My Geekbox

By Jason | September 27, 2007

So, the new Advanced Operators topic is up, and it’s asking “What’s in your toolbox?”

It’s become immediately obvious that “tool” is defined differently by different people, so I’m going to take an approach of “whatever I can remember that I use.”

Hardware:

I use a 24″ iMac with a second, 20″-monitor at work. It’s a pretty unbeatable setup and I love it. I’ve got my browser (Firefox) or Photoshop or TextMate on my main screen; and 3 finder windows (open to different projects or mounted drives), Adium (instant message), and email open on my second monitor.

At home I use a 15″ MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

I usually have a Nalgene of water by my desk, a cup of coffee, as well as a flask of a little something-something there as well. That and some almonds.

Software:

Notes: Journler is a great tool for writing, keeping and sorting notes. It’s free, has tags, categories, fantastic searching, smart folders and can post to blogs also. I put everything in here and know I can find it in a second if I need it again.

Coding: If I code, I use TextMate. It’s just got everything I want (except for built in FTP support). I can use key-commands until my brain hurts, and it’s fast as hell. I love it. I’ve tried Coda, and it’s awesome, but it just doesn’t solve the problems I needed solved in a way that made up for it being an underpowered text editor. Sorry. You’re pretty and smart, but I’m sticking with my guns.

Connections: Gotta be Gmail for your domain (my jasonglaspey.com email is powered by Gmail), and Google Reader. Again, the keyboard commands had me at “open in a new window”; as well as I don’t have to sync it between machines. And now that it’s got search, I will probably never leave.

Posting: I’m using SrybeFire right now to write this post. It’s a great Firefox plugin that lets me post to all my blogs from within the window. It’s not perfect with photos, but for text entries, it’s money. All my blogs run on Wordpress.

Launching: Gotta have Quicksilver. When I sit down at a machine that doesn’t have it I feel like I’m only using one arm.

Folders: Default Folder X is a great little tool when you’ve got files all over the place. You use it in conjunction with your open/save dialog boxes to quickly jump to folders all over your system. It’s hard to explain but easy to use.

Instant Messaging: Already mentioned Adium.

Torrents: Transmission is the amazing. Fast, powerful, lightweight.

Production: Adobe CS3 Master Suite. Way more than I need, but everything just in case.

Color: Color Schemer Studio. Great way to grab color from anywhere on the screen. I use it constantly when designing or coding from someone else’s design.

Video: I use Handbrake and iSquint to get movies ripped and onto my iPhone or my XBMC on my modded Xbox for watching movies on my network.

Wireframing: I recently used Pages to wireframe, and I have to say, it works better than OmniGraffle in my opinion. Elegant looking wireframes out of the box and now super easy to make in Pages 08.

FTP: Transmit and Yummy, depending on if I’m at home or work.

Dashboard: Dashalytics for easy access to my web stats and two instances of a Flickr widget that shows me a photo of a kitten and a mountain biker (one of each) every time I hit F12. I love me some kittens.

Shopping: www.steepandcheap.com. I visit this all day long. It’s bad news for my wallet.

Firefox Plugins: Alexa Sparky (so I can see how important a site is), Del.icio.us Bookmarks (nothing beats the Firefox integration.), Firebug and Web Developers (yeah yeah, impossible to work without them), Greasemonkey, Measureit (allows you to tape measure your Firefox browser so you can see the dimensions of things quickly), OpenBook (bookmarks tool), ScribeFire, StumbleUpon (all my sites gotta get a thumbs up), SEO for Firefox, Stylish (Google Reader is ugly, this makes it Purty). I also use the GrApple (Eos Pro) theme for Firefox so it matches my Mac.

Hope this helps ya’ll.

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Douchebag Wordpress Plugin

By Jason | August 30, 2007

Got a douchebag always leaving lame comments? Mark him with an icon that lets everyone know how you feel.

douchebag plugin

The Douchebag plugin for Wordpress is pretty much the greatest idea ever. There are a lot of times when I dislike a comment, or a commenter in general, but you don’t want to a) delete the comment, or b) be a jerk to them by calling them out in the comments. With the douchebag plugin, you can quickly give them a very ‘not-so-subtle’ hint without censoring them or even typing a word.

the interweb is the greatest place in the world.

