I’ve just started using MarsEdit1 again (in combination with my TextMate2 blogging bundles), but I’ve run into a couple of issues. First, I can’t assign thumbnails to my posts directly. This is the result of poor API support in Wordpress for handling attachments on a specific post, and not Daniel’s fault at all. Fortunately, I’ve set my blog up to search for an image with a specific class, remove it from the post and use it as the post header if a thumbnail isn&…
macos, markdown, marsedit, multimarkdown
I just pushed out a fairly large update for Instapaper Beyond1, my little userscript for Fluid which adds extensive keyboard navigation and additional functionality to the Instapaper website. I’ve been playing with it sporadically for a while now, and version 1.3 has a lot of new features and some big fixes. See below for the best changelog I could pull together from my surprisingly scattered notes and commit messages.
fluid, instapaper, instapaper beyond, macos, userscript
I ran into a problem recently. I wanted to have links to images be “lightboxed,” but I also wanted to blog in Markdown and not have to write out link tags with “rel” attributes for every image link. There are several existing plugins for Wordpress that will do this automatically, but I’ve been sticking with the jQuery Lightbox plugin, which handles Wordpress galleries in this manner, but requires the “rel=lightbox” attribute to handle single image links.
Wordpress, jquery, lightbox, plugin
I did some massive Spring cleaning over the weekend, and found a lot of “treasures” that, after having been momentarily cherished, are on their way to the dump. A pile of Dead Kennedy’s and TCHC cassettes from High School that had been severely devastated by an extended stay in the garage, original vinyl pressings from some of my old bands, Phreak boxes, and more defunct electronics than I could possibly E-bay. Amongst all of it, though, I found a CD of work from my Interactive Multimedia…
design, multimedia, personal, video
I’ve taken a little time to improve the script I’d posted previously. It saves bookmarks you add to Delicious as webloc (Safari bookmark) files on your local hard drive, optionally with thumbnails and OpenMeta tags.
bookmarking, delicious, macos, openmeta, spotlight, tagging
I just read a blog post by James Scariati regarding a method to target every version of IE from a single stylesheet. The idea was to add a wrapper div with a specific class using conditional comments, allowing you to target IE6 using CSS specificity rather than separate stylesheets. The commenters took it a bit further, and I decided to test out a slight permutation.
html, ie6, webdesign
There are quite a few things I love when it comes to my Mac. I love Spotlight. I love OpenMeta tagging. I love Evernote. I love being able to collect information from any source, and find anything I’ve saved, anywhere, no matter what program I used to create it. I especially love programs that allow me to accomplish that.
applescript, bookmarking, delicious, experiments, macos, openmeta, tagging, utility
I’ve been using Things for task management lately, mostly because it has a decent iPad app. I really do love my iPad… however, I often use TaskPaper from Hog Bay Software for weekend to-do lists and for tracking bugs and fixes on my various freetime projects. I sometimes edit my TaskPaper files (which are just plain text) in TextMate and use some Ruby scripts adapted from the GTDAlt bundle to do some fun things, but I really like the interface you get when you actually use…
applescript, gtd, macos, taskpaper, utility
I’ve seen a few people around the ‘net sharing their TextExpander snippets, so I thought I’d join in. Not familiar with TextExpander? It’s a Mac utility that expands short snippets into full text you’ve defined. There are quite a few programs that do text expansion (see Typinator), but TextExpander currently holds my heart because of its extra features such as shell scripting, completion suggestion and a new Fill dialog for variable input.
css, email, experiments, html, lipsum, macos, markdown, ruby, scripting, service, snippet, snow leopard, textexpander, utility
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…
service, shell, snow leopard, url shortener, utility
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…
fluid, instapaper, instapaper beyond, userscript
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…
compression, leopard, pdf, quicktip, snow leopard
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…
TinyMCE, Wordpress, functions.php
Introducing Instapaper Beyond, an Instapaper userscript for Fluid that provides full keyboard navigation and some special features for browsing your Instapaper articles. If you’re not familiar, Fluid is a Mac (only) application which creates a Single Site Browser (SSB) for a site, using the same Webkit engine as Safari. It essentially allows you to turn web applications and sites into Mac apps. It’s pure Cocoa, so all of your Services and fun text tricks (like Control-T…
fluid, instapaper, instapaper beyond, keyboard, navigation, userscript
Songza.fm has moved to Songza.org, so I’ve rewritten the old Songza Lucky Link Service for Snow Leopard to match. This new version of the service runs without dependencies, so it should work for any Snow Leopard setup right out of the box. It’s a bit silly, but what it does is take your selected text and run it as a query on Songza.org, parse for the first result (if there are any), shorten that link and insert it after your selected text. A fast, easy way to punctuate your obscure…
ruby, service, snow leopard, songza
