All posts tagged designmeme
Sunday, February 12th, 2006
For everyone who has been patiently waiting for the X-Ray extension to be updated to work with Firefox 1.5.0.1—here it is! This new version includes several enhancements:
- Support for a wider range of XHTML elements
- Can now be toggled on and off without reloading the page
- No longer interferes with the keyboard shortcut to cut text
Install X-Ray Extension for Firefox
Thanks to all the people who emailed with suggestions for improvements or offered code optimizations. “joh6nn” and “dragonchaos” deserve special acknowledgement for their help.
Donations to The X-Ray Tip Jar are greatly appreciated.
Features to be added in future versions:
- display self terminating tags correctly
- identify deprecated elements
- identify elements incorrectly placed on the page (head content inside the body)
- possibly display additional information about the tag such as class and id
Tags: designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 10 Comments »
Saturday, February 4th, 2006
Two quick updates you might be interested in:
Most of the people who have updated to the newest version of Firefox will have noticed the X-Ray extension reports that it isn’t compatible. I’m going to update the file to make it work, as well as include support for a wider range of tags. That should be ready in the next day or two.
I’ve also been helping Dave at OntarioFilm.com get the site updated and adding some new features to the message board. If you’re a filmmaker, or would like to be involved in a film project in Ontario, visit the site and join the community. We’ll continue adding content and features over the next few weeks.
Tags: designmeme, extension, film, plugins
Posted in designmeme | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 30th, 2006
My brother gave me a copy of Lloyd Kaufman’s new book
Make Your Own Damn Movie for Christmas, and I’ve been reading it on my lunch breaks. It offers a bit more practical advice than Lloyd’s first book—
All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger: The Shocking True Story of Troma Studios. Lloyd Kaufman is, as I’m sure you’re all aware, the prolific independent filmmaker behind the Oscar winning films
The Toxic Avenger and
Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid. Lloyd’s lunatic anecdotes about the chaos of his productions is oddly appealing—at least to me. As I mentioned earlier, one of my resolutions for 2006 is to finally make a return to filmmaking in some form or another, and shoot my own Damn Movie.
The challenge of course is that I have very little money to put into making a movie, and Guelph isn’t exactly Hollywood—or even Hollywood North (aka Toronto). So I decided to see what resources we do have here…
It looks like the website for Ed Video recently received a much needed update, and is now considerably easier to work with. Ed Video is Guelph’s video arts co-op, offering a wide range of support for people interested in making movies. Filmmakers can rent DV cameras (including the Panasonic AGDVX100 which can shoot 24 frame progressive video), tripods, lights and audio equipment. They also make editing facilities and audition space available for aspiring film auteurs. Considering that they offer a handful of film production courses, it reminds me a lot of film school—only with more modern gear.
Ed Video had a link to ontariofilm.com, a new site intended to provide aspiring filmmakers that are outside of greater metropolitan areas access to a filmmaking community in Ontario. The messageboard is pretty quiet at the moment, but I’m not sure if that’s due to a lack of interest, the newness of the site, or people just not knowing about it. Maybe mentioning it here will help out with that last point.
Finally, anyone in the area who might be interested in working on an independent film this summer, send me an email and I’ll let you know when I’ve got things a bit more organized. Sometime after I finish the second half of Lloyd’s book.
Tags: books, designmeme, film
Posted in designmeme | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have confirmed something I’ve had a growing suspicion of—meetings are bad. The longer and more frequent meetings, the greater the negative effects on the participants: anxiety, burnout, and depression.
Over at 37 Signals, they offer some suggestions as to why frequent and long meetings are bad — they usually contain a very low amount of information conveyed per minute, they drift off subject far too easily, and they’re normally all about words and abstract concepts, not real things. Their advice for dealing with meetings: don’t have them. Or if you absolutely have to have a meeting, keep it short. 30 minutes at the most.
Once the meetings are short, and less frequent, the next step is making them more productive. Manager Tools has some great tips and resources to help with this, including sample agenda templates to download and a very good podcast.
