Archive for the 'weblogs' Category

wp-Hyphenate by KINGdesk

Wp-​Hyphenate is a very promis­ing plugin for Word­press, because it enables some typo­graph­i­cal con­trol not pre­vi­ously avail­able for the web:

With it your left aligned text will be less ragged, and your jus­ti­fied text will avoid the ghastly word spac­ing that has pre­vented seri­ous web design­ers from using it.

It’s still in its early stages, but I’m exper­i­ment­ing with it here – using jus­ti­fied para­graphs and block­quotes. Let me know what you think.

Out of the box, the plugin broke my linked flickr image codes, so I had to put <a> tags on the whitelist, so the plugin ignores any linked text. Hope­fully that issue will be addressed in the future.

UPDATE: Nov 16, 2008 – Jeff King has updated his plugin to address the issue described above.

November 11, 2008 » Tags: , . » 2 Comments

How Hackers Show it’s Not All Bad News at the New York Times

Apologies that this blog looks a little New York Times-y lately, but I had to share this – O’Reilly’s Andrew Savikas wrote a very inter­est­ing post on some of the inter­est­ing stuff we’re doing:

…there‘s some­thing going on at the Times that prob­a­bly won‘t make it to Sil­i­con Alley Insider, much less the main­stream busi­ness press, and it‘s some­thing that‘s start­ing to make me think the Times just might suc­ceed in adapt­ing to the chang­ing rules of the media and pub­lish­ing game…

So what’s the Times doing that’s so impor­tant? They’re hacking.

Savikas goes on to list a lot of exam­ples, but the best one that I can pro­vide is the coming release of our APIs, which will enable people on the out­side to play, tinker, and mashup NY Times con­tent. There are only a few APIs cur­rently public, but there will be a flood of releases in the coming months.

[via Jeremy]

UPDATE: Oh man, a bit after I pub­lished this today, we launched our Visu­al­iza­tion Lab – a part­ner­ship that uses IBM’s Many Eyes tech­nol­ogy. More Info Here »

October 27, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

No More Pink Grid Bars

Quick admin note: I removed the gridlayouts.com javascript from this site, so you should not see the pink bars appear­ing when you’re typing a com­ment or search­ing for something.

The Javascript was only sup­posed to toggle the pink grid bars when the user hits ctrl+shift+G – but it must have inter­fered with some other ajaxy stuff, because it was tog­gling with only the G key. So, it’s been removed – and I added a screen­shot of what it looked like to my orig­i­nal post about the redesign.

That is all.

September 24, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

Vivian Girls @ Death By Audio

Vivian Girls

Cassie Ramone and Vivian Girls perform.

Last week I saw Vivian Girls play at Death By Audio in Williams­burg. It was my second time seeing them, and cer­tainly won’t be the last. The Times printed a rave review:

Even though this band’s music tends toward the dis­cor­dant, Vivian Girls … are roman­tics at heart. Their taut, no-​nonsense songs brim over with noise and touches of shoegaze reverb, but at the center are glo­ri­ous, gentle harmonies.

They open for Sonic Youth tomor­row, August 30th, at the McCar­ren Park Pool, or you can catch them again at Death By Audio on Sep­tem­ber 2nd.

August 29, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

wordpress.app

I’m writ­ing this from the new Word­press iPhone app. It’s a pretty light, straight-​forward inter­face. It allows saving posts locally on the iPhone before pub­lish­ing or saving drafts to the server, enabling offline drafting.

There is even rudi­men­tary photo sup­port – but you can’t really con­trol the place­ment or sizing of the image – it is merely appended to the end of the mes­sage. You don’t even see the image markup until it is pub­lished or saved as a draft on the server.

But even then, the lim­i­ta­tions of the iPhone become clear – there is no copy/paste, and the classes that deter­mine how Word­press dis­plays uploaded images is unnec­ces­sar­ily com­pli­cated. (They should sim­plify that.)

So, though this is a pretty nice app, I’m not sure how useful it will be with­out more for­mat­ting options and copy/paste. For instance, I can’t even pro­vide a link to it’s app store page. Also, why doesn’t the iPhone have char­ac­ters luke curly quotes and em/en dashes?

UPDATE (from my Mac): Here is the link to the app.

July 22, 2008 » Tags: , , , , . » 2 Comments

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.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Adding Flickr to Word­Press 2.5’s Media Bar’

April 28, 2008 » Tags: , , , . » 2 Comments

WordPress 2.5

A bit of admin­istrivia to pass along…

WP 2.5I spent some time this week­end updat­ing this weblog to Word­press 2.5 RC1.1. The 2.5 public release should be avail­able soon, but you can grab nightlies that are pretty solid.

