Web Zen

Spring has sprung! Pastel color schemes invade every SoHo storefront. The food trucks burst from hibernation, trailing cupcakes and gay ice cream in their wake. Children fete tortuous tales of chocolate bunnies laying eggs and raising a zombie Jesus from the grave. Now is the season of new beginnings and spring cleaning, both physical and mental. Here are three sites that will help you realign and rejuvenate your fabulous self.

Zen Habits

Blogger Leo Babauta can be infuriating at first. He’s so calm and happy! Keep calm and carry on reading, though; Leo has some great insights to share. Will you rise at 4:30 am like him to experience the calm of the morning, or spiritually connect with centuries of tea drinkers as you sip your morning cup of oolong? Maybe not, but his simplicity and minimalism are great reminders to slow down and rethink how you go about your day.

The Daily Love

Mastin Kipp wants you to love yourself! Really, really love yourself! His Twitter feeds, @TheDailyLove and @MastinKipp, are chock full of positive energy and incorrigible enthusiasm. Have them delivered to your phone only if you accept that your cheek muscles will ache by day’s end from smiling so much. His site often features guest bloggers who carry the same joyous message.

holistic fitness for the real girl

Leanne Shear, a personal trainer in New York, focuses her writing on physical fitness, but her message extends to mental well-being as well. She uses her personal slip-ups (we’re on vacation! margaritas all round!) as teachable moments, in a voice that’s equal parts girlfriend and guru. With her self-challenging, can-do attitude, her blog is a gym bunny’s inspiration.

Quixotic Bloggers

Among the innumerable mediocre bloggers out there, a rare few stand out. The questioning. The quirky. The quixotic. The progeny of The Julie/Julia Project, these cats blog on uber-specific topics, never straying from their stated paths and yet holding our attention the whole way. Add them to your blogroll ASAP.

Condom Science

Two crazy-in-love MIT students rate condoms with a frank, enthusiastic tone and an eye for the scientific. You wish your sex life was as educational as this. “Making love in the name of science?” I’m all for it.

The Daily Nail

A different nail polish every day for a year… and much, much more. This well-manicured blogger crafts innovative nail designs from holidays, wallpaper and fabric swatches, TV shows and more. Get inspired for your next girls’ night in.

The Confined Nomad

Three Brooklyn natives set out to eat the cuisine of every nation in the UN, all within the confines of New York City. They’re up to Colombia. Check out where they’ve chowed down and comment on where they should explore next.

Weather/Music

This week’s Website Wednesday brings you music to live by. Coincidentally, both sites invoke the climate.
SoundCloud: For when you party. SoundCloud is a sleek, streamlined, uber-fast way to upload and download your favorite tracks. The site tends toward electronic and dance remixes of Top 40 tunes, making it great fodder for your next cardio playlist.

Rainy Mood: For when you study. Rainy Mood loops thirty minutes of calming rainstorm sounds, replete with thunderclaps and chirping birds. Play it with your favorite Yo-Yo Ma or Kenny G tunes and you can burn the midnight oil all night long.

Now if only it would rain men.

Smitten Kitchen

Too often, food blogging descends into the excesses of self-gratification and food porn, slobbering over the decadence or high-end appeal of its dishes. One blog that steers mercifully clear of this self-congratulatory style while still maintaining simple beauty and charm, is The Smitten Kitchen.

Besides having the cutest name ever, the Smitten Kitchen is a neat, no-nonsense answer to Baroque bloggery. Each post features a new recipe, with a prose description punctuated with snapshots, showcasing delicate ingredients coming together in each dish. The authors, Deb and Alex Perelman, operate out of New York City, and focus their highly lauded blog on “accessible” food, steering clear of high-end ingredients and fancy equipment.

The site contains a lot of things below its well-photographed surface: a well-organized database of all recipes featured on the site, several conversion tables, and extensive blogrolls. You can browse the site by most recent posts, season, ingredients, occasions, and even by random posts. Browse during your free time, or use this great go-to when you’re scouting for your next new recipe.

Jak & Jil Blog

The Jak & Jil Blog, a standout in the blogosphere of couture photography, showcases bright, crisp, behind-the-scenes photos of the fashion world. Pretty young things dominate the shots, their skin clear and their eyes shaded. The best shots highlight oft-overlooked details: the buckle of a shoulder bag, the fall of a hemline, the arch of a foot. Ignore the all-uppercase paragraphs and lose yourself in this world of impossible beauty.

Saving The World, One Click At A Time

You mean well, you really do, but let’s face it: Mother Teresa you’re not. Thankfully, each of this week’s sites is a fool-proof way to do good worldwide from the safety of your mancave bedroom.

FreeRice

Learn a vocab word, donate ten grains of rice to the World Food Program.

FreePoverty

Locate a city on a world map; the more accurate you are, the more cups of water the site donates to the needy.