I’ve also heard very good things about John Cleese’s training video Meetings, Bloody Meetings, in which he is a thoroughly inefficient chairperson who dreams he is hauled up before a court for negligent conduct of meetings. Unfortunately the DVD is $650… so I think I’ll try and borrow it from someone who already owns a copy.
Tags: business, designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 5 Comments »
Friday, January 20th, 2006
Wordpress is a great tool for blogging—it’s easy to setup, the interface makes it easy to use, and there are tons of plugins you can download to add new features. Unfortunately when you’re just getting started with Wordpress, the sheer number of plugins can make it hard to know which ones to start with.
After more than a little trial and error and a lot of looking at discussions of other people’s favourite plugins, I’ve found 11 that seem to stand above the rest. Here are my suggestions for the 11 plugins you should consider adding to your blog.
- Adsense-Deluxe
Place Google AdSense ads in your posts, or as part of your template. This plugin ensures you do not have more than 3 ads displayed at once—part of Google’s terms of use.
- del.icio.us – Bookmark this!
This plugin lets you easily add a “Bookmark this page on del.icio.us” link to your blog or individual articles. Del.icio.us is a personal favourite, and a great way to save, organize and find new links.
- Digg This
Detects if one of your articles has been linked on digg.com and adds a link to the entry. This might not be as useful for blogs that are unlikely to ever be bookmarked there—but for me it’s a nice find.
- Google Sitemaps
This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Having a Google sitemap can help keep your site as up-to-date in Google’s indexes as possible.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement
Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner.com so you can make use of their various advanced features for feed presentation and subscriber analysis.
- Gravatar
Show the custom icons associated with the email addresses of users commenting on your entries. This is a great service more people should sign up for.
- Head META Description
Some search engines display the Description meta data for a page in search results. Since Wordpress normally uses the same meta data for all the pages on your site, this is a problem. This plugin builds a dynamic Description meta tag for each entriy based on the page content itself.
- Optimal Title
Moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before, letting you put the title of your post before your blogs name in the title tag for an entry.
- Related Posts
Displays a list of related entries based on keyword matches. This is a good way to encourage visitors to read more of the content on your blog.
- WP-Amazon
WP-Amazon adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon to your entries. Great if you’re an Amazon affiliate, but also a good way to add some extra images to your blog entries.
- WP-ContactForm
This plugin creates a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
Tags: blog software, designmeme, plugins
Posted in designmeme, tools | 27 Comments »
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
Hello to everyone visiting from Digg.com and Del.icio.us today!
After publishing the X-Ray extension for Firefox last week I wasn’t exactly sure how to let people know about it. I applied to have it listed at addons.mozilla.org, but they’ve recently updated their policies and no longer accept extensions with external update URLs. That meant I’d have to republish the extension, and I hadn’t really wanted to do that unless I was adding some new features as well. So for the time being, mozilla.org wasn’t an option.
This morning I was checking out the new links at digg.com—a great social bookmarking site that’s very nicely designed too—and thought “what the hell—I’ll submit the link and see what happens.” While I figured that submitting a regular blog entry would probably be bad form, and wouldn’t have very many other people “digg” it (bookmark it), I really thought some people might like the new extension. The people I’d mentioned it to over on the blambot forum all seemed to like it, so I set up my new digg profile at and submitted the link.
I thought I’d get a few extra visitors and a little more feedback. I got a ton.
Today, the X-Ray Extension for Firefox was on the Digg.com homepage and currently has almost 1,000 people digging it. Del.icio.us users must have seen the link on Digg, because the extension also made it’s way to the del.icio.us popular page. Even better than the number of visitors was the great feedback. Lots of people emailed to say they liked the extension, and Thom Wetzel was nice enough to suggest a CSS fix for the background on the site! Thanks everyone. 
Tags: blog, designmeme, web
Posted in designmeme | 2 Comments »
