What is the Daily Slurp

The Daily Slurp is simply a daily dose of sites to check out. The list is fixed for each day, so a once a day check will do. I will be listing sites that are aesthetically pleasing for one reason or another, it is all about visual appeal. The listing is not limited in the type of sites, it can be flash, css, or even table based if it looks nice. The Daily Slurp is designed to provide the fastest way possible to survey freshly designed web sites on the web.

Who are you?

I am Patrick McNeil the guy behind Design Meltdown. I am just a programmer/designer having fun on the web!

Goals of the Daily Slurp

1. To automate the listing of sites on Design Melt Down
2. To automate the collection of sites from Design Melt Down visitors
3. To provide a simple and fast way to categorize and review sites
4. To provide a simple once a day dosage of well designed sites

Why another stinking site gallery?

Well, the real goal of the Daily Slurp is to automate and streamline link collection for Design Melt Down. As it turns out having a huge database of sites and thumbnails presents an opportunity to deliver a new kind of site gallery. A massive flow of beautiful and interesting sites. So you could almost view the Daily Slurp as a by product of our process for collecting sites. In regards to automation for Design Meltdown, the site has been an enourmous success. I can't even begin to guess how many hours it has saved me. With out the Slurp, the meltdown would have died long ago.

How does it work?

I have built a custom web browser that enables me to surf the web at warp speed. I scour rss feeds, gallery sites, and news sites to dig out the best links. All of these finds are stored in a database ready to be used on Design Melt Down articles. This site is more or less the results of that browsing. I found the results of all this wizardry useful and thought others might as well, so I built this interface to allow the public to use it.

I found that efficiency was of paramount importance when doing any kind of work for Design Melt Down. Anything that does not produce fresh content or expand our reach borders on being a waste of time. This is basically one tool of many that I use to reduce the amount of time spent not writing content to a minimum. Take up a pet project and you will learn exactly what I mean.

Each day I will present a list of sites. This list will be static and is built based on links collected the day before. This means you can hit the list once a day and get a fresh slurp of sites. You can also rest assured that the list you view each day will never be repeated. This is in fact a very selfish tool, I have only built what would help us take in as many sites as quickly as possible.

Where do you get your links?

About half the sites in the slurp are submitted to the slurp by visitors. About one quarter of them come to me via Design Meltdown. The other quarter is generally a mix between my surfing the web and a few select gallery feeds.

It's like a funnel

Look at it this way.

1. Getting listed on Daily Slurp is relativly easy
2. Making it to Design Metldown is a bit harder; about half the sites make it
3. From there 5 sites make it into each .Net article
4. And some other sub set will be making it into my book