I'm a digital journalist, producer, designer, developer, social networker and communications professional living in Seattle, WA. I love Kylie Minogue, good food, good drinks, flip flops and KITTENS. Some day I'll be an expert golfer.
This is the Terrafugia Transition, a plane/car hybrid developed by some MIT genuises. It costs $100k with $10 down, which I actually find quite reasonable compared to some of the high-end car prices out there. The FAA recently eased some restrictions to allow this thing to start selling commercially, which opens up the possibility of competition and lots of future improvements.
It’s runs on a 20 gallon tank that gets 30 miles per gallon on the road, so I’m wondering how long it can actually fly with a 20 gallon tank. You have to have 20 hours of training under your belt before you can operate this thing and you have to take off and land from airports. This is obviously not a practical vehicle yet, but imagine the possibilities!
I’ve decided to start using this space more for keeping track of random things I learn that I want to make a record of. I typically scour the internet for a solution, bookmark a site and then completely forget about bookmarks altogether. I figure if I blog about it, it’s more likely to stick with me and I’m more likely to be able to find it later with my site’s search engine. If someone else learns from it, all the better.
I wanted to figure out a way to do a rollover button effect where it looks like the button is being “pushed” when you hover over it. I figured I could achieve the effect by using a drop shadow in it’s inactive state and remove it in it’s active state, but I wasn’t quite sure of the best method to achieve the switch between active and inactive.
After an exhaustive (5 minute) search on Google, I found a solution that was written a gazillion (6) years ago on a Webmaster World forum.
Here’s the trick. Create a mini-sprite where you have the active and inactive states within the same image:
Essentially what you’re doing is limiting a DIV to the width of the first half of your image and when you roll your mouse over that image, you shift the image to the left X amount of pixels to reveal the second half of your image. This allows a flicker-free transition and requires no Javascript.
Yay! That’s easy!
In case you want to know how to create a similar button style, there are a variety of ways to accomplish this, but I used Illustrator. For a quick read on creating buttons in Illustrator, give this short tutorial a try.
We’re planning on shlepping through Europe this fall, and I’m in full planning mode, so I thought I’d share some of our plans with “picture pages, picture pages, open up your picture pages” (you sing the rest). If you’ve ever traveled with the General, you know I don’t screw around with planning vacations. Since I’ve been wanting to go to Europe for, basically my entire life, I’m sewing up all the details now to make sure I don’t forget anything.
The following gallery shows all of the places we’ll be staying while in France. We’re staying for 3 nights at one of Carollani’s friends places in London when we first get there, so there aren’t any photos of that. But then we’ll travel through the Chunnel on the Eurostar Train to Paris. We’ll be staying at an apartment in Paris for five days that is literally one block from the Louvre and the Palais Royale. We decided to go this route so we could stay outside of the normal tourist comfort zone, but mostly because we want to hit up the local markets and make several of our meals.
I digress, on with the show! I recommend going full screen mode with this bish (button in the top right corner).
SimpleViewer requires JavaScript and the Flash Player.
This is my first attempt at a WordPress plugin. I implemented it on The News Tribune‘s homepage several months ago and there haven’t been any disasters, so I’m considering it a success.
This plugin takes post data from your WordPress blog and creates an XML feed of that data. I suppose it could have several uses, but it is optimized to feed data to Flash photo galleries with info from the Title and Excerpt fields as well as each post’s permalink.
I’ve also added the ability to include up to five custom fields (good for thumbnails) and the option of limiting to just one category.
Here’s a screenshot of the options page:
How you might use this in the real world:
If you have a photo blog or a blog that usually includes at least one photo per post, you could use exported XML data from your blog to feed a Flash content rotator that you would use to promote that blog on another page of your site.
Or, if you have a special feature on your blog — say, “Recipe of the Week” — that includes a photo, you could assign that special feature a category (like “recipeoftheweek”) and use exported XML data from just that category to feed a Flash content rotator to promote that special content.
Here’s an example of my blog’s content as XML generated from this plugin:
And here’s a live example of a Flash content rotator that’s pulling data from XML generated by this plugin:
1) The XML declaration is hard-coded to be: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?> … I don’t have any plans to change that unless I get requests for other declarations.
2) You can name most XML elements however you see fit, but right now the parent element is hard-coded to “images” and each blog post parent element is hard-coded to “pic.” I’m hoping to make that customizable in the future.
3) If your excerpt isn’t populated, it will pull from your blog post. Not entirely ideal, but that’s how WordPress excerpts work by default.
I’m late to the game with Lily Allen’s new album since 80% of my friends seem to already own it and have all the words memorized. I finally bought it today and I, of course, love it. I was sort of lukewarm on her when her first album came out and never bothered purchasing it even though I liked one or two tracks I’d heard.
This album, though, there’s something sweet and vulnerable about it. Not as precocious, to borrow a Simon Cowell-ism. There’s still plenty of biting cynicism in several of her lyrics, but I think she’s learned how to tone it down a little and seem approachable and human.
This, so far, is one of my favorite tracks if, for nothing else, you can hear her smile when she sings.
This is handy if you want to weed out the riff-raff on YouTube and get to learning things other than how to pop popcorn with your cellphone or make a soda explode with Mentos.
The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good). Other content, not so interesting.
Personally, I prefer the riff-raff most days, but on occasion I get an urge to learn something useful. Hopefully YouTube has made this easily duplicatable because I can see a lot of other uses for this type of content segregation: Searchable channels full of, TV shows/clips, interviews, political speeches, music videos, sports clips, etc, etc.
