Studio 12a

I found this free iPhoto Flickr export tool, FFXporter, today. It’s working without a hitch so far.

I just cleanly installed Mac OS X 10.5 tonight. Once I installed Mac OS X 10.5, the first thing I did as a web developer was to install my favorite Firefox plugins. Here’s a list of my essential plugins, what are yours?

• Better Gmail 2
• ColorZilla
• DOM Inspector
• Firebug
• MeasureIt
• ScribeFire
• YSlow
  

In Wordpress 2.3, you can change the default thumbnail size by editing the following code.

Open /wp-admin/includes/image.php and look for the following code:

$max_side = apply_filters( ‘wp_thumbnail_max_side_length’,
128, $attachment_id, $file );

The number specified here (128 by default) is the maximum size of either dimension. Just change this to whatever you like.

I just installed ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin that let’s you post to your blog directly to your blog from Firefox.

ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

ScribeFire let’s you upload or include photos in posts via url, add basic text formatting including blockquotes, edit using a rich-text editor and edit source code.

If you are curious how it works, you can checkout the source from the ScribeFire project at Google Code.

# Non-members may check out a read-only working copy anonymously over HTTP.
svn checkout http://scribefire.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ scribefire-read-only

See ScribeFire in action…

This isn’t a political endorsement or statement of any kind. It’s more of a note of something I haven’t seen before. Never have I seen such a well written speech merged into a song and then published as a video on the internet. The tone is, of course, hopeful and inspiring. I have heard Obama speak and I know he is very skilled but watching this video highlighted his speaking skills to a new level for me.

Ok, I think I’m hooked on YouTube.com. This is a funny video on web2.0 shopping.

I was just watching this HappySlip video and noticed the advertising in the video which is a new twist to online advertising in my experience. Traditionally, videos are used to mention a product or service but in this video, there are ads embedded in the video with hyperlinks. Being a programmer, I have to admit that I’m not really up to speed on using video as an advertising serving medium. It’s rather new to me but I see the potential. I’m not sure if these are dynamic or static. It would be a huge advantage to make ads dynamic.

We currently do video embedding at our company, Knowmad Technologies, but we haven’t yet done dynamic ad embedding in videos.

See the HappySlip video.

This is a beautiful video on Web2.0. What is Web2.0? Web2.0 is how we teach the machine the way we think (or does the machine teach us?). Wiki’s, blogs, tagging, bookmarking…what is it all? This is a beautifully done video, without vocal commentary, on the Web2.0 movement.

I see a lot of interesting business ideas in what is most recently dubbed “the new economy”, the web2.0 era. “The new economy” is not a new term at all, by the way. It is a consistantly recycled term meaning whatever is new in the economy.

One interesting idea I’ve come across recently is the idea of making your own printed cookbook online, called Tastebook.

Tastebook enables authors to easily make attractive cookbooks by editing an attractive, pre-built template that consumers can order online. Sections exist for your typical categories like fish, meat, vegetables and there is a catch-all category appropriately named “Everything else”. Authors can upload their own images of recipes and offer purchasers the ability to add their own recipes to the cookbook before having the book printed and bound.

Authors can create their own theme and cover image making this already attractive book completely customized to reflect the theme and personality of the author.
Read the rest

Yes, bald can be beautiful but not when it’s associated with a developer pulling their hair out trying to find CSS styles are not used on a site. Finding CSS that is unused is a pain to say the least.

Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox plugin developed by SitePoint to find usused CSS in stylesheets. It can analyze the CSS and HTML of a single page, or spider an entire site, and reports unused styles. Dust-Me also supports IE conditional statements, remote stylesheets and handles common hacks like “* html #foo”.