I once referred to it as the margin. Then for a while I called it the sidebar. Today? I call it the gutter. (reader: “What you talking about Ben?”) That area on the edges of webpages where folks pile up navigation, advertising, and other what nots.

My favorite bit of gutter trash has been my little link blog, based off of one of my categories in delicious.

Notice! New gutter trash.

The coolest new bit of trash is a tiny map of the world with dots all over it showing an estimate of where my readers dropped in from. It’s a way down toward the bottom. Too cool!

I just added some advertising for ApacheCon. ApacheCon is a delightful conference for real engineers who actually build stuff (example). None of that enterprise sales cruft; just real people who like to hack up solutions to problems. Good bunch of people! A great place to learn what new tools people are actually using versus who’s buying a lot of advertising.

The group of folks in Apache who organize this event do a great job. They are careful to keep the costs down. Las Vegas is cheap to fly to. The hotel is nice, affordable, and free of those damn machines that keep demanding that you pay attention to them and feed them money.

Register today, you won’t be sorry.