There are many new fea­tures, but the one I was most look­ing for­ward to was the redesign of the admin screens, by Jef­frey Zeld­man, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danz­ico of Happy Cog. The design is sim­pler and fresh, and I like how they sep­a­rated the pure admin­is­tra­tive options from those that deal with post­ing and man­ag­ing con­tent. Also, the post­ing screen is greatly sim­pli­fied and elegant.

Of course, in order to upgrade WP, I had to first upgrade the k2 theme, which my design is built upon. This involves rec­on­cil­ing my old CSS with any changes made since to K2, lest I break my site. After a few hours of work, every­thing was in order and I’m happy to report that the RC5 nightlies of K2 worked per­fectly for me in Word­press 2.5.

If you’re curi­ous about WP 2.5, but not ready to upgrade – Chris John­ston has put up a public demo of 2.5, (login with admin/demo).

And if you’re con­sid­er­ing taking the plunge, I rec­om­mend first making a backup and ver­i­fy­ing that your theme is compatible.

March 24, 2008 » Tags: , , , . » 2 Comments

kottke.org is 10

Three cities, two seri­ous rela­tion­ships, one child, 200,000 fre­quent flier miles, at least seven jobs, 14,500 posts, six designs, and ten years ago, I started “writing things down” and never stopped. That makes kottke.org one of a hand­ful of the longest con­tin­u­ally updated weblogs on the web.

Kottke.org is 10 years old today. Jason’s weblog has been a big inspi­ra­tion for me as a weblog­ger; his enthu­si­asm for design, media, sci­ence, and all things web, has launched a thou­sand memes, and made him an indis­pens­able voice in dig­i­tal culture.

March 14, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

Subway Love

Lisa’s photo on Gothamist!Another Valentine’s Day related post – Lisa’s snap­shot of this note in the Car­roll MTA sta­tion made it to a post on Gothamist!

The orig­i­nal is avail­able in her Flickr photostream.

She is kind of a big deal, ’round these parts.

February 15, 2008 » Tags: , , , , , , . » 1 Comment

RSS Updates

I’m doing a little house clean­ing of this site’s RSS feeds. For a while, I was exper­i­ment­ing with splic­ing in del.icio.us and flickr con­tent along side the weblog posts. Kind of like my own tumblr hyper­blog­ging exper­i­ment, via RSS.

How­ever, after think­ing about it, I’ve decided to limit the main RSS feed to only weblog entries. It just makes sense, since a lot of my del.icio.us and flickr con­tent is chan­nelled into expanded weblog posts anyway. And, Ricky makes a per­sua­sive case against what he calls hyper­blog­ging. So, the default feed is now just what I put through WordPress.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘RSS Updates’

November 8, 2007 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

Unoriginal

copy cattimothytipton.com is using a slightly mod­i­fied ver­sion of my K2 stylesheet, with­out atttribution.

The post layout is the same, and he’s using the same exact side­bar mod­ules, in exactly the same arrange­ment. His CSS is full of my custom selectors/classes, and is still hot link­ing to images on my domain.

It’s one thing to take some­one else’s work, pick it apart, and learn from it. It’s quite another to just take someone’s work, remove attri­bu­tion, and tweak it just enough so that it has your name on it.

My site is built-​off of the K2 frame­work, which is the work of a lot of excel­lent design­ers and devel­op­ers. The dif­fer­ence is that I’m upfront about attri­bu­tion, AND, I’ve taken the time and care to fash­ion some­thing new.

So, Tim­o­thy, might I sug­gest read­ing Greg Story’s post on How to prop­erly steal the design of a website?

I ran a diff on the two stylesheets, and took some screenshots:

no attributionbreaking IMG references instead of removing?hotlinking to IMG on my domaincopying IMGs over to your own servercustom selectors

October 27, 2007 » Tags: , , , , , . » 0 Comments

Splat!

It’s been nearly 24-hours since I relaunched this weblog, and the feed­back has been encour­ag­ing. Thanks to every­one who emailed or left a comment.

I talked last night about my desire to use a typo­graph­i­cal grid for this design, but I also knew that this had the poten­tial to look quite anti­sep­tic and ster­ile. I thought of the com­ment that David Carson makes in the Hel­vetica film, as he points to the word “caffeinated” that has been printed out in Hel­vetica Black and hung on the wall next to other iden­ti­cal look­ing words: “This doesn’t say ‘caf­feinated’!” To avoid the trap, I needed to work in a design ele­ment that would make things a little more interesting.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Splat!’

