Congrats to Team Sweden on winning the Gold in today’s final game of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Congrats also to Team Finland on a great tournament, winning Silver, and a hard fought and great final game to watch.

Final NY Rangers medal count form these games:

• Henrik Lundqvist, Goal, Sweden—Gold Medal
• Ville Nieminen, Forward, Finland—Silver Medal
• Marek Malik, Defense, Czech Republic—Bronze Medal
• Jaromir Jagr, Forward, Czech Republic—Bronze Medal
• Martin Rucinsky, Forward, Czech Republic—Bronze Medal
• Martin Straka, Forward, Czech Republic—Bronze Medal

Also making a showing for NYR and keeping me watching throughout the tournament:

• Darius Kasparaitis, Defense, Russia—Finished 4th
• Fedor Tyutin, Defense, Russia—Finished 4th
• Marcel Hossa, Forward, Slovakia—Lost in Quarterfinals

So, I guess my predictions didn’t come to be, but overall it was a great tournament to watch. For every blowout game there was great one to follow it up.

EEK! Who let the code monkey design again?

Prompted by the Textplate theme design competition I started looking at what it would really take to make a clean and pluggable theme for Textpattern which at the moment doesn’t have a formal theme engine. Having come up with something that is both an interesting (or at least different) design and something that is pretty clean on the back side of things I’m officially releasing the SKY Theme into the wild.

• Demo Site
• SKY Theme Information & Download

While I think it looks good in addition to it being sound technically, but I’m not trying to kid anyone here. I’d be delighted to see people using it on their blogs, but it does have a heavily HTML geek driven aesthetic and I’m don’t think that translates well to the universal appeal that a great theme would have.

... and Marty Straka … and Martin Rucinsky … and Marek Malik.

As a Rangers fan there really is no winning outcome to todays Sweden vs. Czech Olympic hockey match up, is there? Either 3/4 of our scoring gets stopped, or the great rookie goalie Lundqvist gets pounded and takes a chunk out of his confidence.

But it very much is a must watch game and I hope to get to watch some between work.

Best possible outcome seems to be a 1-0 Czech win via shootout goal by Malik that Henrik can easily shrug off and lauch about the rest of the season (after going on to win bronze, of course).

From the game Preview @ TSN, Jagr on facing Henrik: ‘’I don’t know where I’m shooting, how is he supposed to know?”

“Create your own web pages, quickly and easily.”

That’s the lead in on the new Google Page Creator site.

“No technical knowledge required. Build high-quality web pages without having to learn HTML or use complex software.”

From the output of the tool it doesn’t look like the developers had to spend much time learning either. To be fair, it is outputting better code, then, say, iWeb, but there is still quite a lot of cruft and divitis, not to mention the basic validation errors in the templates/hacks they include, the element nesting errors (<div> inside <h1>) and the <font> tags. <font> tags? Woe is me.

Here are a few examples that friends built in the wee hours of the morning:

• http://placenamehere.googlepages.com
• http://chris.messina.googlepages.com
• http://nifkin.googlepages.com/
• http://drew.mclellan.googlepages.com/

Drew, of the eerily apt all in the head has written up his experience and has more words for Google.

[A combination of no coffee in my system yet and a bunch of errors when trying to use the site to generate my has contributed to the snippiness of this post.]

UPDATE: I finally got though and created.. you guessed it… placenamehere.googlepages.com. Also came across some more examples linked above.

Tuesday saw the launch of the latest tool from Technorati – Favorites. Independent of any other watchlists you already have this new Favorites feature allows you to track up to 50 blogs by name and display the entries in the listing style so common elsewhere on the site. Derek Powazek announces the launch on the Technorati blog.

Its interesting, but only mildly useful to someone who already is quite comfortable tracking specific sites in another feed reader. I’m curious what the longer term implications are with the information gleaned from who gets favorited on the authority system also recently unveiled.

The thing that they could do to make it (and the other Technorati features) more useful to me is to come up with a Newsvine like “Watchlist” page that includes all of the listings from my various favorites, watchlisted tags, my own blogs and anything else I mark in some way presented in an easy to skim format. Pull it all into one starting point so I don’t have to go chasing it down with a dozen or so clicks. More often then not I don’t end up using things like my watched tags for just this reason.

All that said I’ve gone and setup a few blogs on my favorites list just to try it out. Works great and I’m glad it offers combined results unlike the watchlist. One thing that bothered me a little was that it was quite easy to get an incorrect address added to my favorites when not entering the full address to a blog in the “Add a blog URL to your Favorites” field. When entering http://domscripting.com/ and http://domscripting.com/blog both take without questioning that there isn’t a ‘blog’ at one. Might just need another step to say “did we find the right blog, if so, add it”. But that is certainly a mild gripe.

It should be no surprise where my favorites can be found, loaded with 15 blogs I enjoy reading.