Freekibble

Ace a dog-themed trivia question, donate ten kibble pieces to animal shelters.

Freekibblekat

Like Freekibble, but for cats. (Because cats deserve their own category, okay?)

The Hunger Site

The most improbable venture of the ones listed here, this site donated cups of food when you just click a button. Made possible by the myriad sponsor links you’re exposed to in the process of clicking.

The Rainforest Site

Like The Hunger Site, but for the coolest ecosystem ever.

The Animal Rescue Site

You get the idea.

Comedic Comestibles

So Good

An absurd look at the world of food.

Read if: you follow national food politics, you care about the future of American cuisine, or you love fast food.

My Food Looks Funny

Lolcats meets food porn.

Read if: you’re bored at work and you want a good laugh that doesn’t involve kittens with grammar problems.

EpiCute

The cute food blog.

Read if: you like the idea of melting into a puddle at something’s cuteness before chomping its head off.

1000 Awesome Things

If you’re suffering from a case of middle-of-the-week blues, have I got a website for you.

1000 Awesome Things is a wonderfully optimistic blog by Neil Pasricha, dedicated to making you smile through very little effort. The site’s concept is simple: each day, you can read about a new awesome thing. The posts are all about simple, everyday occurrences, most of which you yourself have probably experienced but have never stopped to appreciate before.

Peeling an orange in one shot?

Being the first table to get called up for the dinner buffet at a wedding?

The final seconds of untangling a really big knot?

AWESOME!

Even if you don’t read the text of the posts, simply scrolling through recent titles is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. The site just hit the halfway point in its countdown (to 1,000 posts, of course), so you’ve still got lots of time to read about the awesomeness in your life!

For the non-internet-junkies, 1000 Awesome Things has even spawned a book! Grab a copy today and enjoy warm fuzzies at your leisure.

Luxirare

LUXIRARE

Luxirare bills itself as “a weekly webzine dedicated to clothing and cuisine.” This photographic gem is that and so much more.

Luxirare posts blogs infrequently, around once a week. Each post consists almost entirely of photos, and is dedicated to a topic within food or fashion: assembling a boot, say, or making egg nog. Don’t let the mundane titles fool you, though- this is egg nog like you’ve never seen it before. The photographer and blogger behind Luxirare, a young woman named Ji, uses hyper-close zoom lenses, simple compositions and crisp, bright shots to track the progress of each unlikely project.

The result is a creation story told through pictures, beginning with raw, disparate pieces and ending with some jaw-droppingly gorgeous thing, a journey that us peons at our desk jobs can only imagine completing. Ji’s skill and imagination as a sewer and a cook make her photographic results even more special. (When was the last time you saw someone make crayons out of Heath bars?)

Ji occasionally features herself in her fashion photos, a lithe, faceless form with long black hair twirling about a white studio. Generally, though, she is very careful to keep personal details, including any identifiable physical characteristics or personal details, away from the camera, adding to the mystery of the site.

Ji often puts her creations up for sale after she blogs about them, but her livelihood beyond the income Luxirare generates is unrevealed. Whatever her methods are for affording the expense and effort put into her blog, I hope they sustain her creative genius for a very long time.

Food Porn

Confused by the burgeoning supply of food porn (the name is not my fault) on the Internet? Here are the best sites to follow.

FoodPornDaily is the eponymous king of mouth-watering culinary photography. Every day features a new, super-close-up photograph of a delectable dish, with the food’s name woven into the photograph. Click on the photos to scroll through previous days. Waking up to this website is a fabulous way to start your morning.

TasteSpotting, FoodGawker and Photograzing are all, as TasteSpotting puts it, “community driven visual potlucks.” Individuals submit beautiful photos of food which are moderated and posted to the site; the photos often link to a recipe or website. Photograzing displays slightly fewer photos per page, but sorts them by fun categories like “International Cuisine” and “Bacon.” FoodGawker and TasteSpotting are nearly identical: each features lots of pictures, with links to the most popular entries or to a random selection of photos. FoodGawker is slightly more tricked out, with a neat directory of all its food categories at the bottom of the page for easy searching, and a link to store your personal favorite photos. All three sites update very regularly, so check back every few hours for new treats to drool over. You can also follow all three sites on Twitter.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, This Is Why You’re Fat is an exercise in revulsion and amazement. Individuals still submit photographs of their own culinary creations, but here, the goal is to be as high-calorie, high-fat, and high-carb as possible. If you think your monstrosity is ready for submission, you’re wrong: wrap it in bacon, dip it in chocolate, add a few more eggs, and deep-fry it. Now it’s ready.

And finally…

Cake Wrecks is a fun collection of cakes gone “horribly, hilariously wrong.” A bit snarky at times, the site is mostly just hilarious. Beautiful cakes are showcased once a week as Sunday Sweets, to restore a bit of your faith in the future of the baking profession.