Articles on Technology, Gadgets and more.
From the blog of John Nack:
It’s critical that Adobe help developers get up to speed in updating their plug-ins to run natively on Intel-based Macs, so we’ve posted a Photoshop CS3 mini-SDK that contains the needed info. The SDK, along with the CS and CS2 versions, is a free download once you fill out a simple form.
Sorry Mac guys, I’ve only installed this on my PC laptop. The new interface is sweet. Device Central is going to be an awesome development tool to have at a designer’s disposal.
Wow, the post made it to the homepage!
And it’s had nearly 700 diggs. The other metric that blows me away is 25,735 views of the screenshots.
The WordPress Tiger Admin plugin has been updated to version 3.0. It’s been completely redesigned, and has much better compatibility with the newest WordPress features. I’ve been using this plugin for quite some time now, and this latest release is phenomenal.
It started with a simple post on Digg – “New Apple.com Design Coming”. (It has 1253 diggs as of right now.) A user reportedly found a design on someone’s site and posted it to Digg.com saying: “I found this image from desudesu.com. ‘It’s design test for Fantasy Interactive for the next generation of apple.com site’ says the caption. It looks quite great to me.”
I caught it early, under Upcoming Stories, before it even made it to the homepage. I posted the first comment:
Looks nice, but I’m going to have to call BS. A “design test” doesn’t mean, “this is the new design for apple.com”. They probably asked the guy to submit a concept for a site he’d love to redesign.
Sorry, no digg.
All’s well and fine, right?
Enter Kyle Neal of Warpspire.com. I subscribe to his feed (mainly because I’m interested in his work on Hemingway), and noticed a post from him within an hour: Spotting a fake: “New apple design”. Evidently, someone else noticed it too, because the story got Dugg. (Since yesterday, his post has received 1100 diggs.) Some of that traffic ended up bleeding over to my site because I had posted in the comments.
I mention all of this, because yesterday I had double the amount of traffic (102 unique visitors) to my site than my previous high (56 visitors). (Yeah, I realize those aren’t real impressive numbers.) When you consider that my site doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all (maybe 30-35 unique visitors a day), this spike is pretty significant. People are always looking for ways to drive more traffic to their site, but sometimes all it takes is to get involved in a discussion. I’m sure Kyle’s site experienced a lot more traffic than that… but it’s interesting that the Digg effect rippled over to my own site to some extent.
I use this site mainly for testing. I blog from time to time (fairly irregularly, I might add). But I’ve been able to boost my Google PageRank to a PR4 by continually gettting in on the discussion, whether it’s on Digg, Warpspire or any other number of sites. So if you’re looking for a good, legitimate way to drive traffic to your site, get involved, say something worthwhile, and people will take note.
This won’t be big news for people outside of the Augusta area, but I just noticed that if you are a registered user of the Augusta Chronicle website, you can comment on articles.This might make me visit their site more often. I know that newspapers have struggled with retaining subscribers as more and more people start to get their news online, and it’s going to take more innovation like this in order to grab eyes.
I tend get my news from CNN.com, Google News, Digg, and a hundred other places. I usually avoid the local paper – partly because I don’t care too much for local news and partly because there hasn’t been any real reason for me to keep coming back to the Chronicle website.
Now, if only they’d consider doing a daily digital delivery (via PDF or something)… I might subscribe to the paper all week long. (Right now, I only get Sunday papers delivered to me.) It would save trees…
This is just a test to see how well Windows Live Writer works. I’ve grown accustomed to using the WordPress backend, but if this makes life easier, I’ll definitely use it. This isn’t the first time I’ve used a third-party app to write to this blog. I used to use w.Bloggar for a time, and it worked well. I just thought it was a little too much for what I wanted to do.
The interface is very Word-like. That’s not such a bad thing. I like the fact that you can toggle between Normal layout, Web Layout, Web Preview and HTML Code. Normal Layout doesn’t pull in any of your style information. Web Layout let’s you type your post(s) using your stylesheet. Web Preview let’s you preview the post within the context of your site design. It wasn’t perfect when I tried it, but that may be more of an issue with my code and IE than anything else.
I’d say that all in all I like Writer. It’s easy to use, supports Plugins, writes fairly clean code…
Pardon me while I put on my geek hat. I’ve been hitting my head up against a wall trying to figure out the best way to dynamically include content into an email using ColdFusion.
I tried the most logical solution first, define the URL with the data I wanted and pass that onto the SEND script.
<input type="hidden" name="msgString" value="http://example.com/msg/test.cfm?subject=Hi&sender=joe@example.com&recip=john@example.com" />
Then, I converted the string to a variable I could more easily work with…
<cfset msgStr = "#form.messageString#" /> <cfmail to="user@example.com" from="user@example.com" subject="Hey there!" server="mail.example.com" type="html"> <cfinclude url="#msgStr#" /> </cfmail>
No luck. ColdFusion choked on the dynamic string everytime. When I tried to define the string as a variable and parse it with CFOUTPUT, ColdFusion choked again.
So, I thought, why not try using CFHTTP to grab the data, and then have it render into the body of the email I wanted to send.
<cfhttp resolveurl="yes" url="http://www.example.com/#form.messageString#" method="get"></cfhttp> <cfmail to="user@example.com" from="user@example.com" subject="Hey there!" server="mail.example.com" type="html"> #CFHTTP.FileContent# </cfmail>
BINGO! That worked. In retrospect, it seems pretty easy to do it this way… but I couldn’t get it to work right for quite some time. Now it works right, and the client should be happy.
The war against comment spam is an uphill battle. WordPress users have a number of tools at their disposal that help with combat it. Based on Lorelle’s declaration of war on spam, I’ve decided to take the same steps here on my site.
Comments are no longer moderated. And you don’t have to be a registered user. If it’s a legitimate comment, it gets posted right away. If it’s spam, one of three tools are going to get medieval on your buttocks: Akismet, Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2.
So far, since going forward with this test last week, I’ve had zero false positives. I don’t know how long this system will remain this rock solid… but I’ve got high hopes for it.
The Audacity developers have been busy with many new features over the past year. We’re pleased to announce Audacity 1.3.2 (beta), which contains dozens of new features and capabilities. Because it is a work in progress and does not yet come with complete documentation or translations into foreign languages, it is recommended for more advanced users. For all users, Audacity 1.2.5 is a minor bug-fix update that addresses some problems with Audacity 1.2.4, but does not add any significant new features. It is complete and fully documented. You can have both Audacity 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 installed simultaneously. Also, we have just made available a set of 92 LADSPA plug-ins for Windows (for both Audacity 1.2.x and 1.3.x).
Audacity is a great, open-source audio editing application that is perfect for creating netcasts.
The newest release of WordPress was released a little while ago. Being the upgrade junkie that I am, I went ahead and applied the latest updates. So far, so good.
You can read more on the release here: WordPress Development Blog: WordPress 2.0.5 Ronan
I have not experienced any conflicts with any of the plugins I have installed.
One step closer to 2.1… Can’t wait to see some of the new UI work by Bryan Veloso.