October 5, 2007 » Tags: , , , , , . » 0 Comments

A New Nedward.org

Today, I’m launch­ing ver­sion 6 of nedward.org, a typo­graph­i­cal grid-​based layout, with heavy use of Hel­vetica Neue. This site has always used a sim­i­lar shade of green, so I wanted to main­tain that bit of con­sis­tency with the past, while intro­duc­ing some­thing very dif­fer­ent. I also wanted to bring together my con­tent from twit­ter, flickr, del.icio.us, and last.fm, while keep­ing it dis­tinct from the weblog con­tent – yea, I’ve gone back on my post is a post comments.

The last major revi­sion of this site was launched on May 1 2005, but even that was some­what of a realign­ment of the pre­vi­ous design, which dated back to 2001. I’m a big pro­po­nent of Cameron Moll’s realign not redesign rule – so I spent the past few years tin­ker­ing away, refin­ing the same basic layout.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘A New Nedward.org’

October 4, 2007 » Tags: , , , , , , . » 8 Comments

Blogging for 7 years?

I’m totally get­ting old! I just real­ized that I missed my “blogging” anniversary… On this past July 11, this site hit the 7 year mark.

wow.

FIrst Post? It was about that brick of a dig­i­tal camera (point-n-shoot) that I bought that summer.

My orig­i­nal weblog was on blog­ger, and then was migrated to a ned.suckahs.org, when we set up the suck­ahs domain in July 2001. (More on that here.) In Feb­ru­ary 2005, I decided to split it out into the domain I use today.

July 18, 2007 » Tags: , . » 0 Comments

Windows Live Writer (Beta)

I’m post­ing this from inside Win­dows Live Writer, a newly released “weblogging” application by Microsoft. It’s a slick little win­dows app, with sup­port for pub­lish­ing to Mov­able Type, Word­press, as well as Live Spaces, by default.

Paul Sta­ma­tiou has an extended review, but here are some of the features:

  • WYSI­WYG Authoring
  • Spell Check
  • Photo Publishing
  • Map Pub­lish­ing, (via Live Local)
  • Com­pat­i­bil­ity with Blog­ger, Live­Jour­nal, Type­Pad, Word­Press (and many others)

Also, like most good WYSI­WYG edi­tors, it allows you to toggle over to HTML code view – (taking a quick look at this post, I see that it writes pretty clean code).

Note: There is no sup­port yet for Tags, a new fea­ture in MT 3.3. (Cat­e­gories & Key­words are supported.)

More Infor­ma­tion & Download

UPDATE: Om has a nice review:

It is not often, I say good things about Microsoft prod­ucts, but with this free-​blogging tool, I have to say: write on! …the soft­ware actu­ally lets you use your blog styles for edit­ing, has abil­ity to add plu­g­ins, and has an SDK to extend the func­tion­al­ity of the pro­gram. You can also swap out  Microsoft Maps for say Google Maps.

August 14, 2006 » Tags: , . » 2 Comments

Vox Upgrade

voxWell, I finally have access to a blog on Vox… (the starter account is little more than an online pro­file). Seems like other people also complained:

With this release, we are also respond­ing to your feed­back that the whole starter account thing wasn’t work­ing and have decided to shelve that fea­ture for now. Last week, we upgraded all starter accounts to stan­dard accounts (yay!) and have turned that account level off.

It seems pretty cool, but I don’t have any invites! So, I have no friends. If you’re on Vox, add me to your neighborhood.

July 11, 2006 » Tags: . » 0 Comments

(Re) Launches

It’s the end of a week, so I thought that I’d note a few new things that I’ve seen this week.

First, Anna just launched Door Six­teen, which will doc­u­ment the ren­o­va­tion and restora­tion of the late-1800′s brick row­house just bought in New­burgh, NY. I used to read her old blog, Absolutely Vile, every day, so I’m glad to see that she’s back.

Veerle launched her redesigned blog this week, using Expres­sion Engine and a whole lot of magic. A com­plete, beau­ti­ful piece of work, which makes my blog feel com­pletely inad­e­quate and irrelevant.

Last and cer­tainly not least, Todd, (of the local food blog Eat and Destroy,) moved his old beansareevil.com domain to the new, (and aptly named), ScootAndDestroy.com. (Nev­er­mind that he pre­vi­ously moved to beansareevil.com, from foodtastesgood.com – make your freak­ing mind up, Todd…). He’s got some great scoot­ing videos, the famous Peeps video, and a new fea­ture – silk-​screened T-shirts!

