Does designing affect your outside life?

August 31, 2007 | 3 Responses

Have you ever found yourself applying techniques or ideas that you picked up from designing?

I was redoing my resume recently and I was having some trouble getting my word processor to do what I wanted. Suddenly it hit me. Why don’t I just code my resume with XHTML and CSS? So I did. And believe me, it went much smoother after that. Once the initial tables and such were laid out, I just had to copy, paste, and update the content of my out-of-date resume into the feilds.

I was pretty impressed with myself, then I started wondering what other aspects of my life has it infiltrated. Whats next?

A word or two on Akismet

August 30, 2007 | 0 Responses

This blog uses Akismet to fight nonsense posts. It is a very popular free plugin. All you need is a Wordpress.com API to activate your protection. Akismet checks your comments to see if they are spam and then it decides what to do with them. To Post or not to Post.

The odd thing is that I have had to manually approve some legitimate comments that were relevant to the discussion. I don’t know what caused them to be marked as spam but I’ve noticed more of it happening recently. It makes me wonder how many have slipped through.

So how does Akismet work? I checked on Google and it told me the FAQS were a good place to start. Google make me feel small.

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

And if a regular comment gets marked as SPAM, you just have to mark it as NOT SPAM. Pretty simple.

In other news, I’ve shut off the moderation of comments. Akismet recommends you to use the moderation queue. This doesn’t sit well with me. I see a lot of other blogs where my comment is posted instantly, even if it is the first.

One of the issues with WordPress is that it can sometimes be really hard to fight the right plugin to do the right job. There are many duplicate plugins. And comment plugins are in especially high volume. I’m not talking about SPAM related, just a lot of the different things that many bloggers want on their comment board. Dofollows, anti-spam, top commentators among others are in large demand and it isn’t always clear which plugins are the top contenders.

Text on the brain

August 29, 2007 | 3 Responses

I’ve been thinking a lot about Typography lately. Thanks to this article on Connor Wilson’s blog series, Better Your Blog in a Week. It is actually a quite addictive thing to work on. Adding new types of selectors to emphasize parts of the story, giving it more of a feel reminiscent of print magazines or even newspapers. Typography is an easily overlooked part of the blog template and it is an art form all its’ own. An art form that is, in some ways, dying. Looking at the justification and headings of some newer print papers is a good example of how much people forget about god typography.

You know when your reading magazines and they have an interesting quote lined up on the page so you read it before you get to that part?

It has actually become quite a rarity these days. But aren’t they great? I had always loved little things like that when I would read magazines and it made me realize that it was something I had wanted to experiment with in my own writing, but never really took the time to do once I got started. Strange how someone else can remind you of something that got you where you are in the first place. A second look at your blog’s typography is definitely worth the time it takes. I took a few cues from Connor’s typography and a applied them here. Not all of them, but a few.

Here a couple of tips that you can use to improve the way your site’s look by using simple font changes:
*A different font in headings and copy can work great.
*Some popular heading fonts are Georgia and Trebuchet MS. The can work in copy too (especially Georgia, very common copy font) but they have unique aspects that make them pop in a larger/heading situation.
*Besides aforementioned Georgia, some highly used copy fonts are Verdana, Arial and Lucida Grande.
*Choosing the right size for copy is important. Don’t go too big for the sake of a fad.

Connor Wilson

For my next tricks I plan to pretty up the response board and do a little ‘pushing’ at the end of each single story.

Get more storage out of your mobile devices

August 28, 2007 | 0 Responses

My cellphone is a basic picture phone. Nothing really fancy. It has 50 megabytes of memory on the phone and 30 megs on the mini SD card. All for a grand total of 80megs. Not a whole lot of space. So I got to thinking about ways to get more for my megabyte.

The answer was simple.

It isn’t hard to store more songs on your mobile devices. All you really need to do is make lower bitrate versions of each of the songs that you rip onto your computer. One for your PC and one for your mobile device. Yeah yeah. I’m encouraging ripping music off CDs. Its your CD and you can listen to it on whatever device you want to.

The standard bitrate for mp3 encoding is usually between 192 - 128 kylobits per second. That is near CD quality. You can definitely push this. An mp3 encoded at 48 Kbits/S will be somewhere near FM radio quality. When I was stuck behind a dial-up internet connection, I did SHOUTcast radio at a bitrate of 32 kb/s. It didn’t sound terrible.

So whip out your favorite mp3 encoder/ripper. A good one is lame mp3 encoder. Windows Media Player will not encode at a lower bitrate than 128kb/s. To get your squeeze on with this you will have to use something else. Another good start is Google.

If you files are already in mp3 format you may have to get more creative. One thing that might work is Zamzar.

---