On Monday I mentioned an online HSV/RGB color conversion tool that I would be making available shortly: You can now find it at http://www.yafla.com/yaflaColor/ColorRGBHSL.aspx.

It's pretty trivial, but it might be useful for someone, so I thought I'd release the URL. There is much more that I planned on doing with it before releasing, but a nasty bug (the flu kind) has prevented that, so I'm releasing it as-is for now. It will likely improve over the coming weekend if I get any spare time.

ex. http://www.yafla.com/yaflaColor/ColorRGBHSL.aspx?RGB=9cceef

[alternately you can pass the H, S, and V variables]

You will get several other colours in addition to your selected colour: Not only will you get a grid of saturation and value variations for the current hue, but you'll also get convenience grouping colors based upon general color theory.

• Complementary color - This is the opposite color of the selected hue on the color wheel.
• Triad colors - These are the two pair colors equi-spaced on the color wheel with your selected color. Some believe these three make a good combination.
• Analog colors - These are the hues to either side of the selected color. Again, some believe this makes for a nice color combination.
• Split complementary colors are the analogs to the compliment of your selected color. Some believe that these two with your selected color make a great color theme.

This tool is not complex, and I'm not intending it to be taken as Earth shattering - it's simply scratching my own itch: I often find myself in need of varying saturations of a particular color, or an easy way to get aesthetically pleasing partner colors. There are lots of alternatives, but this was my own lightweight, easy option.

The colors on the page are clickable, so you can browse around. As an aside, the div layout works best in Opera (where groupings are actually grouped), but comes through as a vertical column in Mozilla and Internet Explorer (UPDATE: I've put aside any DIV purity, and just used a table. It now works in all of the major browsers properly). This was just a humor thing and I haven't had the time and opportunity to diagnose why those browsers aren't doing what they should be doing.

[SEE ALSO: yaflaColor goes AJAX & yaflaColor Updates]

First, some meta-data: This blog has been operational for about a month and a half, and averages over 1,000 unique visitors a day (it's on a solid upward growth path). Quite a few more visitors are reading indirectly through feed/aggregation services. I'm extremely pleased with the reception, and I appreciate everyone who takes a moment to drop by, or who recommends it to a friend or associate (or even friendly associates, or associates of friends, or...). 

Of course, I don't have the big subscription numbers or incestuous links that earlier entrants have: While I was posting content on the web since its general public availability (I did invent the web after all), it wasn't in blog form, so I'm far behind the likes of Scoble and friends. With the long-tail, and millions of great blogs, it's a lot more difficult racking up thousands of readers a day than it was just a year or two ago.

Nonetheless, I am enormously satisfied.

The content thus far has been covering technical and software business related items (there's a lot of great content here - though I should confess that I'm a bit biased. Seriously, take a look back through the days and you're likely to find some entertaining, interesting, and informative stuff), however it's going to ramp up to something even more interesting as some ideas take real-world form.

Anyways, onto some real content: Looking back over some of the entries over the past couple of weeks, a painfully obvious realization hit me - Quite a few times when I provide a link for something I mention - for instance the Japanese Tea Party link in a post from yesterday - I do so just as a bit of extra-information for those people who care. The PageRank of this blog isn't huge, but it isn't terrible either (I think it's PR5), so I've bequeathed a bit of PageRank goodness to the recipient of that link.

How did I get that link?

Like most people, I did a quick Google search and found the first half-decent result and went with that. I'd like to say that I carefully analyzed all of the resources on Japanese Tea Party through hours of intensive research, and carefully selected the best there was, but that isn't realistic. In essence I, like many, solidified the position of a Google result not on merit, but on the presumption that its original ranking had merit. In essence the rankings of the first page hits are recursively building upon themselves, leaving everyone else in the dust.

If you didn't get to the top of the search results early, you have a much harder job of it.

Next time I think I'll jump to some random results page and find something good in there, and I'll try to make that a standard practice.

Of course this is where this all comes full-circle (I have a habit of doing this) - This same premise applies to blogs as well. How many leaf blogs out there include gratuitous or incestuous links to the "A-Bloggers". They do this, of course, sometimes because they really, truly think those destinations are great resources, but often they do it to get flagged as "associated" by the various blog taxonomy/aggregation services, not to mention that they're strangely hoping for some love in return.

They've empowered the existing core bloggers often simply because they're core bloggers, not because they're saying or doing anything interesting.

Interesting to think about.

http://www.yafla.com/