A Long Conversation

GoodReader

If you need to read PDFs on iPad or iPhone, there’s really nothing better than GoodReader. Solid annotations tools; cloud sync. Excellent.

http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html

Wordpress.

Jen,

You make lots of Wordpress sites. Great ones. These are the extensions I think of as basics, but I’m curious what you use.

Bad Behavior
Exclude Pages from Navigation
Simple Wordpress Backup
WordPress Database Backup
WP Super Cache

SSD

I think it’s been a while since I mentioned that adding an SSD to my MacBook made it basically the fastest computer I’ve ever used. Everything is open all the time. Nothing takes any time to do. Quicksilver lives up to its name and the computer powers on so quickly I shut it down at night instead of just putting it to sleep.

Facebook events in iCal and gCal

(tl;dr — facebook provides iCal feeds of events you’ve been invited to. Look at them when you’re looking for something to do.)

When you start showing up at things, people invite you to more. Life’s simple like that. But sometimes so many things are happening or happening at once, or happening while you’re at work or sometimes you don’t even know when you’ll be done with a long day at the office. Right?

For the last year or so, I’ve been able with certainty to say “sure I can meet at 1pm on Tuesday” or “no, the evening of Wednesday is a little booked up” or even add something like “go to a MoMA screening in three months and buy tickets seven days beforehand.” Basic stuff, but a world of difference from “I know I have something on Wednesday, so let’s meet Thursday instead.”

Like any time-shifting trick, the key is to store all the things in a simple place that you’ll have near you when you’re wondering where to go next and what might be around.

I use Google’s syncing calendar system with iCal as a desktop client and an app called Calvetica on my phone. Adding an event in any one seamlessly adds it across the rest. Setting that up changed my life.

The bottleneck has been the maybes. Getting them into that concrete calendar without overwhelming what’s really important. All the invites and screenings and tours and birthday parties that come into Facebook. Facebook does a great job of RSVPs and organization, but Facebook isn’t where I keep my calendar: google is. Well, that’s simple, too.

Facebook generates a Google/iCal feed for each person and this will show you how to set that up. http://www.wikihow.com/Sync-Facebook-Events-to-iCal*

These are some tricks I’ve found, but please share others.

Keep the Facebook calendar hidden. It’s there when you need it, but not if there’s more pressing things to do. If you’re a definite yes, copy that event from the Facebook calendar to your main Google calendar.

But when you’re looking for someplace to go, go where people already want you. They invited you, right?

Every event has the Facebook event URL—

—so take a second to follow that link, RSVP, and invite some friends.

• To remove the event from your calendar, just RSVP as “not attending” and it will disappear from your calendar the next time you sync (by schedule or manually with cmd-R). If you get invited too often by someone or to things you don’t enjoy, Facebook makes it super-simple to ignore all invites by a particular person. No big deal.

99% is showing up. Go to things, enjoy them, and say thanks… the doors are open.

• http://www.wikihow.com/Sync-Facebook-Events-to-iCal

Better EQ in Spotify

Spotify is your music library + a free jukebox. It’s the feeling I used to get doing late-night radio: you bring a couple CDs you love and then explore the archives.

My singular gripe: the Spotify desktop app doesn’t have an EQ, so everything sounds worse to me than on iTunes where—for year’s—I’ve used Merlin Mann’s “Perfect” EQ preset.

So one day this week, I took eight minutes to set up Audio Hijack Pro (with its dearth of filters and effects) as an intermediary between Spotify and my speakers.

The numbers are simple: db +3, +6, +9, +7, +6, +5, +7, +9, +11, +8 db

Here’s a preference file for Audio Hijack Pro.

References: http://www.43folders.com/2007/08/27/perfect-itunes http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro

Life-changing tools this week:

Sequel Pro — a MacOS mySQL front-end (which frees me from a phpMyAdmin dependence)

Campfire / Propane (although HipChat has already been suggested as a superior alternative) + Reading.am = better team/work conversations [src: this blog post]

Readmill — a killerly beautiful reading/highlighting experience on iPad (which warranted a painful return to Calibre to crack some books) [src: this blog post]

the $10 Spotify plan, so I can carry @skwulf’s mixtapes on the walk to work.

I remain faithfully infatuated with Divvy, Dropbox, Cloud, and xScope; recently my top-right menubar accumulated these as well: BaseApp (for Basecamp), and BirdBell. If that range of screen is going to be notifications, let it notify me in segments or—with the help of Nocturne—not at all.

If even one of these spares you a modicum of grief, pay that m’f forward.

The tools of the day

After years spent personal-assisting, client-wrangling, and generally trying to grasp and adapt to the strange ways of my particular primate mind, it’s obvious to most people who know me that my two languages are dance-floors and macbooks.

Aiming to move through both with a keen awareness of where everything is and which brief spaces exist to pass through, I’ve trained in techniques for remembering names; for taking notes; for tickler files and speaking directly to my own nervous system. Haven’t you?

