Soapbox

If I wasn’t so happy with Movable Type, I would definitely be looking at Hiveware’s Soapbox. You can learn more here.

Copywrong

Zeldman calls it. Disney is not your friend.

Very minor site work

So this morning I took care of two minor items I’d been meaning to get to.
First, I used Hiveware’s awesome Enkoder to encode my email address (bottom of right left-hand column on main page). Last month, I began receiving my first spam to this address, after having this site on line since October. While I will remain on some spam lists for the forseeable future, let’s see the gutless scum try and spider me now! (Enkoder is also available as a standalone OS X application.)
Second, I removed the Lucida Grande font from the stylesheet. Yes, it was a nod to OS X users, but Verdana is much more readable, and thus remains the primary font called.

SmartyPants 1.2.2

I know I’m half a month late in noting this, but Gruber confesses to why such a quick update to the 1.2.1 release of SmartyPants was necessary:

See, back in 1998 I became the owner of a South American woolly monkey, whom I named Paco, with the intention of training him to assist in my freelance graphic design work. Everyone told me this was a terrible idea, that it would not work, that at the very least I would need a chimpanzee or orangutan, that a mere monkey would never be able to do graphic design.
I was unswayed. Do you know how much food chimpanzees and orangutans eat? And for chrissakes, an orangutan can beat you up–I’ve seen those Clint Eastwood movies, those [BLEEP]ers can pack a punch. I do not need to be coldcocked by my lower-primate assistant. What I wanted was a monkey, a loyal friend who, when otherwise unoccupied, could sit on my shoulder and pick crumbs out of my hair.

Mediated persona

Gibson ruminates on how everyone now can have their own mediated persona, thanks to the meme of the weblog.

Font fix

Thanks to Mark Newhouse’s article on Unix fonts, I was inspired to revisit the fonts called for in the site’s CSS style sheet. Now, OS X users should be greeted by Lucida Grande at 11 px for for the main text font. All others will see Verdana, Geneva, Lucida, Helvetica, or Arial, in that order. Lucida is really there for any Unix readers that may happen by (say hello in the comments!). If you’re a Windoze user, and all you’re getting is Arial, then reinstall IE to see about getting Verdana loaded; it’s a much, much, much better screen font than Arial, and I’m not just saying that because my site looks better in it. Others will as well.

Eric/raoli

Fellow ATPM staffer Eric Blair is blogging at raoli.com. The jury is still out on what “raoli” means. 🙂

Froogle

Froogle, currently in beta, is a Google project for product price comparison.

RSS feed

Thanks to the nagging hints of some people, I have modified the RSS doc to show the full text of each post, rather than just a line or two. Props to Lee for the quick and easy tag fix.

Raena’s blog

Raena and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff, but she’s a fellow Mac-head and ATPM staffer, so she can’t be all bad, can she? 😉
Anyway, she’s been blogging a while…