Aug 13
2010
I love the keyboard, and I love keyboard shortcuts. It’s one of the reasons TextMate and I get along so well. There’s one thing that bothers me any time I’m editing text (in any application), though: having to move my right hand all the way over to the arrow keys just to move forward a couple of characters, say, after an auto-paired set of parenthesis that I want to get out of.
I know, it’s stupid for two reasons: first, it’s just not that big a deal, and second, I could just use the Emacs keybindings (^F,^B,^P,^N, etc.). Well, to that I say “phooey” on both counts. It is a big deal…
Aug 06
2010
I just pushed a tiny little update to the GReader Instapaper extension. It shortens the default speed at which the notifications disappear, and adds a settings item in preferences so you can adjust it if you want to. I think the 1300ms delay is a pretty good one, it was 5000 before (and everyone complained). All better.
I cleaned up a few loose ends, fixed some error messages, general housekeeping. However, I’m still stuck as to how to tell when a post to Instapaper fails. I’m unable to get a response code from the async post, so all I can really tell is that there was a response…
Aug 05
2010
Yesterday, I posted a quick TextExpander snippet for inserting placeholder images into an HTML layout using placehold.it. I took a minute today to convert this to a TextMate snippet as well, and wanted to share it as I find it immensely useful.
Aug 04
2010
When designing for the web, placeholder images can come in handy during initial layout, and even during wireframing, if you happen to wireframe in markup. I’ve been using a TextExpander snippet to generate instant placeholder images at any size (almost) and with appropriate titles using Placehold.it. It’s a really handy snippet to have in your web design toolkit.
Just create a new plain text snippet, title it “Placeholder Image,” give it whatever shortcut makes sense to you, and then add this code:
<img src="http://placehold.it/%fill:width%x%fill:height%/333333/dddddd&text=%fill:title%"…
Aug 04
2010
This is just a quick pointer to an icon I whipped up this evening for HootSuite. I thought I’d share it in case anyone else found the default icon packed with the Fluid SSB download (available here) unsatisfactory. Their icon is too big and looks awkward in my Dock, so I trimmed it down and vectorized the owl to clean up the lines a bit.
If you haven’t tried HootSuite, it’s a great social media client with a layout similar to TweetDeck. It lacks some of the features that TweetDeck has, but not too many, and it has the benefit of not crashing. Over. And over…
Aug 02
2010
You can count yourself lucky if you have no idea what “blue bags with red letters” might be, but I think you’ll get the idea from the lyrics to this song nonetheless. Within certain circles, the stamp bag is a common form of packaging powdered goods… at least in New York and other high-traffic cities. A small envelope, often blue in my day, stamped with red letters which spell out the name of the dealer/batch the contents are from.
I do my best never to write blatantly drug-related lyrics…
Jul 28
2010
This was a quick plugin I put together last night when I got too frustrated to work on my actual jobs. It lets you define a single shortcut key which, after you input your Instapaper username and password, will let you send the currently-selected article in Google Reader straight to Instapaper. It works fine with themes like Helvetireader (Safari extension), and functions in both list view and expanded view.
Click below to download, unzip the extension and double click it to install. Head for Preferences->Extensions and set up your Instapaper username and password, and pick a hotkey…