inluminent

I found an opensource/free flash based image viewer application today that I totally dig:
SimpleViewer
I may use it to build a few special galleries in the future instead of PhotoStack, which powers my main photo gallery needs at englers.org.

Writing HTML for email newsletters has always been a pain in the butt for me. I’ve never been particularly good at it, so I was pleased to read this new How to write HTML for email guide was a welcome read.

Ok, this is an egg on my face story:
On Janaury 9th, I wrote about adding Jeremy’s comment spam prevention code to my site. I also added the code to my .htaccess file. All has been well. I’ve gotten dramatically less spam since then… however…
I logged into my Google Adsense account the [...]

This is the coolest web page header design on a ‘news’ website I’ve seen in a long time.
On this page, and doubtless on the rest of the International Herald Tribune web pages, they have this really cool header that is the whole header at the top of the page, but becomes just the useful part [...]

Following the footsteps of Jeremy Zawodny, Jason Kottke, Mark Pilgrim and others, I’ve established my very own linkblog.
On it, I’ll post links that I think are interesting enough to read, but either don’t have the time or energy, or need, to write anything in depth about them.
An RSS feed is here, and the templates are [...]

Keith posted a question, and the answer to that same question:
How do I add an ‘edit this page’ button to a Movable Type weblog?
Very cool. Thanks Keith.

Angie McKaig tackles the Full RSS Feed question. I subscribe to Angie’s full feed, and I think her site has a wonderful design.
I subscribe to her full feed because I’d like to read her site whenever it’s updated, and… I really don’t have the capacity or desire to remember to visit her [...]

A few links from the month:

ADHD Observations - interesting comments from a parent of children with ADHD.
CSS Dropshadows - from ALA #172.
The Lowering of Loyalty from FastCompany (great first comment).
How Not to Win Customer Loyalty from Business2.0.
Top 25 Cities in the US for Doing Business from Inc.
The Three C’s of Personal Branding from brandchannel.com.
MacRumors [...]

I learned a neat little HTML/Javascript trick on the about page of the newly launched Orkut from Google.
Here is the trick (let the page load entirely, then watch the next line (on smaller pages it’s much cooler… see the individual story archive page to see it happen the way it should really happen)):
This text will [...]

First, let me say, I don’t know Nick Denton at all. I also only know Noel Jackson through email (though we’ve emailed a bit for two complete strangers) and I’ve only read some of Joe Clark’s stuff online, here and there.
But, when I read this post by Noel, and then more here on the [...]

Chuq was bitching about Marc Canter’s whining about Paolo’s pointing to a post by Todd Dominey. I read Chuq’s post, and followed the trail through to Todd’s post about the text-shadow CSS2 attribute, and am pleased to announce I am using it on this here website.
If you’re using Safari 1.1, then you’ll notice the [...]

Here’s a few links to stuff I’ve read over the past month or so:

Advertising
Deciding On The Advertising Media - good pros and cons list of different advertising mediums, but leaves out online advertising
The On-line Marketer’s Secret Weapon: A Site that Works
Salted Wound : Perfect Weblog Ads
Seth’s Blog: Why Web Ads Don’t Work
Fresh Inc: [...]

Worth reading to any Macintosh-using developer or dabbler:
BBEdit Version Control by John Gruber [via Daring Fireball]
Thanks John.

overheard at:

In case you didn’t notice, I finally did a little housekeeping with my URL structure (after writing about it many, many times). Thanks in large part to a bunch of articles I’ve read recently about URLs, and an excellent conversion tutorial from Olivier Travers (which is where almost all of my tricks came from), [...]

I read an article today about Amazon’s new RSS feeds, and quickly moved to investigate the PR. I added a bunch of feeds to NetNewsWire. I’m thinking this could be dangerous (feel free to grab these feeds for your own use):
Books:
Computers & Internet
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Science Fiction
Fantasy

DVDs:
Science Fiction and Fantasy DVDs
Today’s Deals in [...]

