Raible Designs

Acrobat Reader 5.1

Download Acrobat Reader 5.1. New version includes support for Palm OS and Pocket PC, digital signatures, file attachments, e-mail options, and more.

And then he added search highlighting

I've added a pretty cool javascript library called searchhi to this site.

The searchhi JavaScript library is a way of automatically highlighting words on a page when that page was reached by a search engine. In essence, if you search, for example, Google for some words, and then follow a link from the search results to a searchhi enabled page, the words you searched for will be highlighted on that page. Pretty neat, huh?

To add it to your site, simply copy the searchhi library to somewhere on your web server, and then include it in every page you want this to work on by adding the following line somewhere in the header: <script src="searchhi.js" type="text/javascript"><script> Then add, somewhere in your stylesheet, something like span.searchword {background-color: yellow; color: inherit}. I chose color: black since some colors in my menu are white, and white on yellow doesn't look so good.

Plaxo

Scripting.com gave me the link to Plaxo. Plaxo takes the hassle out of keeping your (Outlook) contact list up-to-date. I downloaded and installed - sounds cool.

Update: Uh oh! I appears that my use of this product is backfiring as it's sending messages to all the mailing lists in my address book. I'm going to run and hide now.

Photo Albums Redux

Remember this post? I wrote about how much I liked Michael's photo album software. Well, lo and behold, he heard me and sent this e-mail:

Matt,

Hi, and thanks for the mention on your site. =)

My photo album stuff was a reworking in PHP of some other photo album/gallery things I'd seen. Of course everyone is looking for something specific, and I was no different, so I decided I needed to make one with what I wanted. That meant it also had to be XHTML and CSS compliant, and I decided on an all CSS layout for ease of updating (that, and I love CSS, heh).

It's basically a three-tiered approach, with thumbnails, medium-sized images and hi-res versions. It's just one main file in a root directory, and a CSS file, title file, and optional pic info/annotation file in each photo directory. Since the program uses the CSS file in each directory, I can create a different layout for each album. I did a couple of minor changes in some of them just to show that they don't all have to look the same.

What it doesn't do:

Currently it does not do any real image handling such as creating thumbnails. I do all the image editing manually and compile a directory of photos (with their respective subdirectories) and just upload it. The program sees the directory automatically.

Also currently, you have to have all 3 versions of photos. I haven't incorporated an option to replace thumnails with text links, or to use/not use hi-res images.

I plan on putting some of these things in before making the whole thing freely available for public consumption, but if you'd like a copy of it as it is, I'd be happy to send it along with a brief intro on how to use it.

Again, thanks for the mention and the kind words.

Take care.

--michael

I responded to his e-mail and I now have this software in my Inbox - what a guy, eh? Thanks Michael! Now if I can only find the time to experiment and (possibly) implement.

kdub's log

There's a blog over at freeroller.net that is using a slightly altered x2 theme. X stands for XHTML and 2 stands for 2 columns (I contributed this theme to Roller, so that's how I know). Anyway, the writer, kdub, seems to like what I'm serving.

Great stuff from Raible Matt Raible is a great guy. I have been reading his weblog for a few months and he has been covering OS X, Roller, Struts, HTML/CSS, and Java which works well with my tastes. I need to congradulate him on his new daughter!

Thanks for the Abbie love - now it's your turn kdub - tell us about yourself. We want to hear about you, the person, not just your interests.

iStockPhoto

Zeldman points us to iStockPhoto.

iStockPhoto is a collection of over 26,000 royalty-free photos, illustrations, and multimedia files created by a growing international community of artists. The site adds around 1,000 new royalty-free photos each week.

You get 2 free downloads for signing up (or at least I did) and you can purchase 40 download credits (I'm assuming 1 credit per image) for $10. Not a bad deal if you need stock images for a site.

Launch of DMXzone.

From my Inbox: We are proud to announce the launch of DMXzone. DMXzone is a merger between UDzone, MXzone and DWzone! This is one of the first HTML-ed e-mails I've received where they used CSS instead of <font> tags everywhere.

Can't get rid of folders

I'm having the same problem on Windows XP that I am on my Mac. On the Mac, I have a folder ASD in my Trash that won't delete. When I try to Empty Trash from the Dock, I get an error stating that the item "ASD" is in use. When I look at the folder and try to remove stuff, nothing is there:

[minime:~] matt% rm -r .Trash/*
rm: .Trash/ASD: Directory not empty
[minime:~] matt% rm -r .Trash/ASD/*
rm: No match.

On XP, I have a similar issue. There is a found.000 folder on my C: drive. In this folder, there is a hidden folder (or at least it has a folder icon) named file0009.chk. When I try to delete it, I get the following error:

Cannot delete file0009.chk: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

Both of these have been bugging me for quite some time - hopefully I can put the comments feature to work for me now!

Neatly Packaged Binaries

Of your favorite open source products for OS X. My favs are among them: MySQL, Apache and Tomcat - all the latest versions.

RSS and Relative URLs

Even though my RSS still does not validate, the latest beta of NetNewsWire seems to support relative links. One small step for webloggers, now if we could only get the RSS spec leads on board.