In dance, the only hardware hack I found was great socks. Wear great socks. With the metaphorical space of keyboards and mice, better tools make better time. Tweaking and tuning aren’t about efficiency so much as enjoyment.

An example: I write my poems in MindNode. I store them in Basecamp or GitHub. Version control freed me of a novice fear of loss through editing.

Another: I’ve moved 99% of all social correspondence to Facebook (which all forward to an email) — and removed most people from my email address book. I draft in OmmWriter, send from Sparrow. Most everyone is a search away and most Facebook hold-outs are people I’d probably rather write with paper and stamps.

‘Be mindful of everything’ and ‘don’t think’ are my only mantram and everything—everything—is about interior experience and external communication. My mind holds the most delightful details of every encounter while forgetting almost everything I’ve ever said. True story!

Once realized, this became the impetus for carrying a camera, scanning with JotNot and saving to Evernote, switching entirely to Gmail, bribing Will with steaks for rsync’ing my sites to his server, investing monthly into Pinboard, Evernote, and Dropbox.

I’m still someone who often forgets to brush his teeth, who doesn’t send birthday cards, and often goes months or years without saying hello. But I remember nearly everyone and think fondly of hundreds of people a day. The systems are not why I hold these people in my heart—wish them safety, prosperity, and joy—but I use the tools to remove impediments from the explicit expression of those thoughts.

The tools are means towards movement. Will I leave some sort of legacy? Only in traces.

^MF

Why Tumblr?

Taken from an email to a prospective client about why Tumblr is relevant for a small creative business, and informed by a phone call with Max on the evening of 7.14.11.

In my mind, Tumblr does three things well.

First, it’s a great, free, easy-to-use lightweight blog interface. You can share text, photos, links, audio and video content. Unlike WordPress, which is something of a gorilla with its complex dashboard, Tumblr has a breezy quality with a nice, straightforward interface that allows for easy content creation. For business owners specifically, Tumblr offers a great platform for a news feed with regular updates about products and announcements. It could also be used strategically as an inspiration board of “what we like” and “what inspires our business”, if you prefer a more integrated, lifestyle approach to promotion.

Secondly, Tumblr is social. By its very nature, content is meant to be “tumbled”, meaning, users can easily “like” and reblog content. This is great for product photos, especially with your company’s URL watermarked on the image, which then can be recirculated over and over by other users. Tumblr posts are blogged and reblogged by fans, trend reporters, bloggers, etc, helping to disseminate your message and expand your reach. Likewise, you can follow other Tumblr users and they appear in your dashboard stream, much like the Facebook newsfeed. The option to reblog content from users you follow helps cultivate a social network with a visual/creative slant. Tumblr also plays nice with FB so that any content you add to Tumblr can automatically publish to your Facebook page, unifying your announcements and eliminating the need for multiple postings.

And thirdly, Tumblr offers great customization so that with some HTML and CSS knowledge, it can be skinned out to seamlessly reflect the visual vocabulary of your brand/project/self/whatever. That would be where I would come in, providing design and programming services. Because Tumblr’s interface is so versatile, it can even be tricked out to function as a CMS, hosting your entire commercial site.

Tumblr is free so you can sign up for an account an play around in there and see how you like it. The only real drawback to Tumblr is that occasionally their servers go down intermittently, but they seem to have this issue mostly resolved.

Pre-loading Images: CSS Hack

Well, hackers get what they get and what this gets is a broken site in IE 7. Wah-wah. -ja

Now that I’m using CSS to control my image hover states (by setting the background image), I need a way to preload these “roll-over” images for so that the user doesn’t get a momentary blank the first time they mouse over a button.

Check this. Absolutely zero scripting. So easy it hurts.

Somewhere in the <body> of your page, you’re going to include this div:
<div id=”preload”>
<img src=”the_same_img_path_that_you_are_using_in_your_CSS_code.jpg” width=”1” height=”1” />
</div>

In your CSS code, this:
div#preload { display: none; }

Voilà!

via Perishable Press

Adventures in Vertical Centering (continued)

Trying to vertically center something in HTML has got to be in the top 5 most annoying aspects of my job, particularly when trying to center objects of variable height (such as images in a CMS gallery). It’s especially awful now that I’ve abandoned tables for divs. Position: relative? Absolute? The much mythologized “vertical-align”? Top:50%? I’m getting sleepy.

Here is an easy and elegant solution I discovered yesterday for vertically-centering an object (such as an image) in a <div>, as long as no text is involved. The key: LINE HEIGHT. 

How it works:
In CSS, set the height of your parent container to a fixed value (say, 500px). Set the line-height to that same value. Now, we are going to use the vertical-align setting (gasp!). Because vertical-align is designed to define the behavior of TEXT within a given line, we are going to make it think that our <div> is a very tall text line and then the CSS will do the heavy lifting, magically centering our object in this space.

The code looks something like this:

#sample {
height:500px;
line-height:500px;
} 

#sample img {
vertical-align:middle;
}

That’s it. How do you like them apples? I like them very much, thank you. 

via Phrogz