Feb 28
2011

Thanks to Michael Jones for brightening an otherwise dull day for me. He pointed me to placekitten, a site that mimics placehold​.it and inserts dummy images into HTML mockups for you. The difference being that placekitten does it with pictures of, yes, kittens.

While you might not ever show a design filled with kittens to the average client, you can keep yourself feeling warm…

Feb 17
2011

It may come as a surprise to some (many), but I’ve never really made effective use of TextExpander on my iPad or iPhone (TextExpander touch). I don’t do a lot of the things on my iPad which I do on my desktop, and the things that are similar often don’t support TE. When I want to write some Markdown quickly, I use Nebulous Notes with my custom macros. Lastly, my shell scripts…

Feb 06
2011

I know, I said I was done with the Lorem Ipsum generators. Then Dr. Drang responded with a brilliant solution which doesn’t require Internet access to generate some beautiful dummy text. I set it up and ran it myself, and loved the results. Then I found myself wanting to expand it to do more, such as multiple paragraphs, list items and other things I use regularly when making…

Feb 05
2011

Ok, this is the last TextExpander Lipsum post, I promise (with my fingers crossed). I’m posting a full TextExpander group with all of the TextExpander random Lorem Ipsum generators I’ve posted so far (LoremIpsum​.com, LoremIpscream), plus some new ones based on the Kwisatz Haderach[^dune] generator. That one seemed to make a few people pretty happy (looking at MacSparky). It…

Feb 02
2011

It turns out it was me that was broken, not the Loremipscream API. That API can return just plain text, so the shell scripts are much more readable than trying to hack apart XML in Bash. You can get a list of “flavors” from the website, or just curl "http://loremipscream.com/flavors.xml" from the command line. That will also give you the slugs you need to use when calling them.

Feb 01
2011

I hate it when I get an idea for something simple and end up spending an hour figuring out how to do it. I figured I’d make a post out of it to make myself feel better. It all started with my being disappointed that the Loripscream API wasn’t working. I did a little digging and found that <lipsum​.com> had a not-well-publicized XML feed you can pull from. That’s where the…

Oct 18
2010

A quick script in response to Donald’s query on my TextExpander Experiments post. He wanted to know if I could make the bit​.ly script—which expands to a bit.ly-shortened version of a url in the clipboard—work with an authenticated account, presumably for click tracking. Well, sure! Just adjust the script below to contain your bit​.ly username and your API key (in lines 6 &…