kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: July 2007

RSS Icon — History of our Little Orange Friend

Classic Feed IconWhile poking around on Feedburner today I found a link to a site called feedicons.com, which keeps an archive of the always familiar syndication icons used on blogs and podcasts all around the Interweb. From there I found a link to a post by Matt Brett describing a bit about the history of the little orange icon, including notes from the Mozilla and Microsoft camps.

It’s an interesting read, and shows a bit about how some of the things we take for granted every day, got their start. Kind of like “How’s it made?” for computer geeks. :mrgreen:

Miss604 –> $400 for Surrey Food Bank

Just a quick update on the Blogathon post I did the other day.  Miss604 has successfully completed her 24-hour blogathon and her readers (myself included) have managed to pool together over $400 for the Surrey Food Bank!

If you’re one of those who made a pledge, be sure to follow up on it… tout de suite!  If you haven’t yet made a pledge the Donation link from the Miss604 website will remain active until July 31st, after which you can donate directly from the Surrey Food Bank website.

Well done, Rebecca!

Mac Lab Rat #2 – Global Geek Podcast

Episode #57 of the GGP is out today, and with it the latest segment of the Mac Lab Rat.  Here’s the detailed show notes from the MLR segment… if a few hours late. ;)

Classic FTP ScreenshotFirst up this week is a slick little FTP client called ClassicFTP from NCH Software.  It’s a fairly basic tool which provides all the usual suspects for features including stored credentials and SFTP compatibility.  What I really liked about this versus other popular tools like Cyberduck is the second pane for viewing files.  This helps to keep things easy to find, and is a feature I was used to having from Windows apps like CuteFTP.  ClassicFTP is available for Mac OS X 10.2+ and most Windows platforms.

sshOpener ScreenshotThe second app this week is an SSH manager called sshOpener.  This tool, written by Boris Penck, is a simple menubar application for OS X which allows you to open up a terminal session and connect to an SSH connection.  You will still need to enter your password, so the tool isn’t perfect, but it’s saving me time and energy already and has become indispensable over the week or so that I’ve had it installed.

Dashalytics ScreenshotNumber 3 on the hit list this week is Dashalytics, a Google Analytics widget for your OS X dashboard.  This provides a look at your site’s Google Analytics stats from the comfort of your own dashboard.  Dashalytics shows the basic stats including the all important visitors graph to show general traffic to your site.  The only thing I’d like to see is the ability to switch the sites you’re monitoring from the main view, without switching back to the info screen, but maybe that’s just me.

Finally a tidbit of iPhone news.  (Yes, I’m sorry)  It now appears that someone has managed to crack open the SSH server on the iPhone.  It’s only a matter of time now until large suites of iPhone ready tools (and probably the first iPhone virus) will start to flow from the blogosphere to your phone.

Thats it for this week.  Download the latest copy of the Global Geek Podcast!

Blogathon 2007 – Support the Surrey Food Bank

Though I’ve moved out of Surrey, I still consider myself a Surrey-boy at heart. A friend of mine, Rebecca from Miss604, will be participating in Blogathon 2007 and her charity of choice is the Surrey Food Bank.

The Surrey Food Bank receives no core government funding. They assist about 14,000 people per month from the communities of Surrey and North Delta. 42% of our clients are children and babies.

If you would like to support this cause, please take a minute to click-through to the Food Bank’s donation page from her site.  She will be keeping a running list of her Blogathon 2007 posts on her site as well.

Good on ya, Rebecca!

WordPress Plugin: Random Image Selector

UPDATE: December 9, 2007: The Random Image Plugin has been updated! Please see the new post for updates on features, or to comment.

 

 

Have you ever wanted to display a random image from a folder on your site? Maybe for a background or banner for your blog? Now there’s a quick and easy way to do it: the Random Image Selector plugin for wordpress!

The initial release, version 1.0.2 is available from the WordPress.org plugins site. The download location is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-image-selector/

The premise of the plugin is quite simple, create a folder on your website where you want to store your randomly selected files. The plugin will select from all the files in that folder, and choose one at random to display. This is a great way to create a random, rotating header for your blog, or even GASP a primitive ad-rotator.

  1. Extract randomImage.php into your wp-content/plugins folder (or a subfolder)
  2. Activate the plugin in WordPress
  3. On the options screen, select the “Random Image” menu
  4. Fill in the values for your physical and http paths
  5. Add some code to whatever page you want to display the image. This is a great way to customize the header image for your wordpress installation. The plugin will look in the folder and randomly select a header image to display.

