THE WEB’S MOST ILLUMINATING, USEFUL, OR JUST-PLAIN-COOL WEBSITES.
Emojibuilder EXPRESS YOURSELF! phlntn.com/emojibuilder
As its title may suggest, this website allows you to build custom emojis from a collection of parts and components of existing emojis. These range from the ubiquitous smile of the smiley to the more obscure alien face and dollar-tongue. The interface is really quite simple, with a selection of faces, eyes, mouths, and accessories on the left-hand side from which to draw from, and the canvas in the centre. Once you’ve selected a few of the face-pieces, you can then change the order in which they overlap, adjust their X-Y coordinates, or change their scale and rotation. If you think you’re in too deep, you can clear the canvas or completely randomise it, and if the array of components isn’t enough for you, you can import your own to add to the fray. Once you’re done, you can save a large or small PNG image of the emoji for your use, although you’ll only be able to use it in your device’s emoji keyboard if it allows you to upload custom images.
Squoosh TWEAK, COMPRESS AND OPTIMISE YOUR IMAGES squoosh.app
The Google Chrome Labs has produced a rather nifty web tool by the name of Squoosh. The aim of this PWA (Progressive Web App) is to help web developers simply and easily compress images, thereby reducing their file size in order to help pages load faster. If you happen to be running the latest version of the Chrome browser on ChromeOS or Windows 10, this means you can utilise the PWA as well. Simply drag and drop an image of your choosing and muck around with the image size, quality, number of colours, dithering and file-type in order to see how the file size is reduced and how the image itself is impacted. For instance, reducing the quality to 50% makes little differece in visible quality in a given sample image, but it manages to reduce the file size by 83%. There’s also a swathe of advanced settings if you feel like diving into the nitty-gritty, although we have to admit that each setting in this menu had us turn to Google for some definitions.
The Electric Typewriter LETTING LONG-FORM LITERATURE LIVE LONGER tetw.org
It’s The Electric Typewriter’s mission to act as a central hub for some of the better long-form journalism floating around the web – from Hunter S. Thompson to Zadie Smith and plenty of lesser-known authors in between. While the site hosts semi-regular thematic posts (such as “10 great articles about the psychology of the internet”), you can also sort through the immense library of links by author or subject. While the Author’s page only hosts 30 of the most well-known writers on the site, the subject page ranges wildly. You can check out non-fiction on sex, love, happiness, life, death, music, social media, mental health, war, and just about every major theme you can think of. Each of these respective pages or posts will contain a series of links that will send you to free sources for the respective pieces of work, letting you read the full essay, article, or journal entry at your leisure. If you’re wanting to track down the hidden treasure immediately, the page also offers a “150 great articles” section to give you a headstart.