etc.

I’m experimenting with Snap at the moment. If you haven’t seen a Snap-enabled website yet, you might want to go ahead and hover over this link (forgot to mention: you’ll have to hop out of your aggregator and visit to get the full Snap-advantage). Nice, eh? I thought so. I have a terrible habit of embedding links with no indication of where they will take you (#4 on the list of top ten blog usability mistakes), so I figured that this blog would be a prime candidate for preview thumbnails.

Also, TangognaT reminds us that it’s National Delurking Week. If you’re a lurker, hello! Say “hi” in the comments, won’t you?

Happy Thursday!

Just a quick one tonight. I received three email messages with questions about how I create my headers, so I thought I’d jot down a few notes that might help anyone who is interested.

• I use Photoshop to create headers. I’ve never had any formal training with the software so everything I come up with is the result of a lot of futzing, tweaking, and clicking on buttons to see what they do. I’ve found a lot of cool functions as a result of all this messing around, it’s a strategy I highly recommend!
• I pick a colour palette and use the brush tool to fill in the background layer. For the current header, I painted the entire canvas sage green, then I used a wide square brush for the blue band. And finally, a really tiny square brush for the thin, gray line.
• While using the square brushes, I accidently stumbled upon this neat trick to draw straight lines: hold down the shift key as you drag the brush across the canvas and, voila! Miraculously straight line. This works with all the brush tools.
• The text tool takes care of any text I want to add to the header and a drop shadow on the text layer gives it a little added dimension. Which is good if it’s dimension you’re going for.
• And the snowflakes? Another brush tool! Oh, the brush variety! It makes my head spin.

And that was about it for the current header. If you have any other Photoshop tips to share, please do!

I went grocery shopping to-day, which in & of itself isn’t particularly blog-worthy, except I that never go grocery shopping, it’s something the mister has always done (along with the cooking and general pantry maintenance). It was a good outing, I stocked up on stuff for lunches (this is my favourite kind of lunch) and plenty of fruit. And I got a free hot dog while we were there. And it wasn’t as insane as I thought grocery shopping on a Sunday would be. And the mister bought eight T-bone steaks (the mister often stops at grocery stores to “browse” for meat, like you or I might “browse” for new shoes). Good times.

Yesterday, after excitedly telling you all about the new blogs I’m reading, I followed the links on a few of those blogs and found some more pretty treasures. To-day, Bloglines has been going back and forth between getting its plumbing fixed and just not updating at all, so at the moment I am feeling rather disenfranchised. The lesson here? Download Sage (or any other aggregator that integrates with your browser), export your Bloglines subscriptions on a regular basis, and use Sage as a backup the next time Bloglines’ pipes get clogged. Okay? Okay.

While yesterday’s minor techie aside was a last-minute effort to satisfy my daily blogging commitment (although, who’s gonna call me on it?!), to-day’s techie post is well and truly intended. First, some backstory.

I’ve never ever liked any email program I’ve used. Ever. From Pine to Eudora, to Pegasus, to Netscape mail, to Lotus Notes, to Outlook or Outlook Express, to Mac Mail (which I’ve liked best so far, but I certainly haven’t loved it), to the various web interfaces I have been stuck with over the years, none of them, and I really mean none, have ever done everything I wanted them to do. Until now. From the same people who bring you Firefox comes Thunderbird, a sweet little email application that seems to provide the best of all those other email apps, and none of the worst, as well as a bunch of other neat features I have been longing for, lo these many unfulfilled years! For example, the customized folder view is tremendous, as is the ability to label or “tag” emails according to categories of your choosing (I like using the “to do” tag to identify emails that require some sort of action from me). And the tags? Colour-coded! Also, a wicked spam filter! And Extensions to get it to do all sorts of other things doesn’t already do! Finally, an email client worth blogging about!

If you’ve been frustrated as by your email client for as long as I have, you would do well to download Thunderbird and give it a whirl. And if you haven’t been frustrated by your email client as long as I have (lucky you), and if you’ve already met your email client match, tell me, what are you using?

[PS: if you're not into application chatter, rest assured, no tech-talk to-morrow!]

The mister doesn’t get the whole posting daily thing. A conversation tonight:

me: “damn, I haven’t blogged yet to-day”
him: “so?”
me: “I promised to blog daily!”
him: “promised who?”
me: “you know, the blog world! my readers! everyone! I made a commitment!”
him: “[laughs] so how’s gonna call you on it?! what are they going to do if, heaven forbid, you don’t blog today?! [laughs]”

See what I have to deal with?

I think yesterday’s post drained more than a day’s worth of blogging energy because I plumb forgot about to-day! And now it’s almost 11pm and I’m tired and all I want to do is just crawl into bed. So, here’s a quick web browser PSA for you: Firefox 2.0. Using it yet? If not, I highly recommend downloading it — it’s pretty, it’s got a built-in spell checker for any web-based form (including blog and comment forms!), it integrates one-click RSS subscriptions right into Bloglines, and the search suggestions for the toolbar search are awesome. More details in the release notes. Then there’s Zotero, a bookmarking extension (only good with Firefox 2.0) that’s got some serious functionality and worth checking out if you’re doing any sort of research on the web.

