cjorgensen (user #59453) follows in the same great tradition as Lazlo Toth, satirically typing and mailing actual letters in an enthusiastic, friendly persona. Who do these letters go to? Corporations, cultural icons, pills, the Care Bears... and many more. The site is intended to explore the ensuing correspondences, but it seems he gets way fewer replies than Lazlo Toth ever did. Still, cjorgensen's initial volleys are pretty funny.
So I decided I'd aim for the low MeFi user numbers. The lowest numbered user I could find who also has an associated webpage is jjg (user #16). And this is where he keeps his hidden agenda. It is a site that really works, fulfilling his strategic objectives while meeting the needs of his users. (OK, I just lifted that off the page that hawks his excellently-reviewed book, The Elements of User Experience.) But really, the "Hidden Agenda" isn't hidden too well; I found it, and it's full of useful aphorisms.
Plutor (user #17646) is MetaFilter's Greasemonkey Script Guru. Plutor.org's front page has a very MeFi-ish feel, chock full of links to interesting stuff, sprinkled with flickrs and twitters, sorted by date. Clicking on the "Photos" tab leads to... whaaaaat?! 404'd?! Oh Plutor... oh my... **shaking head sadly** Anyway, moving right along, there's a tiny fiction section that leads you to community-type fiction sites, a section on the history of Logan's web-presence, a place where he lists his computer hardware (circa 2006), his resumé, and finally, a brash statement on the contact page that Plutor does not fear spam!!
Mmmmm, steak.
goodnewsfortheinsane (user #20191) was last profiled on this blog about 16 months ago, but has since added a website to his arsenal, and it's a doozie. Electicker 2008 aggregates just about anything you can find on the web about the 2008 US presidential election into convenient categories (a poll-ticker, videos, metamedia, blogs, podcasts, twitters, flickrs, wingnuts, just to name a few), all in real time. It's pretty easily skimmed or scanned—still, it's mind-boggling, the amount of stuff there is.
And here's the GoogleTranslation portal into his personal Dutch-language website. It seems to be about music, mostly.
nosila (user #60765) has a website that... that... well, what does it do? Nothing that I can control, it seems, but it's a screenfull of spooky, shifting imagery and random echoey bleats of musical snippets. The figures and the sounds seem to respond to mouse motion, and clicking on the absurdist words and sentences in the upper left corner only exacerbate the situation. It's quite disorienting; I feel sorta dizzy and oogy. The only meaningful words on the screen are "Download Album." So I click on that, and the site spits out a .zipped album, by her band Voodoo Economics, which turns out to be actually quite interesting and quirky and snakey--and Alison has a cool voice! To think I almost missed this music due to frustration at the artsiness/incomprehensibility of the containing website. Afterward, I notice further down on nosila's mefi profile page that there is a warning: "creepy, uncanny sounds play automatically." d'oh!
borborygmi's (user #19030) Blogborygmi is subtitled, "A digest of developments in the life of an emergency medical resident." Which is funny because borborygmus (n. pl. -i) is the SAT word for stomach-growling-sound. Hence, a "digest." ahem. It's also apt that his latest entry has to do with the physiological side of competitive eating. The rest of the blog does what it says on the bottle, and more.
edlundart (User #10322) hangs out in the MeFiMusic backwaters a lot, and Bård's website showcases his music alongside his other artistic outlets--photography and poetry included. But it's his digital images and illustrations that stand out--mostly very tactile-looking, geometric, featureless bendy people, posed in various ways among simple, stark backdrops. There are also a few wordless comix featuring these people. The miscellaneous section of the site also yields a couple of gems: Bård has designed a double-heeled stiletto and a thong with f-holes! (F-holes as in like what's on a violin.) In his bio, we learn that Bård is "pronounced 'Board,' or yes, 'Bored.'" [Insert your own pun about boredom leading to creativity here.]
The design is pretty no-nonsense, sans bells-n-whistles, sometimes mildly frustrating as options for navigation are found in tiny fonts at the bottoms of some pages; but that was easy to spot after a few clicks.
ukdanae (User #38639) is the editor of Knickers, a lingerie weblog. I have actually never seen a lingerie weblog before. This one has great photos -- yes, of women in their underwear -- and a crisp clean design. The writing is informative, a little funny but not always-on-ribald. There's even a subsection of the site called "Ask Knickers" with questions about bra sizing and tracking down tough to find underwear. While the photos may be strictly speaking NSFW, Knickers is full of solid information on good underwear.
mindsound (User #63168) is pretty new. Actually he's been a member since... Monday of this week. But I just peeked at his eponymous blog which seems to have posts from April and November of this year and saw that he and his wife are pregnant. Congrats mindsound and welcome to MetaFilter!
mimi (User #1174) has a great blog called Dynagirl 5.0. Her archives are a lot of fun, I particularly like her entries about cooking Julia Child recipes (and her cassoulet has me salivating), but all the cooking stuff is great. The little essay she wrote to get Henry Rollins tickets is fun. I really wish the pictures were still working in the Squirrel Car project. Oh, and this entry is AWESOME.
Greg Nog (User #36852) draw comics. I heard about his site during the podcast where the thread about his comics about him being a host at Olive Garden were discussed. If you like the powersuit comic, you'll love this page where you can dress Greg Nog. He does other comics too.
Bazman (User #5926) has made no comments and no posts at MetaFilter, and his site is a link farm. But I'm desperately curious about what it once was since the title They Should Die has me hooked. Ah ha, apparently it was a place where you could vote about wanting certain celebrities to die. The banner is a Great Leap Forward style propoganda poster. Meh.
bigdumbHoosier (User #2792) has a very comprehensive blog about Indiana environmental issues called big eastern. The reporting is good and the writing is also decent. He only ever made one comment at MetaFilter, that closes a thread about the bursting of the dot com bubble.
seawallrunner (User #18854) is a mefite I first became aware of because she sent me a cd I liked during a cd swap. I looked at her website and discovered that she does the same kind of running I do. Her photo blog is filled with gorgeous landscape shots of backcountry vistas. It's well worth spending some time looking at what she's posted (I particularly like this snowy shot of dawn).
