This is pretty cool. Aussie artist Rhett Dashwood spent about six months, poring over Google Maps, to compile this landscape alphabet. Some ‘letters’ work better than others, and i reckon it would work better with more instantly recogniseable landmarks.  But nonetheless, another one of those really simple ideas to file under “why didn’t i think of that?”

link-o-tron [with the locations of each ‘letter’]

Mashable have posted this infographic. Based on data gathered by hunch.com from user profiles of visitors to their site, it confirms that all your preconceptions and stereotypes about mac users vs. PC users are true. Click here to see the full version.

This is a really nice idea. In essence:

Pictorical are a publishing house, who sell ebooks for iPad. You apply to register with them as an artist and –provided they like your illustration style– they sign you up and you choose from their list of available books and illustrate it.  When it’s done, they sell it as an ebook and you [as the artist] get half the profits.

Applications are closed at the moment, but it might be one to keep an eye on for the future.

More info

Dear Tumblr

What, in the name of Beelzebubb and all his legions, is the point of providing an HTML editing button for posts, if you strip out any custom code we write, anyway?

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For about three days in a row over this [alleged!] holiday, i’ve been wrestling with my webserver, trying to configure it so i could use embedded Ruby in my webpages. Something i’ve been meaning to do, ever since i switched from using Apache to Nginx for my server, a while back.

The consensus of web-wisdom suggested that the easiest way to do this was the allegedly “plug’n’play” Phusion Passenger. So i spent about two-and-four-fifths of those three days, configuring, reconfiguring, uploading, downloading, installing, uninstalling Ruby, Nginx, Passenger and various other doohickeys and doodads and must have tried every configuration option out there, with absolutely no result; whatever i did, Nginx, Passenger and Ruby steadfastly refused to even look at each other.

Then, yesterday evening, i came across this pair of articles on Slicehost, walking through installing a separate server called Thin [which i’d never heard of before], to run alongside Nginx and then configuring Nginx to hand off any requests for pages containing Ruby code to Thin:

While ploughing the depressing Passenger furrow, i’d seen a couple of recommendations from people suggesting the best way to use Ruby and Nginx together was this twin-server setup, but i figured that –since setting up and configuring one server provides enough headaches to keep me occupied in my spare time– setting up two servers and expecting them to skip along hand-in-hand in perfect harmony, was just asking for trouble.

However, having exhausted the alleged ‘easy’ option, i had nothing left to lose, so i thought i’d give it a go.

Approximately 45mins later i had Nginx and Thin, effortlessly passing Ruby embedded pages back and forth between them, with the dexterity of circus jugglers.

Go me!

AUDIENCE:  So what’s the feckin’ moral of this story then, you boring nerd?

STÍO: The moral of the story, Glasshoppa’ is “Sometimes path least travelled is quickest route to destination”

Apr
26
2011
busman’s holiday

Even though i’m supposed to be on holiday for the next week, I cannae resist tinkering on the intarwebs. So today i’ve given my tumblr blog a bit of a make-over:

before:

after:

  • Widened the layout. there was s-o-o-o much wasted space in the old one. i think it was about 700px wide altogether. my new one is 1000px wide.

  • Changed styling of post title, footer bars and sidebar headings to make them look a bit more ‘labelly’, which is kinda the look i’m going for.

  • Changed link colours to match header bars and added text-decoration:underline on rollover.

  • Stripped all ‘px’ text sizes out of template and replaced with the more uniformly compatible 100% + ems method.

  • Changed formatting for quoted text.

  • Centred images and videos within posts. The “align center” [sic] option when posting has never worked for me and, inspecting the generated code, it seems that it does absolutely fuck all. So i used some sneaky jQuery to add an “imageholder” class to any paragraph containing an img or iframe [as used by youtube] tag. Then set all such paragraphs to “text-align:center” [sic].

  • Finally got round to doodling a logo

  • Gave sidebar a negative top margin to lift it up a bit, now i’ve got quite a fat logo at the top of the page.

i think that’s it. Looks much better now —even if i say so myself!