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Bare bones? You got it. Tersus is an achingly simple WordPress theme without all the usual cruft.

Super Ginormous

This is the personal site/blog/experiment of Chris Harrison, a web designer living, working and playing in Augusta, GA.

04.20.2010

Leap

Last month I made the leap back to using a Mac. Since July 09, I’ve worked solely as a free­lancer and my trusty Dell lap­top has served me remark­ably well, but the time came for me to upgrade to some­thing more capa­ble. Budget-wise I was aim­ing to spend as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. That left me with only a a few choices:

  1. Get another PC. I toyed with the idea of get­ting a desk­top sim­ply because it’d be more upgrade­able down the road. I love my lap­top, though. Being tied to a desk isn’t ideal when you have to meet with clients or want to work some­place else from time to time. For $500-$1000 you can get some good lap­tops and/or desktops.
  2. Get a Mac. I was torn between get­ting a 13″ Mac­Book Pro, 24″ iMac or a Mac mini.
    1. A 13″ Mac­Book Pro would be a very capa­ble machine, able to run CS5 with­out issues. It could be hooked to an exter­nal mon­i­tor when needed. It’s super portable. The only down­side is that it’s a lit­tle on the small size. Work­ing on it for extended amounts of time, with­out an exter­nal mon­i­tor would prob­a­bly be a pain in the ass. Start­ing at $1199, the base model isn’t bad, but not quite what I was after.
    2. The 24″ iMac is fast, has a nice sized screen. Lots of great options. I loved that I’d be able to hook an exter­nal screen to it to dou­ble screen space. At $1199, the entry-level model is a great deal and I was seri­ously con­sid­er­ing it.
    3. The Mac mini is com­pact and decently pow­ered for its size. While it’s not portable like a MBP might be, it’s easy to trans­port. With its abil­ity to con­nect to mul­ti­ple screens sport­ing HDMI, VGA or DVI (via dis­play adapters), I was sold. The price helped as well. I bought the entry-level Mac mini for $579 retail with free ship­ping and no tax.

Get­ting used to Snow Leop­ard ver­sus sev­eral years in Vista and XP has been a bit of a chal­lenge, but not much. The Mac mini is quick, is able to do a lot with it’s seem­ingly unim­pres­sive hard­ware specs. All in all, I’m happy with the deci­sion to get it. Given the lim­ited bud­get, it was most def­i­nitely the right choice for me to make, but I could see myself going for either a MBP or an iMac the next time I need to upgrade.

Dual

The Setup

It han­dles two mon­i­tors flaw­lessly. It runs all of my appli­ca­tions with­out a prob­lem, even Cre­ative Suite 5. I’m extremely happy with my Mac mini and I can’t wait to build and cre­ate some awe­some stuff with it.

No Comments

03.11.2010

Microformats Made Simple

Micro­for­mats Made Sim­ple, a book my friend Emily Lewis wrote, now has its own microsite. If you haven’t picked up a copy of it yet, you really ought to.

3 Comments

01.18.2010

Never Stop Learning

Our indus­try is in an ever-changing state. Sure, on the sur­face it doesn’t look like much changes, but that’s where you’d be wrong. You might find it hard to believe, but there are some devel­op­ers that still use tables. There are some devel­op­ers that use inline styles or refuse to use CSS at all. Why? They stopped learn­ing or learned just enough to get their job done. How can you stay on top of things and avoid?

Make a com­mit­ment to learn. Make a com­mit­ment to improve your skills. Don’t let your­self or your cur­rent sit­u­a­tion keep you where you’re at.

What are your strate­gies for learn­ing? Does your cur­rent employer encour­age you to learn and improve upon your cur­rent skillset?

9 Comments

01.12.2010

Broken

Dear Twit­ter:

Twit­ter Trends are bro­ken. Yes, they can give invalu­able insight on the pulse of Twit­ter as a whole, but they’ve long been irrel­e­vant to me and I don’t feel like I’m alone.. The sys­tem is eas­ily gamed. Ran­dom hash­tags like #SheP­rob­a­blyA­Hoe spread like syphillis but why?

I know what you’re think­ing: just ignore them. Use a desk­top or mobile client that doesn’t put trends in your face. That’s valid. But ignor­ing a prob­lem doesn’t make it go away.

Trends would mat­ter more to me if they applied to the peo­ple I fol­lowed. I don’t care about what the whole of Twit­ter is talk­ing about. I want to know what the peo­ple I fol­low and who fol­low me are talk­ing about. What is impor­tant to my social cir­cle is infi­nitely more impor­tant to me than what’s #now­play­ing, #please­ex­plain­why or #omg­facts. But there are peo­ple out there who find that sort of stuff inter­est­ing, and it’s likely the peo­ple they inter­act with on Twit­ter do too. That’s why Twit­ter needs to fix trend­ing — so every­one can get the most of it. So that everyone’s expe­ri­ence with Twit­ter is a bit more custom-tailored to their own interests.

And would it kill you to fix replies?

Love, cd.