In case you haven’t noticed, the “Steal My Buttons” effort run by Taylor at gtmcknight.com is up to 839 Buttons. Wow.

Tom Coates wrote an article that says people don’t need Search Engine Optimization companies to help them get good rankings in Search Engines. I’d say that I disagree with such a blanket statement.
A lot of companies do need SEO consultants as long as those consultants are trustworthy and will help those company’s build [...]

From Kuro5hin:
What is hypertext? It’s one of those things that make the web so wonderful, but how many of us have stared into the various, intricate patterns in the rich tapestry of hypertext and pondered them? We’ve certainly come a long way from the ‘ click here ‘ days of old.
Interesting read… although I’m sure [...]

Kalsey says it best:
Dear Client,
Netscape 4 is now six years old. Could we please stop catering to an old, buggy browser that is incompatible with all other browsers?
Thanks.
I mention it in full, as my web dev department asked our internet general manager just today if we could drop Netscape 4.x support in the [...]

Years ago, major web-sites were ‘re-launched’ every year or two, and some were relaunched as often as every six-months. This often resulted in major usability changes for a large group of core users that ended up sounding very vocal to the designers and managers of those websites. Today’s approach is to no ‘re-launch’ [...]

For the past week I’ve been pretty busy… here are a few things I’ve read recently and needed to blogmark:
MT Medic [via Pat Berry]
Interesting graph on SARS
Let’s Make a Cell-Phone Deal - I’ve done this. It works. More from ArsTechnica.
Working with Forms in PHP, Part 1 and Part 2. Great information on [...]

Just wanted to share with those of you looking for a job, or a better job, that LJWorld.com is looking for a web programmer/developer. I’d highly recommend the job to anyone with the reuqired skill set. LJWorld is one of the leaders in the industry. Good luck if you apply. And [...]

Noel Jackson has released the truly fantastic PhotoPal 1.0b. I’m using it here… you should be too.
Think MovableType templating, with the ease of PHP understanding for a photo store, photo blog, or even just a handy place to hold your images for personal archival and retrieval purposes… truly fantastic.

I’ve installed another hack: Google Hilite from Dean Allen over at Textism.
So, now if you search Google for somewhere over the rainbow-mp3 and follow the first link, you’ll see a page where the terms you’ve searched for are highlighted.
Pretty cool. Thanks Dean.

When you’re designing advertising, or pretty much anything for that matter, you should know the reasons for using certain colors:
Color Psychology
Psychology of Color
About.com: The Psychology of Color
Interesting: The Meaning of Color in Cultures
From HP (a PDF): The Meaning of Color

Scott’s Feedster has made the blogrolls quite a bit lately, and while definitely cool, it wasn’t something I was following all that much, but, while I was telling him to call AppleCare to get his iBook diagnosed over the phone yesterday, he showed me Feedster Images.
I think Feedster Images is totally cool… in fact, I’m [...]

Found this handy dandy Character Entity Reference thanks to a link from Zeldman

This is something to add to my weblog this weekend.
Later: Just found Google Hilite from Textism… cool stuff.

News.com’s got a great ‘history of the browser‘ in celebration of Mosaic’s 10 year anniversary (which is today btw).

Ugh… oh how a thief must feel after being caught stealing someone’s code. Adam Kalsey has publicly shamed a thief. And it’s really sort of sad that someone would steal Kalsey’s code, and then put it online to claim as their own. Don’t people realize that there’s just about nothing on the [...]

I’ve never really paid much attention to accessability guidelines, thought I’ve found them quite interesting. I’m not a designer or a developer by trade anymore, but rather am a sales person, so I just pay attention to them peripherally, but…
I’ve got a new Palm that talks to my phone via bluetooth, and the web [...]

