By his explanation, my childless marriage shouldn’t earn the privilege of marriage either, since my wife and I aren’t benefiting society by producing children.
This. This is why we bought a treadmill. (via: Swiss Miss)
A couple of years ago I set up a Flickr photo gallery on Sibylle’s studio site. I had seen nettuts tutorial on creating a slick Flickr gallery with SimplePie.
SimplePie is an RSS feed reader, and the tutorial showed how to incorporate it into your site, along with some JQuery JavaScript and the Thickbox style sheet, to create a photo gallery. Once I had the gallery working all Sibylle had to do was add or remove photos from a particular set on her Flickr account to alter the pictures on her website. It seemed like a good solution at the time but has proven to be cumbersome in actual use.
Today, quite by happenstance I observed Jon Hicks ask on Twitter about a “clean-looking non-Flash way of embedding a Flickr set into a blog post. Much to my delight he soon posted the best response.
Flickrshow produces a very elegant slide show using a Flickr set. There’s a single JavaScript file to link to (or download and refer to on your own host), and a few lines of script to embed in your site to produce the gallery. Compared the RSS-feed method I had used before Flickrshow is lightweight and dirt-simple to setup and use.
It only took me about 5 minutes to cobble together a new photo gallery page for Sibylle’s site use Flickrshow. Sibylle was delighted with the appearance and so this evening I made the switch. You can see it in action for yourself.
Even after all the years I’ve been online I am still astounded by how quickly and completely a single reference to something can change your life.
I’ve been using the TextMate 2 Alpha since its release in December. For the work I do (largely Markdown editing and some minor scripting) it has been stable and a joy to use. TextMate 2 introduces a properties file where you can specify global or project specific properties. Every time I start a new markdown file I get part way through before I remember to visit Edit | Spelling | Check spelling as you type. Today I decided it was time to learn how to set that option once and for all.
A little Googling led me to this TextMate 2 .tm_properties gist. After reading through it a couple times, and through all the comments, I cobbled together the beginnings of a .tm_properties file for my use.
# .tm_properties file from http://gist.github.com/1478685
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Display the name of the home directory
# ---------------------------------------------------------
windowTitle = "$TM_DISPLAYNAME - ${CWD/^.*\///}"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Omit .tm_properties so it doesn't show in the browser
# ---------------------------------------------------------
include = ".htaccess"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Exclude old *.tmproj files
# ---------------------------------------------------------
exclude = "{$exclude,*.tmproj}"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Variables
# ---------------------------------------------------------
TM_FULLNAME = "Mark H. Nichols"
TM_ORGANIZATION = "zanshin.net"
TM_GIT = "/usr/local/bin/git"
TM_HG = "/usr/local/bin/hg"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# General Settings
# ---------------------------------------------------------
showInvisibles = true
spellChecking = true
[ text ]
softWrap = false
wrapColumn = 80
softTabs = true
tabSize = 2
[ text.html.markdown ]
softWrap = true
wrapColumn = "Use Window Frame"
softTabs = false
tabSize = 4
[ text.plain ]
softWrap = true
wrapColumn = "Use Window Frame"
softTabs = false
tabSize = 4
[ source ]
softWrap = false
wrapColumn = 80
softTabs = true
tabSize = 2
[ source.plist ]
softTabs = false
tabSize = 4
[ source.tm-properties ]
spellChecking = falseMost of the options I’m setting here are self-explanatory. The windowTitle setting at the top causes the TextMate window title to display the current working directory (CWD) in the title - helpful when you have multiple project windows open at once.
This properties file is stored at the root of my home directory, making it global to all TextMate sessions. You can also have project specific .tm_properties files stored at the root of any given project. Here’s the very simple template I’m using for my projects. It just appends my project name to the window title.
projectDirectory = "$CWD"
windowTitle = "$TM_DISPLAYNAME - Zanshin"You can clone or fork my global .tm_properties file, along with many of my other dot files on Github.
Transcript of a letter written by a former slave to his former master. Politely pointed.
(Warning: Personal site statistics navel gazing ahead.)
My little bitty site continues to grow in popularity. Last week was the first time I had over 1000 visits for the week without some large outside event like a link from Shawn Blanc or Reddit. The average weekly visit count has been slowly increasing for the past few months and has been hovering just under 1000 for several weeks now.
The increased number of visits is icing on the cake for me, as having the site and posting to it are essential to me.
Easily one of the best answers on Quora ever.
“Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets. Parents will show up.”
Interactive display that lets you watch the speech, while viewing the text, and with some facts given disputed or verified.
David Heinemeier Hansson, or DHH as he is known, nails what yesterday’s stellar Apple numbers mean. I also switched in 2002, and have done my fair share of evangelizing. It isn’t so much a vindication as it is a validation.