Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Adding Flickr to Wordpress 2.5’s Media Bar

I’m a big fan of the new Word­press admin inter­face, espe­cially the new media but­tons that lets you quickly add photos, videos, and audio to your posts.

wp-media-flickr 1But what if you use Flickr for your photos? Well, there is a great plugin called Word­press Media Flickr, writ­ten by yu-​ji. It adds a little Flickr media button, and makes adding a photo from your Flickr pho­to­stream a piece of cake.

His site is in Japan­ese, but he has a great screen­cast show­ing the plugin at work.

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McCain’s Optimum Look

Can a type­face truly rep­re­sent a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date? Yes­ter­day on the Times’ Cam­paign Stops blog, Steven Heller invited sev­eral design­ers and crit­ics to com­ment on John McCain’s use of Optima for cam­paign collateral.

Is it dated? Clas­sic? Does it convey strength? Or, quirk­i­ness? The replies run the gamut; many of them funny or tongue-in-cheek. Michael Beirut notes the font’s resem­blance to the one used to carve the names on the Viet­nam Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial, and Matthew Carter muses about how the type­face will hold up with the addi­tion of a run­ning mate this summer. But, my favorite judge­ment comes at the end, from Rudy VanderLans:

What does Optima say about Sen­a­tor McCain? Noth­ing. It prob­a­bly says more about the designer than any­thing else. Who, except design­ers, would judge a can­di­date by the typeface?

Oh, and ear­lier this month, Heller did a sim­i­lar dis­cus­sion with brand­ing expert Brian Collins, on Obama’s Gotham-​heavy design scheme.

Google Earth in 3D

Google Earth now has 3D-buildings, and it’s really fun to play with. Here is the Times Build­ing, where I work:

Times Building

A 3D rendering of the New York Times Building in Midtown, as shown in Google Earth.

If you have Google Earth installed, see it for your­self. Or, try land­ing on the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, (just zoom in).

There seems to be data for a lot of cities, includ­ing my home town of Buf­falo, and former home of Boston.

Pukka: Simple. Delicious.

Despite recent crit­i­cism, I use and love del.icio.us almost every day. Fre­quently, I’ll quickly book­mark a page that I want write a longer post about later, when I have the time. (A little short­cut tool helps to stream­line this.)

Pukka: Simple. Delicious.Del.icio.us pro­vides a few ways to expe­dite the book­mark­ing process – there are exten­sions, but­tons, and book­marklets – but, I prefer Justin Miller’s Pukka, a native OS X app that greatly speeds up the post­ing of bookmarks.

With Pukka, you don’t have to wait for any­thing to load – just high­light some text on a page, and click its book­marklet. Up pops the appli­ca­tion with the URL and high­lighted text already inserted. Type a few tags (auto-​completes from exist­ing tags), hit return, and you’re done. Pukka recedes to the back­ground to do its thing, and you’re back in your browser, and on your way.

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Battlestar Galactica, Season 4

BSG-season04

A lot of geeks are going to be parked in front of the TV tonight, (even more than usual on a Friday night), for the season pre­miere of Bat­tlestar Galac­tica. Go ahead and laugh, but over the course of its 3-plus sea­sons, BSG has become one of the more cul­tur­ally impor­tant shows on TV:

Bat­tlestar Galac­tica is one of the more beguil­ing series on tele­vi­sion, an action-​adventure drama that trav­els through time and space to explore moral­ity, pol­i­tics and metaphysics.

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