Looking for stock photos for a project you’re working on?
Look no further than:
Inertia Stock Exchange: share your photos with fellow designers. For personal or commercial use. Long live the free exchange of information and ideas.
[via angiemckaig]

Adrian Holovaty just published an Interview with Web optimization expert Andy King in which she asks Andy a great set of questions that deal with website optimization for news sites specifically, which would also help weblog writers. Here’s some of what I gained from the interview:
“67.5% of us are still plugging away at 56Kbps [...]

[written on 3/2 at 10:00 pm]
I justed finished reading the latest Media Professional email newsletter by Adam Cohen and I could these two great resources that I couldn’t help but share:
Direct Creative which is a “direct response resource site from copywriter Dean Rieck.” Adam’s newsletter points out this page with some great offers to try [...]

I use BBEdit to write all of my entries for this weblog, as well as to edit the templates remotely, so finding this MT Glossary for BBEdit was quite cool. I’m looking forward to using it soon to update some parts of this site and MarketingFix.
[via PixelCharmer]

I saw some really kick ass mouseovers on Phil Ringnalda’s site, and decided I wanted to use them on inluminent/weblog, so… I stole the code, and implemented it here…
The thing is, I think the code only works in Mozilla or at least Gecko based browsers on a Mac (though it sounds like Safari might support [...]

On Monday, I downloaded the latest version of Opera for Mac so that I could test some of the problems that people have reported with the new “images: on/off” option that I’m offering on inluminent/weblog. Then I read this article on C|Net.
It basically says that Opera might be dead on the Macintosh due to [...]

It’s never to late to learn about the Q Tag from diveintomark.
So, now the question is… should I go back and fix all of my old code?

A long, long time ago… Kasia asked me to get rid of the images on inluminent/weblog.
I immediately wanted to do what she asked, as I didn’t mean to offend Kasia, or any other female readers. But, I didn’t know how to do it quickly, and I was in the middle of getting ready to [...]

So, I’m seeing this page in my referrers:
http://ilist.yahoo.com/
The visitor’s IP from that page resolves to yahoo.com so I’m wondering what ilist.yahoo.com is.
Anyone have an idea?
[update: Jeremy tells me that it's an internal mailing list manager and that someone was probably reading their archives and clicked through to inluminent]

Wow.
Text Pattern
Brought to you by Dean Allen.
Looks totally cool, very useful, and fun.
I’ll definitely be looking into it for a client in the near future.
Dean, if you’re reading, I’ll need to know what the pricing will be buddy.
Oh yeah, one more time:
WOW!

Go read Would You Really Follow a Manager into Battle?
If you feel there’s an insatiable force sucking up your energy and your children’s future, it’s Managerial Capitalism.
The key to Managerial Capitalism is a shortage of capital, not its abundance. This view requires an inversion in how we think of economic eras.
I personally had to tune [...]

Adam Kalsey has a good article on why small businesses need websites. I’ve never really paid close attention to the ‘local’ market until here recently as I’m traditionally a national advertising sales person, but my new job has forced me into focusing on the local market, and one of the objections I’m hearing to [...]

Top 10 Google Myths Revealed, by Chris Beasley, is a must read for anyone doing web development work where search engine ranking is important.
1. The Higher Your Google PageRank (PR), the Higher You’ll be in the Search Results Listing
2. The Google Toolbar will List Your Actual PageRank
3. PageRank is a Value Based on the Number [...]

If you want to publish your email address on a website, you’re gonna get spam, but there are a few things you can do to cut down on the amount of spam you get.
The easiest is to not publish your email address on a website. You’ll still get some spam, but your ISP should [...]

FYI, the 2003 SXSW Interactive Web Awards entry deadline has passed for this year, but it’s totally fun to visit random entries if you have some time on your hands… And if you come to the conference in March, drop me a line so we can maybe catch lunch or something… I’m pretty sure I’ll [...]

How to get Plucker, a decent AvantGo replacement, working on Mac OS X.
Jeremy Zawodny will be playing with MySQL and Terrabytes of data…
.