birdhouse is home to a handful of web projects by Scot Hacker, aka shacker. birdhouse has been a bunch of things through the years...
Updated from time-to-time. More than 13 years of posts on misc topics, going back to the beginning of blogging.
Hundreds of pages of mostly outdated writing and web arts, kept around for purely historical reasons. This arts collective started at the birth of the web (around 1993) and was maintained actively through around 1999. None of it has been updated since then, and the formatting and coding is embarrassing by today's standards. But in the mid-90s, there were few enough sites in existence that there were entire magazines dedicated to reviewing individual web sites, and Birdhouse was written up in lots of them. We even won awards for our "cutting edge" use of web technologies, since we were pushing the limits of what was then possible (for example "flow" was the first example of using heavily repetitive animated gifs to create a psychedelic effect, and was considered ground-breaking at the time).
Misc shell, Python, and PHP scripts written over the years to solve specific problems with Django, WordPress, Movable Type, QuickTime Streaming Server, web host performance, and other random stuff.
Birdhouse evolved from its origins as a free host for early web artists to a full-fledged web hosting company, providing personalized mail and web hosting solutions -- primarily for journalists, artists, and non-profit organizations. Birdhouse Hosting closed its doors in December 2015. A few screenshots of the original hosting service are available at the site.
shacker is co-founder and a writer for music exploration site Stuck Between Stations.
I spent years digitizing thousands of albums and CDs, and either photographed or scanned hundreds of high-resolution album covers to go with. I've made them all available for download here.
shacker is the author of the now out-of-print BeOS Bible (Peachpit Press), as well as dozens of articles about BeOS for Byte Magazine. Hacker later wrote MP3: The Definitive Guide for O'Reilly Press.
Bio, resume, more links.
shacker created and once ran bucketlist.org, a site where users go to catalog all the amazing things they want to accomplish before they die. He sold the site in 2012.
shacker created and once ran kissthisguy.com, a site where users go to catalog song lyrics they thought they knew, but had gotten wrong for years. Misheard lyrics are also known as "mondegreens." He sold the site eons ago and it's been transformed by the new owner several times since.