Check out the Douchebag Plugin at Young Go Getter

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Is social the new search?

By Jason | August 29, 2007

Personally, I believe that search is going to be broken up in the future, as I see it already starting to happen. For a while, Google was god, and you went there for everything, but not anymore. If I’m looking for a torrent, I go to a torrent search engine. If I’m looking for something I know is on Wikipedia, I just go straight to the Wikipedia page. If it’s something I’ve read before, I do a search in my feed reader.

Do I think Google will become obsolete? Absolutely not. They will continue to be the starting point for most people for most things. However, as we get better at searching, as our options improve, I think Google will cease to become the one-stop-shop for all your searching needs. Maholo, Facebook… I’m sure they’ll play a role, as I think the abilities of the masses will definitely begin to shape the search arena. But for that random shit, the obscure, the uber:niche, I think will continue to be served best by robots.

Just my opinion.

To check out other people’s opinions, check out Advanced Operators as a bunches of other people discuss whether or not Social is the new Search.

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Hardcore advanced renaming of files in Mac OS X and Windows

By Jason | August 16, 2007

Renamer4Mac is an advanced file renaming tool for Mac OS.

Where was this app just a few weeks ago? I needed this desperately and ended up bugging my programmer for 30 minutes as we wrote a shell script (never done that before) to make some pretty sophisticated file-renames. However, I was pretty nervous to hit “go” in case I missed something… Now, here this is with live previewing, so you can see exactly how your files will be renamed before you hit Go.

Renamer4Mac supports Regular Expressions (yay! regex), search and replace, insert/overwrite of text, numbering files, and capitalization. Whew. It’s also donationware, so make sure you support these guys if you like their work.

Renamer4Mac

Renamer4Mac, found via lifeclever.com.

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Porn Spam and the search for Links

By Jason | August 13, 2007

I noticed this morning that a comment had made its way into my queue for moderation on one of my rarely updated sites this morning. When I went to moderate it, I saw as I expected that it was spam and filled with links to porn sites. It had the usual “lesbian licking party” with some link to some url that specializes in lesbian licking parties. As I deleted the comment, I have to admit, for a split second I thought “I like lesbian licking parties… I wonder if this site is any good…”

Now, for those reading, I didn’t go and check out the site. I stay away from that shit. However, it did occur to me that I delete all the spam I get pretty quickly because there is nothing in it for me to keep that comment. It’s filled with junk and I don’t want it on my site. However, taking the idea a little further, what if this site gave me free access to it’s paid content? Now, I’m going beyond porn here, what if sites that wanted links just went to the site owners and said “Hey, we’ll give you a month’s free account if you let us do some nasty, link-filled commenting in your system? What if SEO experts just offered up free goodies to people when they needed more links? It’s better than buying them because in the case of free memberships, those memberships have no value outside of the people who are willing to pay for them, so giving them out to a handful of people, in order to get a truckload to sign up, is a positive exchange.

Now, a non-porn specific way to do this would be an SEO going to a handful of sites that pass decent PR, and working out a deal, some free service in exchange for the ability to get any number of links posted on the original site. That way, the SEO gets his links all over the web, and can probably give out the same piece of advice to almost everyone, a simple “advanced” eBook or something. Maybe 30 minutes of personal 1-on-1 advice, in exchange for 20+ links? I think that’s a pretty good deal, if it’s saving you time getting decent links in the long run.

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Quickly and easily add images to your site or blog without hotlinking

By Jason | August 9, 2007

Man, I love adding cool images to my blog posts, but sometimes it can be a pain to find an image, download it, upload it, get the path, and blah blah blah. So, imgred.com makes it easy to embed images in your site, but instead of hotlinking to the original source, imgred downloads it, places it on their own server, and allows you to hotlink from there.

But how does it work? Well, I tried it with this image from Lifehacker, who wrote up this very same topic.

Hotlinking from an article about hotlinking

So, if you see an image above, then it must be working.

