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The new pack can be downloaded from XBox Live via the Marketplace for 800 MS points. It will also be included in the upcoming COD4: Game of The Year set, which is set to hit retail stores in the near future.

XBox 360 Fanboy has posted some screenshots for the new maps, so be sure to have a look at them.

Smashing Magazine has just released another list of 20 FREE First-Class WordPress themes that will get your WP blog looking sweet in no time.

According to the article, EA is going to be using some big names in the business, after fans of the Madden series have been calling for EA to change up the in-game announcers.

35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets

In actuality, the CSS 2.1 standard is just now finally being supported by Microsoft in their new IE 8 Beta release. Although it is not fully supported yet, MS has said that future releases of the beta will have full 2.1 support built in. The CSS 2.1 standard is already fully supported in Firefox, Safari, and Opera browsers.

So, while it may do you well to go ahead and start studying up on the CSS 3 standard, it will most likely be a really long time before you get to implement some the great features of it.

Heroku has a sweet feature list and appears to make development and deployment really simple.

When you create or import an app with Heroku, it’s already live on the web. No configuration or deployment necessary.

Deployment of a Rails app has always in my opinion been a black eye for the framework. Heroku obviously thought so too.

Heroku is built on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), so your apps have access to unlimited computing power.

The other big debate in the Rails community and programming community in general is the debate of whether or not Rails can really scale. This topic has been debated and solved (some would say) but Heroku looks to make this a non-issue by using Amazon’s EC2 architecture.

There are also some other great features including one-click gem and plugin installs, built-in Rails console, Rake console, and the ability to share and collaborate on your project. There are some great demos on the site for each of these features, so be sure to check it out.

So, while it is still in beta, I think you should certainly keep an eye on this project. It appears to be gaining some good momentum and they just released an API as well.

Check out Heroku here.

So what the heck happened?

Now, Digg is mostly populated by users that submit content that is so irrelevant, I can’t believe that anyone took the time to create it, much less post it on another site for all the world to cherish and vote on. If you look at the majority of stories that hit the front page of Digg, over half of it will be useless, odd, or just simply unoriginal content that has been on the front page in some other form 30 times before. The one thing that made Digg great was the interesting content that you could read there, and now, even that is very slim on a good day.

As with most sites that become popular, there is only so much quality control that you can do without suppressing your user base, but sometimes it just has to be done, and this is clearly one thing that Digg did not learn. Now granted, they have some measures in place to moderate content and prevent duplicate content, but what the heck happened to the measure that prevents useless content?? Somehow, it got left out in favor of popularity I think.

More importantly, I think this has to do with the user base of Digg. If you look at the overall user base of Digg, then the content you find there fits right in. Just as it does for Newsvine, the Newsvine user base is very broad, so the content obviously stays just as broad. Don’t get me wrong, Digg does provide some relevant news but sometimes you really have to muddle through the garbage to find it. I remember when that wasn’t so. I remember when only the best and most relevant news hit the front page, and the other garbage got buried, just like it should have.

The other problem, which Digg has supposedly fixed, is the fact that content began to get outweighed by friends and what friends were posting. Suddenly, you started seeing stuff from certain users, regardless of what the content was, getting pushed to the front page just because they were a top poster on Digg. Friends lists on Digg became the deciding factor on what got pushed up and what didn’t. Almost like it was a contest to see who could get Dugg the most, regardless of whether the content was worthy or not. In my opinion, this factor alone all but killed Digg, especially for me.

So, will Digg ever get back to being the excellent information source that it once was? I don’t know, and I just simply don’t care to stick around and find out. There are far too many other great sources of information out there now that have taken the Digg model and made what Digg used to be. If you are a Digg user, I would love to hear your thoughts, and whether or not you still enjoy Digg, cause I am totally over it.

Maybe one day………..

I have been using it for a few weeks now and I really like it. Using Snitter is much more convenient than actually hitting up the Twitter website. It is very lightweight and is really useful when you want to keep up with who you are following on Twitter while still managing to get some work done. Snitter is an Adobe AIR application, written by Jonathan Snook. Jonathan is well-known throughout the design/development circles and I think that Snitter will help that out even more.

I really like the fact that it is super compact, while still packing in all of the great features from the Twitter website. Snook has done a great job with the look and feel of the application as a whole. My only drawback to it is the color of the client, which is an odd green color (which perfectly matches his site, which is why I am guessing he used it).

So, if you have been looking for a really good, free Twitter client then Snitter just might be what you have been looking for.

US 360 shortage acknowledged by Microsoft - Xbox 360 Fanboy

I think the whole social networking thing is pretty awesome, but I think there has to be a limit to it. I can see the need for certain social networking sites to play a big part in my life, just not everyone of them. As my friends and family get more involved in it, it makes more sense for me to get involved with them.

Anyway, here is a link to my LinkedIN account if you would like to check it out.