Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

8apps Invites

Though there are many ways to socialize on the net (too many), I recently revisited this invite only site, 8apps. They’ve added a few more apps to the planned 8, so there’s a few more things to check out. Not meant as a review, as I honestly haven’t spent enough time on the site to give justice, suffice to say it’s a very slick site, with a lot of potential. It’s simply up against stiff competition.

That said, if you’d like to check it out, I’ve got 40 odd invites available, just leave a comment and I’ll be sure to send one. Only thing I ask is that you after sign up, look me up (miklb) and add me as a contact, as the system doesn’t automatically add invites to your contact list.

8apps Invites was published on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 3:16pm and tagged 8apps and social networks. There are currently 9 comments on this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

Site Maintenance

Note to self, clean up the lifestream template and turn error reporting off. Adding comments now

Site Maintenance was published on Monday, July 16, 2007 at 1:42pm and tagged aside. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Custom Style Sheets and Basecamp

I’ve mentioned that I primarily use BaseCamp these days with the company that I work with to manage the many sites they handle. That’s all good, but whenever I log in, I am overwhelmed with many, many, late milestones and upcoming milestones. Sure, some of it’s relevant to me, however most is not. Even what is relevant, I’m well aware of my tardiness. I don’t need a constant reminder :)

Enter a handy little Firefox extentsion, Stylish, that I became aware of after adopting Hicks Designs handy Mac OS styled Google Reader style sheet. (Note, there are instructions for using the style sheet with other browsers).

Another quick use of the Web Developer extension (I couldn’t live without this extension), I was able to determine the class of the milestones on the dashboard (.milestones - go figure), and add a quick display:none to a custom style for the company’s Basecamp dashboard.

The Stylish extension easily offers you the option of using the style for a URL, a domain, or a global style, so I can be sure that it’s only being used where and when I want. The extension author recommends using the !important declaration, however I found no need for that with Basecamp. Certainly worth checking out if you are looking to hide some annoying element of a site you often visit.

Edit: I went ahead and changed my style to only drop the upcoming milestones, and left the overdue ones there, as that seemed more relevant to my job. The class for that is .Dashcal. That way, I can still see what’s overdue, and potentially avoid issues. Upcoming milestones I’ll leave to the project manager to advise on.

Custom Style Sheets and Basecamp was published on Monday, July 16, 2007 at 12:18pm and tagged BaseCamp, CSS, milestones and Stylish. There is currently one comment to this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

More About Email

So quickly I’ve discovered (or been reminded), that using a Mail.app rule to move right out of the Inbox removes the notice in the dock. Not a big deal, but if I’m away from the computer when the hour is up, I might not see that I have new work email, so I’ve employed Mail Badger, so that I can create a custom icon notice in the Mail icon in the dock just for that work’s email. So far so good though with the system.

More About Email was published on Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 10:48am and tagged GTD and Mail. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Speaking of BaseCamp and GTD…

My previous post mentions BaseCamp and GTD, what I’d really, really, (no, really) like is a way to export my todo’s from BaseCamp. Most specifically, to the new Omni Focus, or even better, iCal, which then could be exported to some other format, be it Google Calendar, which supports Remember the Milk, or, as I mentioned, Omni Focus. (Which reminds me, I haven’t been using it as much as I’d like, due to the the subject of this post). Perhaps if my new system works out, I can use the quick add from Mail.app to OF as part of the system…hmm, might just work.

Speaking of BaseCamp and GTD... was published on Tuesday, July 10, 2007 at 10:09am and tagged GTD, BaseCamp, Omni Focus, iCal and Mail. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

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Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.

Note to self, check to see what time a store opens before driving there. Sidenote - 11am, really Ikea?

Side Notes

I’m always on the prowl for cheap (read FREE) iPhone apps, and finding a simple source for such is no easy task, at least in my searches. Unfortunately, all the sites I’ve found that cover this type of information are so full of ads and poorly designed, it’s impossible to actually find anything useful. I have however recently discovered at dealmac.com a RSS feed specifically for discounted iPhone/iPod Touch apps.. I can’t say that I’ve actually found any great deals yet through it, (I haven’t had a chance to play the recent “Let’s Golf!” game posted today), but it’s a start. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying for a quality app, and do so with perhaps too regular of frequency, but still like finding a deal when I can, especially on games, which I know I’ll only play a few times, or very rarely.
Do you have any sites or feeds that you’d care to share? Tips on finding apps on sale?
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I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon by a comment left here on the site that my first Habari theme, Mzingi, had been ported to another CMS, WolfCMS. Though I’ve since passed Mzingi off to the official Habari project, and is now owned by the community and part of the official download, it’s a bit rewarding to see it deemed worthy of porting. You can see a demo of it in action as a WolfCMS theme.
It’s also nice they gave attribution on the official site. I’d not heard of the project before, seems like a young project that is a fork of another CMS project, but their site describes the project as something akin to Habari.
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It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
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You’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
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I’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
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