I’ve steered clear of discussing politics in my blog for quite some time. I find it good practice to do so, unless your blog happens to be about politics. This was too good to pass up.
Augustans voted for change the other day. They elected Deke Copenhaver as their next mayor. Why’s this important? Deke was an unknown, an outsider to Augusta politics. That’s a good thing for Augusta.
Congratulations, Deke. Let’s see what you can do…
Quick post before I leave for home… Gmail now supports RSS feeds, aka “Web Clips”. It’s nice to see this addition. Read more about it here.
It’s the 21st century, and with it has come some new ways of doing business. Google is showing that big billion-dollar businesses do not have to be bureaucratic. Google’s setup a sort of mini-democracy, where every employee has a say in how things are done. They are more concerned about the well-being of their engineers, than they are about their bankers or money managers. The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has put together a summary of the way things at Google are done.
Hat tip: ForeverGeek.com
Not sure how this slipped under the radar, but on 11/18, Microsoft released ActiveSync 4.1 for synchronizing Windows Mobile devices with PCs. You can snag it here.
I’ve used the CSS attribute letter-spacing to control the amount of space in the titles on my site. They work fine in Firefox, utilizing the following CSS:
h1 { letter-spacing: -.08em }
IE6 doesn’t seem to like negative em values. IE6 actually adds spacing between the characters in this instance. To fix this, I used the * html hack filter to pass an alternate value over to IE6. Not a pretty way of doing it, but it works. Here’s the code I used:
h1 { letter-spacing: -.08em }
* html h1 { letter-spacing: -3px; }
By using a negative pixel value instead of a negative em value, IE6 displays the content properly.
Update … so why this approach? It’s scalable in modern browsers. By using em values, we can scale the letter-spacing based on the size of the fonts, as specified by the user’s settings. Pixel values don’t scale. That’s why we utilize the * html hack to pass the letter-spacing value we want it to have.
Break out the champagne, folks. Apple has finally added some new TV show offerings to the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) from NBC, USA, SciFi and Disney. You can now get episodes of The Office, Monk, Battlestar Galactica, The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Law & Order, and more. They’ve also added older shows, like Knight Rider, Adam 12, Dragnet, etc. I’m not keen on most, if not all, that’s been added, with the exception of maybe “Surface”… (but I’m not really all that into that show, so I don’t see myself downloading episodes). This is definitely a step in the right direction, but I don’t think I’ll be truly happy with the product offerings until I can get “My Name is Earl” and “Stargate” episodes off of the ITMS.
Hat tip: The Unofficial Apple Weblog
The folks over at Firewheel Design just unveiled the new IconBuffet website. You can read more about it over on their blog, Sparkplug.
One of the cool new features of IconBuffet is the Free Delivery feature… where you can get free icons every month. The catch is, you might get Download A, and I get Download B, and a coworker gets Download C. We can send invites to our friends and allow them to snag our downloads. If you feel like sharing, my account email address is chris@powerserve.net 
The icons Firewheel has available are really sweet. I’ve bought several sets from them in the past for use on design projects, and they deliver a high quality product. I especially like that they now offer some vector versions of the icons…
I’ve got my fingers crossed right now, but I think I finally figured out what was going wrong with Blogger and it’s ability to publish my blog. It was choking on the MeasureMap script I had to incorporate into my template. I figured this out first by copying the modified template I had setup, and choosing one of the pre-built templates Blogger provides. My site published without a hitch. I then took a look at the MeasureMap code and saw that it was wrapped in its own <Blogger>...</Blogger> tags. I think this was the issue… I removed those… and incorporated the script elements designated within the <ItemPage>...</ItemPage> tags with stuff I already had to have on the ItemPage and tried to publish. Presto! I can publish again. It’s rather odd that this was an issue… but I figure that Blogger was having problems rendering out the pages because of the way my code was setup.
It looks like, for the time being anyway, I will remain using Blogger… but I am still looking for a viable alternative that utilizes ColdFusion, ASP or .Net and won’t affect what I have on the site too much…
I thought my issues with Blogger were over. They aren’t. I’m still getting Broken Pipeline errors when I try to publish. I got no response from Blogger. I guess this is to be expected from such a big company… especially one offering free applications.
After evaluating several blog applications, I have decided to make the switch over to MovableTypeWordPress. I’ll be working on migrating my existing content over to the new blog app in the coming weeks.
Stay tuned…
I’ve been using Measure Map since November 11th. Since that time, I’ve found it to be extremely efficient at tracking stats within my blog. I’m also evaluating Google Analytics for a higher view at how my entire site is doing, stat-wise… but it is very unreliable… and seems to update only when it’s good and ready to.
The only problem I have experienced so far with Measure Map is its ability to track comments on my site. But I think that is a result of how Blogger is setup. So I can’t really fault it for that.
I love the use of flash in the interface. It is quick, and definitely aids in the use of the application. It’s easy to increase date ranges using the flash sliders. Data gets pulled into graphics and is populated into flash graphics. Very slick, indeed.
Measure Map couldn’t be easier to use. It present information in an easy to use format that even entry-level users could understand. It doesn’t present meaningless data – only what is important and most relevant. You can’t beat this sort of reporting. Simplicity rules here.
I can’t wait to see what else is in store for Measure Map. I’ve really enjoyed it these past two weeks and look forward to continuing to use it!