Apr 28
2010
I’m fascinated by http://to. It’s a url shortener with no TLD. Some browsers, and apparently some DNS setups, don’t like the urls it creates (they want a .com or .org or anything at the end), so it’s not exactly in heavy usage. Still, I wish they had an API. In lieu of that, here’s a quick Ruby script that will run on a stock OS X install as a System Service. It’s so simple that I’m not even going to package it up… It’ll be a good chance to show the steps for creating your own utilities using Snow Leopard Services:
require 'net/http' require 'cgi'input = STDIN.read http = Net::HTTP.new('to.')
Apr 25
2010
I just got back from a week-long “Code Jam” that was all business, all week, so I took a Saturday to work on some personal projects. Instapaper beyond 1.1 is out, and I’d love to hear some feedback on the new features. One of the major additions is a bit of mouse support. You can now click an article in your list to skip the highlighting to that point, and then perform the standard commands on it (open, move, archive, etc.). To that end, most of the links in the interface have also been hijacked and will use the Instapaper Beyond methods, mostly Ajax, to perform their jobs…
Apr 17
2010
It’s probably old news to most, but I just realized this today. Since Leopard, OS X’s multi-talented Preview.app can compress needlessly large PDF’s in a matter of seconds. My clients (and today, my mother) often export PDF’s from various programs that don’t flatten or compress images, ending up with files between 8M and 90M, in my experience. Obviously, when you’re building a website, you want to get filesize down as much as possible. I’ve always used Acrobat to shrink these, usually reducing the size to about 15% of the original…
Apr 17
2010
I was working on a quick website for my wife, and trying to make things as simple as possible for both of us. For me, I just wanted to give her a flexible template that I didn’t have to hack much on (I went with Thesis), and for her, I wanted her to be able to start posting with a minimal learning curve. She just got a Flip, and wanted to start posting video. Since she was already posting to YouTube, I just wrote a quick shortcode in Thesis’ custom functions file that would take a YouTube id and turn it into a link that the Shadowbox plugin could pick up and make into a “lightboxed” video player. It worked great.