After a wonderful weekend spent in Madrid to attend Riverside’s gig (write-up and pictures) and feeling like crap for the entirety of yesterday with a sinusitis attack, I’m now back on my feet. Meanwhile, some things that have crossed my radar and incidentally are now crossing yours:

• Ryan Freitas, of Adaptive Path has a very interesting article describing how they teamed up with upcoming startup Sphere tackling the challenge of ruling the weblog search arena. The emphasis is on simplicity while delivering a host of decisive features, focusing on improved result presentation and the accompanying screenshots are tremendously cool.

• Dave Crane, author of Ajax in Action posted his thoughts on the use of closures in Javascript. Remembers, lads, closures bind references, not values!.

• Still on the design theme (I’ve been reading quite a few articles on that subject lately, you see), with so many blogs out there, one issue that tends to be overlooked is how comments are styled. Granted, most of the time people probably don’t even read the comments following an article but still the issue is relevant. SmileyCat features a Blog Comment Design Showcase and there’s plenty of great examples to go around. Here are my favorites, one for a white-based design and the other for a dark-based design:

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