Made with 🧀 in Madison
So it’s been a few years since we’ve seen a new logo for apple and I think it’s time for a refresh. The monochrome logo has been effective, but it seems as though the plain white “glassy” logo is becoming too cliche. I’d love to see them bring back a new 2010 version of the rainbow logo.
For some reason I’ve wanted to create my own URL shortener just for my stuff for some time now. It’s finally here: the jbe.me URL shortener. Now, I’m the only one that can use the service; it’s only for my links, but when you see a jbe.me URL you at least know it will link to something I’ve done.
It was super simple to setup.
First of all, I had to buy the jbe.me domain name ( think J B dot ME ). Unfortunatly jb.me is not a valid domain, I’m sure someone much more important than I will grab it. Anyway, jbe.me was the next best thing.
One I had the domain I installed the YOURLS (You Own URL Shortener) script at that location. It’s a series of scripts that talks to a MySQL database with some pretty cool bookmarklets and an API. The API was key for the next step: the Twitter Tools extension. As many people know, I use twitter tools to post new blog entries to my twitter profile. Since I want to get as much of my URL-shortening as possible done through the jbe.me shortener now I needed to get twitter tools to use the new system. Twitter Tools has it’s own api that will let you create a shortener for any service that you could think of with some hooks that it install for WordPress. Then I threw a plugin together using the YOURLS API and now when I publish a post, Twitter Tools uses the jbe.me shortener to shorten the URLs. Pretty Cool.
I’ve been playing around with backing up my tweets lately. At this point I’m using the Twitter Tools plugin to create a weekly digest. Since I created a Tumble-blog not to long ago to share social stuff like this I also wanted the tweets to go to tumblr. Part of this was just a way to clean up Tumblr and not create a new post everytime I tweet.
Now, having the tweets on the blog is mostly for me. I didn’t want to bombard people that are subscribed to the RSS feed with this weekly mashup of all my tweets, but still be able to have the RSS feed to send to Tumblr or for anybody that wants it.
This is what I ended up doing:
function tweetRSS123($query) {
if ($query->is_feed && !is_category()) {
$query->set(‘cat’,’-1′);
}
return $query;
}
add_filter(‘pre_get_posts’,’tweetRSS123′);
Last week when I was in the CSS-Tricks forums, somebody wanted to modify the functionality of Chris Coyier‘s anythingSlider. Not a huge change, he just wanted to make the slider advance to the next panel when you click “Go”. Made sense to me. By the time you click “Go”, you’re done looking at that panel and are ready for the next one. If it doesn’t advance until after whatever delay you’ve setup, it could be confusing.
Basically what we want to do is make the slider advance to the next panel when we click go, which is the same as advancing to the next panel after we click the start/stop button if the slider ends up playing. It sounds complicated, but it will make more sense when we look at the code.
base.$startStop.click(function(e){
base.startStop(!base.playing);
if(base.playing) base.goForward(true);
e.preventDefault();
});
Both YouTube and Vimeo recently gave an option to watch videos in HTML5. I switched right away knowing that every time I try to play an HD video on YouTube, my Macbook fan spins up because of the heat caused from flash processing. On the Dell Mini I just bought, I couldn’t even watch HD videos on youtube because HD video in flash was too much for the atom processor.
When I saw that YouTube and Vimeo were offering HTML5 instead of flash video, I immediately tested both of the above mentioned issues. The fan in the macbook stayed quiet and the Dell Mini didn’t have any problems when I watched HD content with HTML5 video instead of flash. This is an example of the power of HTML5 video and why Apple decided to skip flash on the iPad.
The other thing that I really like about this is the fact that it pushes the HTML5 spec forward that much more. Obviously Google is involved in developing HTML5, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this on YouTube. Vimeo, however, is not involved — at least that i know of — in developing the HTML5 specification and just wants clean, efficient code. HTML5 is a good way to do that.