I was building a ridiculous Saved Search that gathered all of my web-design-related bookmarks and notes into one place, based on keywords and tags. I don’t even remember why I started doing this, and HoudahSpot would gladly have saved me from the issue, but I was too far gone.
finder, search, spotlight
I ended up going a little crazy with YouTube embeds on the site this week, and my load times suffered greatly. I had just added lazy loading for post images and seen some speed gains, but the Flash embeds were killing me. I needed the click-to-load feature that I’ve seen on other sites.
jekyll, lazyloading, video, youtube
The Giveaway Robot (he needs a better name1) has named the lucky winners in the SliceReader giveaway. He claims to have notified them all with a stunning email he generated himself and sent through my GMail relay to avoid being spammed. Hopefully. Just in case, here are the winners, contact me if you didn’t hear from “GR”.
giveaway, macappstore, macos
For as much as I follow web technologies, I really didn’t comprehend the full extent of possibilities until very recently. To that end, David Walsh has curated a great list of demos. Warning: they may explode your brain1.
canvas, html
I pushed a new version of Slogger to the GitHub repository this morning. For those who don’t care about all the nitty gritty, just head for the main page and download the zip.
slogger, twitter
I updated the GrabLinks bookmarklet one more time tonight, and anyone with it currently installed should start seeing the changes immediately. If you still need it, drag the link below to your toolbar.
bookmarklet, grablinks, jquery, markdown
Another day, another version of GrabLinks (the bookmarklet for grabbing all links from a chosen section of a webpage as a Markdown list). The first major change is that the bookmarklet is now auto-updating. It loads the actual script from the Gist and will therefore always load the latest stable version. It pops up a small “Loading” indicator until the script loads and, if needed, injects jQuery. If it’s a fast load, you may just see a brief flash of white in the upper left corner, so…
bookmarklet, grablinks, markdown
I shared this bookmarklet on Twitter a while ago, but it’s been so handy lately that I thought it was silly not to post it on the blog. It lets you hover over any section of a web page and grab all of the links contained in that portion of the page, handing them back to you as a nicely-formatted Markdown list. It’s a great way to get bunches of links into nvALT or any plain text situation.
bookmarklet, grablinks, jquery, markdown
I was overtired and feeling a bit sick, but talking with Nick Sousanis today perked me right up. He’s completing a dissertation at Columbia entirely as a comic book, and is as interesting as you would expect someone attempting that to be.
podcast, systematic
I recently wrote a review of the Mac app SliceReader. The developer, Mutahhir Ali Hayat, was kind enough to offer you all five free copies ($2.99 US value). Use the form at the end of the post to enter.
giveaway, macappstore, macos
Regular Expressions, often called “regex,” are one of the most powerful tools in any programming language’s toolbox, at least when it comes to string handling. They can be a challenge to build and test if you’re working blind, though. There have been a few good apps to help out with this, and some websites that offer live, online testing of regular expressions.
appreview, macos, regex
I’m happy to announce that the BrettTerpstra.com t-shirt campaign hit its goal on the first day. Thanks to everybody who helped make that possible!
apparel
When SliceReader first appeared, I was instantly intrigued. It’s a simple app which “slices” an article, pasted text or text file into pages and display them, one paragraph per page. It’s designed to make reading long form articles easier for those of us who don’t do as well with reading long pages. It works.
appreview, macos, reading, review
