For the Pick of the Week, I am choosing the one podcast I follow as soon as it comes out, Macbreak Weekly. Macbreak is where my Pick of the Week started since each host does one on the show. The show itself is entertaining because it not only covers the Mac news of the week, but often sidetracks into other discussions involving productivity, photos or random other technology. Due to the sense of humor of each host and their interactions, it feels like a bunch of tech savvy friends hanging out and talking about Mac stuff. I find it entertaining each week all for no cost.
Archive for June, 2008
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New Design is Live
Once again, Marktopia has a new design with some changes to the way some stuff was done with the organization of the site as well. The first thing I want to do is give credit to PSHero.com for their Interstate Road Sign tutorial in Photoshop. The wonderful detail it gave set the theme for the new design and allowed me to add more texture to the site.
The next thing you will notice is that the Categories are back. When WordPress introduced the tagging feature, I jumped all over it and abandoned the categories. It allowed me to do the tag cloud I had on the previous design and made me feel all Web 2.0. When working on this new design though, I realized without categories, I had lost some focus for what I blog about. I decided to look at my content a little harder and found everything could fit into 5 neat buckets, Music, Personal, Pick of the Week, Reviews and Web Technology. I went through the lengthy task of adding a category to each post so now if you only want to follow one type of post on my site, you can use the RSS feed for that category.
This is also a nice lesson for other bloggers, use categories and tags together on your site. Combining few categories with many different tags gives you a well rounded organization for your site and can also help you better define what you want your site to be. I would love to hear opinions of the site, so feel free to comment below.
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Textmate – Pick of the Week
Lots of people ask me what I use for a web editor, expecting the answer to be Dreamweaver almost everytime. When I tell them I use Textmate, I get an odd look almost everytime. Textmate is a text editor on steroids. First off, it looks about as good as a text editor can look and if you don't like the default look, you can tweak it however you like. Next, you can open either a file by itself or a folder using the sidebar. If you open a folder, you can quickly get to different files easily in a tabbed interface. This all makes it easy to get to the files you want to edit.
Luckily, Textmate isn't just pretty, it is also really useful. It comes with bundles that allow you to perform shortcut macros for whichever language you are programming in. In my case, lots of times that is plain HTML and/or CSS. Textmate can tell by the file what type it is and automatically defaults to the shortcuts for that type. Textmate is one of those programs that seems expensive for what it does, but when you see someone who has mastered the shortcuts, it is like watching a magician put out code. If you have moved past the Design View of Dreamweaver and find the code view lacking, I would recommend checking this out. Also, if you are programming in Rails or PHP, I would HIGHLY recommend giving it a spin. You might find that you can not live with out it.
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Operator – Pick of the Week
Operator is a plug-in for Firefox that enables highlighting microformats on a web site. Microformats are content types on a web site that have been formated a specific way to highlight the type of content they are. For example, if you wanted to put contact information on a site you can use specific html tags and classes to create the contact information and then when visitors with Operator come to your site, it will highlight your info and enable them to interact with it in different ways. The idea is a little difficult to explain, but if you get the extension and go the Microformats calendar example page, you should see some sample events show up.
The idea of microformats to display content types on a site is a relatively new one, however the idea makes sense. While Operator might not be the best way to get this data in the future, it is the best way I have found now, so check it out.
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Disney in Google Earth – Pick of the Week
Late a few days due to panic over flooding and parents visiting, this will be short and sweet. Google Earth is really cool, and if you are a Disney World fan, it got cooler last week as Disney announced they have rendered the theme parks and most resorts in Google Earth to incredible detail. You can navigate the parks, find out about attractions and just take in the sights of Disney World. More info can be found on Disney's site, but after trying it out for a few minutes, it is really cool.