Ramblings

Ever miss the simple days of those old-fangled cassette tapes? Well now you can have them back … sorta.

I have been on the lookout for the perfect todo list software for years. My dream was a simple interface that would allow me to store todo items hierarchically and pretty much operate in a similar fashion to the pads of paper that I’ve been using, but cleaner. Some applications have come close, but none have ever matched my note jotting style … until now.

Todoist is pretty much exactly what I have been looking for and it comes with exceptional usability bling as a bonus. Projects are available for high-level “work/home” style containing and within those are todos that can be hierarchied like mad (and tagged, if you dig that). That’s how I like it. The interface is great, with click-to-edit goodness, keyboard shortcuts that rock, and pop out menus. There is really nothing in the way of I-don’t-need-this clutter.

Thank you Todoist. I might just buy your premium plan even though I don’t need it … just to let you know that your service rocks.

Ever since I read an article suggesting using CSS backgrounds to check your grid alignment during development I have been dreaming of building out a tool that would make checking webdev-in-progress against a master grid simple and painless.

My concept was an online tool where a user could enter specs such as page width, gutter width, color, opacity, number of rows, number of columns, etc… after which a custom grid image would be generated and a javascript bookmarklet provided to throw a layer containing the generated image over the user’s site. Presto!, Grid-checko!

I got the idea worked out pretty well and did a quick proof of concept with the javascript involved. Then this project got backburnered due to higher priorities.

But lookee lookee … someone just put together a Firefox extension that boasts all the functionality that I was hoping to build and more. Brilliant. I get to take something off of my todo list today.

GridFox
http://www.puidokas.com/portfolio/gridfox/

In doing one of my periodic “where am I on the web” self-Googles, I noticed that I had a page on IMDB.

Cool.

P.S. Costs $40/year to add your photo. :(

I was just over at homeagain.com, and ironically it took me a bit to figure out how to get back to their homepage.

I just finished playing around with beta.searchme.com. It is a new search engine with an Apple iTunes album cover style display for results. Very cool for visually previewing result websites and the experience is rather fun.

I just happened across tweetscan.com, which allows searching of twitter activity. I threw the RSS of search results for “linkedin” into my linkedin RSS folder and look forward to a totally new and much more personal style of feedback.

So we had a bun in the oven, but the dough failed to rise. We whipped up a new batch and it seems to be baking up very nicely thus far.

Note: This post simply begs for punny comments such as “if it comes out looking burnt instead of nice and fresh and pasty like Max, Gail has some ’splainin’ to do”. Gauntlet has been thrown.

I thought up a word today and kinda like it. Feel free to use it all over and throw it in your blag if it hasn’t been updated in a while.

Blag (noun)

A blog that doesn’t get updated regularly

Ex: “I need to get posting or just shut my blag down”

Blag (noun)

The lag between posts in a blog

Ex: “I really like what he has too say on his site, but there is too much blag”

Blagger (noun)

One who feels compelled to start blogs but then blags as a general rule

Ex: I’m following way too many blaggers in my RSS reader … time to clean house

Blag (verb)

To refrain from posting to one’s blog

Ex: “Unfortunately I blag more days than not”

Ex: “I had a blog for a while, but I blagged so much that I finally shut it down.”

Ex: “Given that communication is fundamental to our success, we cannot tolerate our current levels of blagging”

Want to use pseudo elements in your CSS but don’t want to have to deal with IE6’s lack of ability to handle them? You have four options:

1. Don’t give a crap about IE6. It’s about time we start ignoring that pile.
2. Use pseudo-classes for enhanced, but not crucial, styling.
3. Just wait for IE6 to die
4. Allow the new Offspring JS to parse the DOM and apply standard, non-pseudo, classes to all elements on the page. The full mode applies first-child, last-child, only-child, nth-child-odd, nth-child-even, and nth-child-##. The lighter mode applies first-child, last-child, and only-child. You can apply it to specific elements, which might result in faster processing and could be useful after an AJAX update. Read more at A List Apart.