That’s it. Now, there’s a pillow upstairs that is beckoning to me. Good night!

Happy birthday, John Milton. It’s no gesture whatsoever that the rest of this post has nothing at all to do with you.

I upgraded to Tiger a few days ago and it’s been good times ever since. Those widgets! That Spotlight! That Automator! Good times. I also upgraded to Firefox 1.5 and it’s been a whole new journey of good browser discovery all over again. There are some neat new extensions and some impressive updates to old favourites as well. The upgraded del.icio.us extension is particularly slick.

I recently set up a news page over at homebaked.ca, complete with RSS feed. It’s a miniblog published to a static page and I made notes as I went along, mostly for documentation purposes, but also to help out anyone else who is trying to do something similar (like set up a side blog, for example):

• downloaded, installed, and activated the Miniblog plugin. I’m working with WordPress 1.5 and it works fine.
• downloaded, installed, and activated the RunPHP plugin so that I could use PHP on a static page (without this plugin, PHP code on a static page publishes as lines of code. Who knew?)
• created a new page, inserted this code < ?php miniblog_list_entries(); ?>, hit “Create New Page”.
• proceeded to Miniblog (a tab under “Write”, once you’ve activated the plugin) and created a new post. Voila!

I set up the feed by word-for-word following the directions in the Miniblog documentation. Easy!

I’m at the start of an all-library-all-the-time junket at the moment: Friday, I was at the OLITA Digital Odyssey, Tuesday, I give a talk to the SLA Ontario Southwest chapter on blogs & RSS, and Wednesday through Friday, its all about library instruction at WILU (our very own, home-grown Canadian version of LOEX). I enjoy these intense spurts of library-activity, there’s something about being in a roomful of librarians for seven days that rejuvenates the librarian-enthusiasm in me. Not much of a stretch, I suppose.

And, I thought I’d give you an update on the PC-Mac switch that I mentioned a couple of months ago and then never spoke of again. I’m not sure why, but when I bought the iBook, I anticipted a long-road-ahead, characterized by a steep-ish learning curve and old PC habits needing to be broken. It ended up being much ado about nothing, the learning curve was not so steep, and a week or so of working on the iBook at night got me well past the single mouse button issue, and all the other little oddities of using a Mac. I love this little feller now, more than is healthy to love an inanimate object probably, but there you go.

Good morning. This post is powered by a large cup of Earl Grey tea, a good night’s sleep, and one of these.

It all feels a bit too extravagant, I don’t quite know where to look.

As you already know, my computer has been going through all sorts of overload for a while now, and I have been covetting one of these smart little machines for ages. Over the past two weeks, I’ve done some serious research, along with some well-needed number-crunching, and then yesterday, the mister and I drove to the nearest Best Buy — just so I could show him this covetted machine — and we just bought it, right there, no more research needed, no further number-crunching required (my Professional Development Allowance at work is picking up the tab).

As you can well imagine, I haven’t spent a minute apart from my iBook, ever since we brought it home last evening. The possibilities laid before me seem positively mind-boggling (!), but I’ve never felt like such a rank amateur with a new computer before. This is my first ever Mac, you see, and I’m finding out what most people probably feel like when they take their first computers out of their boxes and stand back to marvel. It’s so pretty! So shiny! So many options to customize, yet I’m more than happy to live with the default factory settings, because, well, I’m just so pleased to even have one!

The learning curve is going to be interesting and I’ve started a new category (“switch”) for those of you who would like to follow along at home. The first, very obvious, observations (Mac afficionados can skip right along, rank amateur, remember?): no left-mouse button! I knew this going in, of course, but the gravity of that No Left-Mouse Button hits me harder everytime I feel the need to use it! It’s a bit like getting into a car and being told you can’t turn left. Ever again. Then there’s the keyboard shortcuts. I’ve always preferred using the keyboard in favour of the mouse whenever possible, but my keyboard shortcuts, they’re all different now! Need to copy and paste a URL from one window to another (oops, can I even call them Windows any more?)? No problem! Ctrl c & ctrl v. No, wait, that doesn’t work. No problem, left-mouse-click! No, wait, can’t do that either! It’s a bit like getting into a car and being told you can’t turn left ever again, oh and your steering wheel is over here now and we’ve reversed the order of your brake and gas pedals, and yes you can still control your stereo and air-conditioning, those gauges are now on your left and up a bit.

But, oh! I’m not complaining! I truly am still at the stand-back-and-marvel stage. And, did I mention, I’ve been running on a single battery charge for over four hours? Which is a terribly small price to pay for not ever being able to turn left again.

This day, being Saturday, March 5th, is reformat day. I have made lists, backed up all data, collected all software CDs, and gathered all drivers. The one CD that seems to have disappeared into the ether? The operating system disc.

Bother.

All this had better not be for naught.