March 1, 2006 » Tags: . » 0 Comments

Beer Logos in Vector Format

Boddingtons BitterI love this site, which offers tons of beer logos for down­load, in EPS format [via]. For some reason, this amuses me.

What didn’t amuse me, was the 20 min­utes of frus­tra­tion last night, trying to get a freakin’ Bod­ding­tons at The Burren in Davis Square. I had to order twice, from the same woman, (as she must’ve forgot the first one)… and finally I grabbed a second bar­tender to go check on things. And, HE was the one who brought me my freakin’ beer. I real­ize that a lot of bar­tenders double-​pour Boddy’s, (much like Guin­ness), but you’re not sup­posed to forget me!

February 10, 2006 » Tags: , , . » 1 Comment

24 Ways

“24 Ways”:http://24ways.org/ is a kind of _advent cal­en­dar_ for markup geeks. I’m now in the process of redesign­ing (as oposed to “realigning”:http://www.alistapart.com/articles/redesignrealign) my port­fo­lio site, and it’s been fun tuning in to these little tutorials.

My favorites include:

* “An Expla­na­tion of Ems”:http://24ways.org/advent/an-explanation-of-ems – I love using _ems_

* “Introduction to Scrip­tac­u­lous Effects”:http://24ways.org/advent/introduction-to-scriptaculous-effects – for a little javascript splash

* “Putting the World into “World Wide Web””:http://24ways.org/advent/putting-the-world-into-world-wide-web – I _work_ in local­iza­tion, so I enjoy this kind of thing.

December 14, 2005 » Tags: , . » 0 Comments

PageRank and Me

November 3, 2005 » Tags: , . » 4 Comments

Mapped FTP drive

mapped ftpThere was a great “how-to” arti­cle on Engad­get yes­ter­day: Map a drive to your FTP server.

Now, tweak­ing that CSS file is as easy as right-​click, and Edit.

October 26, 2005 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

Mint: Languages

Since installing Mint, I’ve enjoyed pour­ing over all kinds of refer­rer data, with­out having to sort through spam bots.

One of my favorite bits of vis­i­tor infor­ma­tion, (seeing as how I work in the Local­iza­tion indus­try), is the lan­guage of my read­ers. Using Marc Garrett’s Parsel Pepper (plug-​in), I see that my vis­i­tors are over­whelm­ingly English-​speaking.

No real sur­prise there, but guess what the #2 lan­guage is? Believe it or not, it’s Chi­nese. I have twice as many vis­i­tors from China and Taiwan than from either France, Ger­many, Spain or Japan… (where are my Nordic readers?)

Even more sur­pris­ing, when I sep­a­rate out PRC vs. Taiwan, 75% of my Chi­nese visits are from the main­land. I know there is a huge pop­u­la­tion advan­tage there, but I still find that fascinating.

October 17, 2005 » Tags: . » 2 Comments

Yahoo! Site Search

Well, I’ve had enough with Google Site­Search… I’ve switched this site’s search func­tion­al­ity over to Yahoo! Site Search.

I tried, I tried, I failed, so I switched.

October 11, 2005 » Tags: . » 2 Comments

“Underground Man” update

Thanks to Mint, I noticed that a few vis­i­tors were referred here look­ing for the text of a New Yorker arti­cle writ­ted in Feb­ru­ary 2004 titled, Under­ground Man: Can the former C.I.A. agent who saved New York’s subway get the Tube back on track?. I had scanned the text a while back, but my direc­tory secu­rity set­tings on my server were tight­ened, and the scans were no longer available.

So, if you’re look­ing for the arti­cle, it’s is now prop­erly linked in the orginal post.

I still wish I had a way of extract­ing the text via OCR…

September 12, 2005 » Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . » 3 Comments

301 (Permanent redirect)

I’ve taken a second step toward fixing my Google index­ing prob­lem. On the advice of Casey, I mod­i­fied my .htac­cess file to rewrite all ned.suckahs.org URLs to nedward.org and send out 301s (Per­ma­nent redirects).

Now, when a user arrives here via a ned.suckahs.org URL, they’ll be trans­par­ently redi­rected to nedward.org and Google will see the 301 mes­sage. Hope­fully then, Google will get with the program.

Thanks Casey!

September 9, 2005 » Tags: , . » 0 Comments