chuggnutt.com

After I last posted about the buttons (see "Button Sites" from March 14) on Web sites, and the button maker, I've noticed that others are taking notice, and it's popping up elsewhere:

• Wil Wheaton: stay all day if you want to (March 23)
• Jeremy Zawodny: Politically Incorrect Blog Buttons (March 22)
• Boing Boing: Fun Web button maker (March 19)

Damn, I'm ahead of the curve! I must be some kind of trendsetter!

... and if you believe that, I have some lovely oceanfront property in South Dakota you might be interested in...

My post about the buttons from the other day ("Those small web buttons...") yielded up some excellent links:

Taylor McKnight has an amazing archive of all the known buttons, 2025 at current count. Nice. I'm not even bothering to "collect" any more.

Kalsey Button Maker is an online app that automagically creates the buttons for you. Though with all the buttons available at the other site, this is kind of redundant—but it's fun to fool around with.

Playing around with Google's image search, I've thought of some advanced search features they need to implement. Hopefully someone at Google is reading this and will get right on it ;)

You need to be able to search by specific image dimensions (in pixels); for example, I'd like to be able to type "width:80 height:15" or maybe "dimensions:80x15" and have Google return all the images that are 80 by 15 pixels (yes, this idea is directly related to my last post on the 80x15 images). This can't be hard; Google's already caching the size of the image and displaying that on the search results pages, so why not be able to search them?

I've been noticing recently the proliferation (mostly on blog sites) of those small image files that are 80 pixels wide by 15 pixels high, are generally two-tone in color and use a simple old-school-looking font. Like these:

And I'm wondering, what's the story? What are they called, exactly? (I'm thinking either "buttons" or "badges.") Who's making them? I think they're pretty cool, actually; clever, simple, and elegant, and a damn good graphical meme that's working it's way around my brain. I just haven't been able to find out anything about them online, and I'm getting really curious.

So I've started "collecting" them, saving any news ones I come across into a "badges" directory on my computer. I've got 42 already in two days. (Hmmm, 42. Coincidence?)

So, what's the scoop? Anyone know?