Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

Excellent Design Bookmarklet Suite

Lately I’ve been contemplating switching to Safari, as Firefox still seems to be a memory hog, especially since I tend to leave my desktop on for days at a time. With the improvements to the developer tools in Safari 4, there’s less and less reason for me to hang on to Firefox. Couple that with this bookmarklet suite of design/development tools I just discovered, and the excuse of having to use Firefox for it’s superior developer tools flies right out the window.

The suite includes a configurable grid overlay, a ruler overlay, a measurement tool to determine distance between two points, and a cursor crosshair tool (I’ve not found how to use this one effectively, but it could be useful for figuring placement when using position: absolute).

I can’t speak to how Firebug and the Safari tools compare regarding javascript, as I don’t do much with javascript, save using various jquery plugins.

Excellent Design Bookmarklet Suite was published on Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 2:35am and tagged design, aside, Firefox, bookmarklet, Safari, tools and debugging. There are currently 0 comments on this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

Color of the Year

Color of the Year was published on Friday, January 9, 2009 at 11:41pm and tagged design, aside, color, trends, 2009, Pantone, mimosa and palatte. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Redesign

I’m working on a new theme, another open source design port. Being the impatient person I am, I’ve got a few tweaks still, so pardon any glitches while I finish up the tweaking. Certainly interested in any comments, I’ll post another more formal outline of the port when I’m done. This will be available for download when it’s done.

Redesign was published on Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 7:19am and tagged design, theme and port. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Live Designing

In the true spirit of blog design, I’m doing it live on the site, vs working offline. Not that anyone really ventures to this domain yet anyway. If you have stumbled in, thanks, and hopefully things will be functioning normal by the end of the weekend.

Live Designing was published on Friday, June 15, 2007 at 7:05pm and tagged blogging and design. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Humbling Attention

As I’ve had this site for a while, I’ve become less and less of a stats whore, but at least a few times a month I check my referrer logs. The past month or so, I’ve been linked to by two separate design showcase sites. The first, Liquid Designs, showcases sites that use liquid width design. A lot of this site is based on that concept, and it’s something I’m learning more about. The second, and more recent is from Design Melt Down, part of their “Beautiful Blogs” section.
I did put a lot of time into this past springs CSSReboot for the site, and have tried to maintain the site despite the lapses in content. However I would have never expected ANY type of recognition for the work. So to the operators of the site, and those that have clicked over, thanks.

Humbling Attention was published on Saturday, November 4, 2006 at 6:25pm and tagged design, CSS, my-site, liquid and showcase. 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.

Sub Pop now on emusic. I can now fully relive the salad days.

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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Theme Development

I have moved all of my theme development to Beanstalk. If you would like to check out the full svn repository, you can checkout from http://blogworks.svn.beanstalkapp.com/themes.