Made with 🧀 in Madison
Dr. Drang wrote about daylight savings time and why people who say it’s bad are wrong.
I too like daylight savings time. Or, basically anything that allows me to see more sun during the day. After dealing with sunsets at 4:30 – 5pm all winter, I’m ready for longer days again. And not the kind of longer days that start at 3:45am.
After trying to sort out the best way to facilitate asynchronous communication for a group project, I was reminded of P2. This talk by Pete Davies at WordCamp SF this past year tells a very compelling story about why you should use P2 on your project. You can use it for free on WordPress.com or download it to run on hosted WordPress. It took all of a few minutes to sign up for a free WordPress.com site and switch to the P2 theme. After that it was all work.
Occasionally I need to send sensitive files to someone on the internet. I took a tip I once heard from Merlin Mann and built a script to automate this as much as possible. It requires Hazel and a cloud sharing service that syncs to your Mac. I’m using Dropbox.
The basic idea is to use Dropbox as a place to share files safely and automate the process with Hazel. We’re going to rely on long, obscure filenames along with randomly generated passwords and short availability windows to protoct our files. We can automate all of this through a couple Hazel commands and an Applescript.
The Hazel commands are set up as follows. The first one looks for any file or folder older than 7 days that is a zip archive and deletes it. This enforces our short availability window. You could make the window anything you like. The second command looks for anything that’s not a zip archive and runs the following Applescript on it.
https://gist.github.com/4686756
We generate a random password with openssl rand -base64 32 — this means we’ll get 32 random base64 characters. We also create a SHA1 hash of the file to append to the filename. After that, just zip the file with the random password and put the password on the clipboard. You can do more, like generating a notification when the script is done. I have a TextExander snippet that lets you fill in the filename and grabs the password off the clipboard.
Ideally, you wouldn’t send the password along with the link to document. Try to use two different methods to notify someone where the file is located and what the password is — even if it’s just two different email accounts on a separate server.
For now this won’t work with directories because the SHA1 hash of a directory is blank. An easy way to fix that would be to zip the directory first and then get the hash and rename the zip file.
Chris Coyier recently posted an article about using lists in navgiation on CSS Tricks. I tend to agree that they’re unnecessary. The first time I built a menu with a nav wrapping a ul wrapping a bunch of li‘s wrapping a bunch of a‘s it felt gross, but I did it because I thought that was easier for screen readers to understand.
I just redesigned my site and decided that I wanted a simpler structure for my menu this time. Since WordPress builds menus in lists, I created a custom walker class for wp_nav_menu that formats the menu the way I want.
https://gist.github.com/4688292
That looks like a lot. It’s mostly just a copy of the Walker_Nav_Menu class with a few things changed:
nav instead of uldiv instead of ulli wrapping each linkid and class‘s that would normally go on the li on the a instead.Of course, you have to tell your nav menu to use this walker. Since this disables the fallback if you don’t have a menu set, you’ll have to specify a menu.
wp_nav_menu ↩