Raible Designs

OS X Treats from Forwarding Address: OS X

I found the community blog of Forwarding Address: OS X this afternoon, which appears to be maintained and updated by 17 different bloggers. A pretty cool idea and (hopefully) a reason for frequent updates, to satisfy my blog-reading addiction. I discovered a whole bunch of goodies:

• Patrick, you're not the last one to know how to speed up Finder - I am.
• How to colorize emacs doesn't help me, but does make me wonder how I can get colors to show up in my Terminal window. When I ssh into my Red Hat machine, I get different colors for executables, folders, etc. - maybe this is a Linux thing.
• Virtual Desktop and TigerLaunch - installed and loving them both!

If any of you are eagerly awaiting my Wiki Review (I doubt it), I haven't forgot about it - just lost motivation for it. No need == no motivation.

Building Accessible Websites

Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites is now shipping. I was one of the technical editors for this book; having read it thoroughly, twice, I can assure you that it is the most comprehensive and most well-written web accessibility book in existence. Every web designer should read it. If you can only afford one web accessibility book, buy Joe’s book. (If you can afford two, buy Joe’s book and Jim’s book, reviewed here.) [dive into mark]

Since I'm a web designer (bold added by me), I've added this book to My Wish List at Amazon. I will buy and read after I've finished the Photoshop Bible, Photoshop Classroom in a Book and JSTL in Action. Maybe. I might also just choose to read the next Harry Potter to my daughter instead.

Good CSS Designs

Scott Andrew lists his favorite CSS Designs and also points out some great CSS templates. This site got its original CSS inspiration from glish.com and I've also used Blue Robot's techniques on my current project.

Googlism

What does Google think of you? It's pretty acurate on it's impression of me and my company.

Apple (finally) releases JDK 1.4.x

Allen Denison, Java Product Manager at Apple has just sent an email to their java-dev mailing list announcing the availability of a Java 1.4.1 Developer Preview. This preview is available to all ADC members and can be downloaded from the "Download Software" section of the ADC web site. [via MacSlash]

Happy Day! Downloading now...

Apple Switch Ad

You gotta check this out whether you're a Mac user or not, it's a good laugh. Found via Zeldman.

Unrelated to any of the above, an Apple “switch” flick that thinks different is now making the rounds. A second copy is available on another server. No doubt many copies are available on many servers, though perhaps not for long. Thanks: Dori Smith and Todd Fahrner.

Dreamweaver MX Certified

I passed a test today to become a Certified Dreamweaver MX Developer. I got an e-mail from Macromedia a few months ago, looked at the sample questions (PDF) and figured, what the heck. The sample questions looked so easy (basic HTML stuff) that I didn't even study. After the first 5 questions on the test, I was shittin' bricks since most questions where related to Dreamweaver and such things as the Asset Panel. I use Dreamweaver a fair amount, but only as an HTML editor, and I hardly ever use the advanced features. So when I encountered a bunch of questions about how to do such and such in Dreamweaver, I just answered with a WAG. I thought for sure I was going to fail - but I passed!

Bookmark for Web Developers

If you're a web developer and are constantly looking for good backgrounds, fonts, or icons on the web, check out http://www.grsites.com. They have a ton (4,300+) backgrounds that will tile seemlessly on your web page. If you know of any others, let me know.

Roller Referrals and NetNewsWire Images.

I found out today that my referrals get reset to 0 when my website crashes. Doh! Oh well, it was interesting to see that most of this site's hits come from Google, or at least they did today. I don't want to record them for historical purposes anyway, that's what these stats are for.

I also figured out the problem with displaying images in NetNewsWire - you have to use an absolute reference (i.e. http://yoursite.com/images/... vs. /images/...). I'll see if I can get Brent to change this, how bad would it suck to move your site to a new domain and lose all your images?! This first issue in this bug has been solved by Roller 0.9.6. Looks like Ranchero Software needs to use JIRA, you can't update or comment on a bug once it's entered!

What else am I doing tonight? Drinking a Fat Tire, cooking some Rosemary Chicken for dinner and getting ready to watch the World Series. Go Angels! I really don't care who wins, but I bet my mom $10 since she wanted the Giants to win. My mother-in-law is coming into town tonight, so it might be a light blogging weekend.

I tried to make this site XHTML-compliant by escaping the HTML in the bookmarklets. This caused Javascript errors, so this site will simply have to remain invalid for a few days.

RSS Validator.

I wish I could say that my RSS feed validates, but alas, it does not. I guess it doesn't like HTML in a site's description. I don't know where I'm getting the language error from, Dave doesn't appear to get it.

Update: I updated my website description in Roller to be text with no markup and hard-coded the HTML-rich version in my page template. Now I'm complying with yet another web-standard, yee haw!