I always though it was an interesting idea, and one that could really work in some cases. Independent game developer 2D Boy is one of those cases…

2D Boy makes World of Goo, an interesting and fun physics game that retails for $20. It’s also one of the most-pirated games on the internet, with a whopping 90% piracy rate. This is a game that’s rated very highly by most sources. (It’s also one of the few games that works cross-platform on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.)

So what did 2D Boy do? They ran a Radiohead-style special for a few weeks, letting you pay what you want to download the game. The results?

Out of more than 57,000 sales, about 68% of the downloaders paid $2 or less. And 16,852 buyers only paid one cent. 7,347 were in the $5.00-$5.99 range though.

The GameRiot blog has something to say about that:

$2!!! That is a tenth of the regular retail price!  That is like two tacos at Taco Bell compared to hours of enjoyment with an awesome game from a studio that deserves your money.  I guess it just really disgusts me that so few people paid next to nothing.  I realize the deal was there but how can you consciously pay a penny for any game that you would want to pay.  Almost 30% of the people were completely pathetic and paid a mere penny.

As cheap and “pathetic” as it may be, I’ll certainly agree that it’s not very nice to pay a single cent, it certainly is better than the big fat zero from someone downloading from BitTorrent.

Because the payments were processed through PayPal, 2D Boy didn’t even get those one-penny payments.

For all purchases of around 30 cents and under, we actually saw no money, PayPal took it all, but they probably ended up losing money on most of those transactions ($0.01) as well, they’re not the bad guy.

You can see the full post of results over at 2dboy.com.

So, does this “pay what you want” thing work? I would say yes, but not in every scenario. There are times when you can make some good money, and times where you won’t. People love it, because they can get a great product for a price they can afford, or a price they feel is reasonable. Some will put the minimum amount, yes, but that doesn’t mean everyone will. There are generally enough nice people to make up for some of the cheapskates.

Git seems like a powerful tool, and one I’d definitely like to look into in the future. It seems like it can do a bit more than SVN, as WhyGitIsBetterThanX.com happily points out, and may even be easier once you get used to it.

Git is a open-source code managemen tool; it was created by Linus Torvalds when he was building the Linux kernel. Because of those roots, it needed to be really fast; that it is, and easy to get the hang of as well. Git allows you to work on your code with the peace of mind that everything you do is reversible. It makes it easy to experiment with new ideas in a project and not worry about breaking anything.

Version control systems are great for anybody doing serious coding work, or design even. You could keep your blog’s theme in a repository, for example, so when you make changes to it you can roll them back if things break or you just want to revert back. You would be able to store the files remotely on a Git server, work on them locally (in your WAMP/MAMP server), and when you want to make you changes live you could just checkout the files to your production server.

Now that doesn’t matter so much.

A new feature (currently in beta) has been added to the plugin repository. There’s now a “Compatibility” box with a dropdown selection box. Pick your WP version, and it will show aggregated data from people pushing the “Works” and “Broken” buttons.

A neat idea, providing people don’t try to skew the results by voting “Broken” because they have some sort of vendetta against a developer… I might be worrying too much, but I think it’s a good idea other than that possibility.

It’s funny, in the geeky way characteristic of their comics, but let’s hope that retro web “design” doesn’t become a trend in the future.

The ISPs, phone companies and cellphone carriers have been very vocal in their opposition, and have went so far as to encourage their employees to astroturf. As a result, there has been a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (or FUD) spread about the issue. Some fear that the FCC wishes to impose a version of the old Fairness Doctrine on the internet, which couldn’t be further from the truth. (The regulations would prevent something like that, since they require that any and all lawful content be accessible without discrimination.)

Essentially, these are regulations to prevent regulation or ISP tampering. They’re to make sure that the ISPs stay as what they should be: indiscriminate carriers of unopened and untampered packages.

You can read more thorough explanations of what’s going on at Wired at PC Word:

• Net Neutrality FAQ: What’s in it for You
• FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Now the Fight Begins

Not long after the FCC made their decision, Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona) introduced a bill to Congress known as the Internet Freedom Act. It’s purpose is to “keep the FCC from enacting rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Internet content and applications.” Not only that, but it will essentially prevent the FCC from regulating anything related to the internet or cellphones. This coming from someone who has admitted to not knowing how to operate a computer.

This is an important issue, to everyone. The internet is a global thing, and allowing companies to tamper with the traffic passing through it is bad for everyone, no matter what country they’re from. It must remain neutral.

I would say that you shouldn’t believe the telcos or those who support their agenda, but I prefer not to try to make peoples’ opinions up for them. So I’ll say this: Use your head. Research the issue, find out what both sides have to say. Then make up your mind for your self. Are you for openness, or for giving the telcos free reign?

Anyway, to the design.

Simple, visually interesting, and functional. It also has one of those big, in your face search boxes that are in vogue with “Web 2.0″ sites. The front page has a Google-esque simplicity that leaves no doubt what your next step should be: to search.

When you perform a search, you are taken to the following screen, which serves as a results page and portal to play songs or perform other actions. (You can also add songs to the queue to be played, get Flash embed code to put songs on a website, share songs, etc.)

The results page is displayed as a nifty iPod-style menu, easily sortable by Songs, Artists, Albums, or Genres. You can drill down through the menus to peruse the available tracks.

The breadcrumbs and still-accessible search bar are nice touches.

The styling strikes me as slightly Mac-like, but not quite. The interface seems fairly polished, and easy enough to navigate. Pretty good overall.

In the English language, titles follow a certain convention of capitalization. Titles of books and magazine articles, news headlines, names of publications, etc., they all follow this basic rule: You capitalize every word in the title, except for unimportant words (e.g. and, or, is, the), with the first and last words always being capitalized. Patricia Vennes’ post on Blogging Tips, CaPiTaLiZaTiOn, describes the overall rules to crafting a grammatically-correct title.

All too often I’ve been seeing a trend of blogs naming their posts with basic sentence case, as Engadget does. It just doesn’t look right, and it breaks decades of journalistic convention. You capitalize your name, John Hannibal Quincy Rutherford Wallace Smith, don’t you? Have you ever seen a book with only the first word of the title capitalized? Have you ever seen a printed newspaper without compliant case? Probably not.

If you want to be taken seriously, don’t ignore conventions like this.

Blogging Tips had a recent post, The Capitalization Wars, with a similar point. Interestingly enough, Blogging Tips displays their headlines IN ALL CAPS. However, if you read their posts in an RSS reader, you’ll notice that they appear “properly” there. How is that? The post titles use Title Case, but they use the CSS text-transform property to display them in all-uppercase. If you view the source of the page, they look normal, but the browser renders the headlines in all-caps. It’s a stylistic choice that can be easily reversed at any time.

Please, type your headlines in Title Case. It may seem like a minor pet peeve, but you lose some credibility in the eyes of the “old media” (and the grammar geeks) if you don’t do it “right.”

In the post announcing the change, the fourth iteration of the site, they say that their goals are to make things simpler, searchable, and more social. The search has been improved, and now lets you chose to search within your favorites, everyone’s, or your friends’.

It all looks significantly different. The “simpler” part of their mission has certainly been realized. It’s easy to navigate, and there certainly aren’t any unnecessary elements cluttering things up.

The search, too, works as advertised. It’s good at digging-up what you’re looking for, and seems to be heavily weighted towards views/votes.

It will be interesting to see if this drives more people to the main StumbleUpon site instead of just clicking away at their toolbars. I wonder if the iframe toolbar and Su.pr are also partially attempts at doing just that?