Sample Code: <?php if (function_exists('generateRandomImgTag')) { generateRandomImgTag(); } ?>

I welcome any comments, feedback or suggestions for future iterations. I’ve got a few ideas myself. I would like to thank Stefan, one of the early adopters, for his feedback and corrections for the documentation. For another look at the plugin in action visit his site stefanmedia.

MacPorts: Subversion setup

In trying to upload my first WordPress plugin to the subversion servers at wp-plugins.org, I found that I didn’t have Subversion installed on the Macbook yet. So I turned to my first source for all Mac tools which originated in the Linux/Unix realm and that’s MacPorts.

MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) is a package manager for Mac OS X which can handle the installation, removal and updating of many tools. The vast majority of these are command-line programs. They run the spectrum from development tool like Subversion or Ruby on Rails, to network tools like bind or arpwatch.

Typical syntax for installing a MacPort is:

sudo port install some-application

A quick note about the Subversion install: you may need to ensure that your MacPorts install is up-to-date. I needed to run a “self update” of MacPorts before my subversion install would complete. See the transcript below to see what I mean…

titanium:~/Projects/WP-Plugins kdmurray$ su root

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools Error: Unable to execute port: wrong # args: should be "proc name args body"

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port selfupdate DarwinPorts base version 1.400 installed Downloaded MacPorts base version 1.5 Configuring, Building and Installing new MacPorts base selfupdate done!

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools

If you’re working with command-line tools on your Mac, and trying to compile linux tools from scratch, give MacPorts a shot. It will quite literally save you hours of time and frustration.

Mac Lab Rat #1 – Global Geek Podcast

I mentioned the other day that I was making my first forray into the world of podcasting by producing a segment for the Global Geek Podcast called the Mac Lab Rat. I’m going to make it a habit of including all my sources in the show notes, but also providing a copy of the review on the blog with all the relevant links. So without further ado, here’s this weeks reviews.

The first item this week comes from Apple itself. A few weeks ago Apple released an update for OS X (version 10.4.10… this update was primarily required due to the delay of Leopard until later this year which was itself necessitated by the Q2 launch of everyone’s favourite over-hyped device the iPhone…. but I digress…). The initial version of this update had some problems which caused hissing and popping noises for some Mac users. Apple has since released an “Audio Update” and updated the 10.4.10 files to include the audio update. The long and short of it: make sure you run your software updates regularly.

I’ve included a link to the original notice from Apple on the Apple Docs website.

The second item for this week is an image manipulation tool from Acqualia called Picturesque. This tool allows you to add all those super-cool “Web 2.0″ effects to your photos or website graphics. Some of the features include rounded corners, faded edges and the ever-popular “reflection” effect. I’ve included a couple of bef0re-and-after images to give an idea of what picturesque does. Normally I’ll be trying to keep an eye out for free Mac software, but in this case the amount of time Picturesque can save over trying to do the same effects in a more sophisticated tool like Photoshop more than makes up for the $20 price tag, particularly if you spend much time doing website or template design. The trial version will watermark your photos, so to really take advantage of its features you will need to purchase the full version.

To get more info on Picturesque, or to download the trial version visit Acqualia’s website.

Finally, I was going to discuss an about activating your iPhone without a 2-year contract from AT&T, but I figured we’re all at the iPoint of iOverload with iPhone iStories.

Thanks to Dave and Tim for giving me this opportunity. I’m looking forward to producing next week’s segment.

Web Trend Map 2007

Information Architects Japan has just released the updated version of their 2007 Web Trend map. This provides an amazing visual record of where the biggest sites on the web are, and how they inter-relate with each other.

iA WebTrends Map 2007

The analysis also includes descriptions of how sites are faring (using cool weather icons), and an indication of which “Web” they belong to. The Wall Street Journal is listed as “Web 0.5″, MSN is listed as “Web 1.0″ and popular social media sites Flickr and WordPress were listed as “Web 2.5″.

Its definitely worth a look to get a better idea of just how your digital world is connected to itself… and to you. The map has been released in several formats, I for one am going to try out the very cool OS X Screensaver version. :)

Applescript: Text to AIFF

I recently had a need to quickly and quietly encode some text to an audio file on my Macbook.  I found a very short, simple and effective Applescript file right on the Apple website which does just that.

The script will prompt you to choose one of the built-in system voices, then produce your file.  If you need an MP3, just open it up with iTunes and convert the track.

Sheer Brilliance!

PS: Those of you who watch Command N should try out the Zarvox voice. ;)