As you can see from the image, all you have to do is add “http://imgred.com/” to the beginning of the absolute path to the image online. Pretty easy. Now, I’m about to hit submit and see if it works…

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Running Coherence on Parallels

By Jason | May 18, 2007

I finally got around to setting up Parallels and installling XP so I can more easily test sites in IE6 and IE7. However, the one feature I was most excited about was coherence. Now, setting up Parallels and getting a virtual machine set up couldn’t have been more easy, but out of the box, coherence wouldn’t work. The button was there, but nothing happened when I clicked it.

So, I googled it, and came across this page. It had just what I needed. It turns out, you have to manually install Parallels Tools (you actually begin this process on your mac, then make it happen within your virtual machine.)

Once I did this, I was running in coherence mode immediately, and it was all better. (by the way, coherence mode allows you to not have to run your virtual machine confined to a window. It places the Windows Start bar at the bottom of your browser, and you just launch apps just as if they were made to run in Mac OS X, it’s amazing, and I love it.)

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Firefox Inline Autocomplete

By Jason | May 11, 2007

I spend most of my day with my hands on the keyboard and a web browser open. So, one feature I’ve come to absolutely love is Firefox’s inline autocomplete. Basically what this means is that when you’re typing into the address bar a URL, and you’ve visited a similarly named site before (for instance, I type in “goo” and google.com is in my history), it autocompletes inside the address bar. So instead of having to move to the arrow keys and scroll down to it, the best match is automatically filled out. I love this feature so much, but whenever I use a new machine, re-install my settings, or something, I have to look it up on Google again. So, I’m posting it here, for you and for me.

To enable autocomplete in the Firefox:

1. Go to about:config in the URL field and press enter.
2. Right-click somewhere on the page and choose New > Boolean value
3. Enter browser.urlbar.autoFill as the preference name (note, this is case-sensitive: ‘F’, not ‘f’). I just copy and paste it, makes it easier.
4. The value should default to true, but double check.

You’re done. So nice, so easy. Here’s a screen shot of it in action.

Firefox inline autocomplete

Special thanks to Geek Ramblings for this tip. I always went to his site to remember, but I just want to have it on my own site for ease of finding…

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Wufoo - Hosted Form Service

By Jason | May 5, 2007

wufoo

I’ll be the first to admit that this free script solution isn’t the most full-featured form builder I’ve ever seen, but it is very simple and handy for it’s intended purpose. Sometimes however, you need a little more muscle. Wufoo is just such a muscle. It’s a great, hosted service that lets you manage and control forms without any programming knowledge or time commitment. After you create an account, you can then create and manage as many unique forms as you want; contact forms, questionnaires, event sign-ups, etc). All of it is done via wysiwyg editors and simple wizards. It then gives you the code to put into your site and viola, instant database driven forms. You can then log back into Wufoo and view, sort, export the results of your form at any time. It has a very simple free plan, but for bigger needs, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan, but the price you pay is much cheaper than paying a programmer to build it by hand, especially if you need to administrate the results of the form. In the end though, the prices are very reasonable.

Features

Available on All Plans

* Built in Validation and Error Checking
* Ability to Style the Look of your Forms
* Subscribe to Entries via email or RSS
* Custom Confirmation Messages
* Easy integration into Your Web Site or Blog

Available on Paid Plans

* Access to Customer Support
* Upload Files with your Form
* No Advertisements on Confirmation Page
* Redirect to a Custom Confirmation URL
* Password Protection on Forms and Reports

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Creating Web Contact Forms Script

By Jason | May 5, 2007

Aaron Wall recommended this site in a recent TechCrunch comments thread, and I absolutely fell in love. I’m not much of a programmer, so I’m always bugging my partner to make me little scripts or do simple things for me when I need something, but this is the kind of thing that will help me be much more efficient and self-sustained.

Contact Form Generator

This site has a quick little wizard that will write and preview everything you need for a customized contact form. You enter where you want the form to send it’s contents (an email address), the subject of the email, and then you design the form with whatever fields you want. It writes up some php and gives you some code to embed in your site, as well as a php file to place on your server. It’s all very simple, and very fast. I love it.

I whipped up a little one and embedded it below to test it out.

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