3 Comments

12.23.2009

Badges

Here are some 125×125 badges I made for Word­camp Atlanta:

And some 300×75 badges:

1 Comment

12.18.2009

Carmen

Car­men is here, and she’s the best Word­Press yet. Grab the lat­est ver­sion from your Dash­board by going to Tools > Upgrade or down­load from WordPress.org. With fea­tures like eas­ier video embeds, bet­ter image edit­ing, post thumb­nails and more, Word­Press 2.9 is more pow­er­ful and speed­ier than its predecessors.

No Comments

12.16.2009

Post Thumbnails in RSS feeds

the_post_thumbnail is one of my favorite addi­tions to Word­Press 2.9, but I recently ran into a prob­lem… the images I had set as my post thumb­nails weren’t being included in my RSS feed. Assum­ing you’ve already added sup­port for thumb­nails to your theme, you should be able to add this snip­pet to your theme’s functions.php file to dis­play them along with the rest of your feed content:

function insertThumbnailRSS($content) {
    $content = '<p>' .the_post_thumbnail('medium'). '</p>' .$content;
    return $content;
}

add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertThumbnailRSS');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'insertThumbnailRSS');

Thanks to Dou­gal Camp­bell for point­ing me in the right direction!

Thanks to Sébastien Méric here’s an event bet­ter approach:

function insertThumbnailRSS($content) {
   global $post;
   if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ){
       $content = '<p>' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'medium' ) . '</p>' . $content;
   }
   return $content;
}

add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertThumbnailRSS');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'insertThumbnailRSS');

23 Comments

Worthwhile

So far, over 300 peo­ple have com­mit­ted to par­tic­i­pat­ing in Project 52. It’s pretty safe to say that it’s exceeded everyone’s expec­ta­tions. If ever there was a rea­son to write, Project 52’s quickly become one of them. If even a frac­tion of the par­tic­i­pants stick with it, con­tent on the web should see a marked improve­ment in 2010. I hope they’ll focus on qual­ity and not just quan­tity. Com­mit­ting to writ­ing 52 posts is well and good, but if there’s lit­tle thought put into them, you might be bet­ter off not writ­ing at all. After all, this is a per­sonal chal­lenge – one we should learn and grow from.

I know that by announc­ing my inten­tions with Project 52, I might be sab­o­tag­ing myself, but my aim is to be as trans­par­ent as pos­si­ble about what my plans are and what goals I hope to achieve through Project 52. And hope­fully my trans­parency will help keep me more account­able. But trans­parency isn’t enough. I want my par­tic­i­pa­tion to mean some­thing. That’s why I’d like to up the ante. For each post I write for Project 52, I’m going to be rais­ing money for a char­ity. (Which one? Not sure yet, but I’ll announce between Christ­mas and New Years.)

If you like what I write, I’m hop­ing you’ll be encour­aged to chip in some­thing to help me reach a goal of rais­ing $500. That breaks down to $9 a week. I know it can be done. And if my content’s good enough, it will be done.

What are your thoughts? Am I insane? If you dig the idea, got any char­i­ties you think would be wor­thy of sup­port? (I’m think­ing I might try to find a local char­ity to sup­port, but would love any sug­ges­tions you might have.)

4 Comments

12.15.2009

Best Bot Yet

In its short his­tory, Tap­bots has released two incred­i­bly well-designed util­i­ties for the iPhone: Weight­bot & Con­vert­bot. Last night they launched their third — and in my opin­ion, it’s the best bot yet.

Paste­bot is the ulti­mate clip­board man­ager for the iPhone or iPod touch. I’ve been lucky enough to use this app for a few months. When I first started using it I described it as “an app I didn’t know I needed, but can’t imag­ine not hav­ing it”.

It’s beau­ti­fully designed. It’s incred­i­bly easy to use: sim­ply copy an image or text string within any iPhone app, then launch Paste­bot and — bick­ety bam! — it’s stored to Pastebot’s clip­board. Once you’re in the app, you can eas­ily tog­gle between mul­ti­ple clips. If you’re a neat freak, you can eas­ily setup a series of fold­ers. If you use Tap­bots to store images, you’ll be able to crop and apply color effects to stored images.

I could go on and show you lots of screen­shots and walk you through all of the apps fea­tures, but I won’t. Instead, I encour­age you to visit http://tapbots.com/pastebot/ to learn more, or hop on over to iTunes and grab a copy. (It’s only $1.99 for now. The price will go up to $2.99 after the ini­tial launch.) Oh, and did I men­tion it’ll sync to your Mac?

Want to win a copy of Pastebot?

In the com­ments below, tell me what you might use Paste­bot for. I’ll announce the win­ner tomor­row — 12/16/09. Leave a com­ment before 12/16/09 at 9:00am EST to be included in the drawing.

10 Comments

12.08.2009

Project 52

Thanks to Anton’s sug­ges­tion of Project 52 — based on a tweet by Chris Wal­lace — I’m pub­licly com­mit­ting to write more in 2010. Begin­ning the first week of Jan­u­ary, I’ll post at least one new (sub­stan­tial) arti­cle. Asides and port­fo­lio entries won’t count. Why am I doing this? I want to become a bet­ter writer and I’m tired of this site being con­sis­tently stale.

My Approach

A year-long endeavor like this will require plan­ning and per­se­ver­ance. I’ll need to iden­tify top­ics. I’ll need to come up with some sort of reg­u­lar sched­ule (and stick with it). And I’ll need to force myself to be account­able through it all.

3 Comments

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