There can be only one

Well, Bradley was right. Four blogs is too many. As much as I love to hang out on wordpress.com, I need to simplify my online world before it becomes too fragmented. I’ve imported all of the existing posts from this blog into my aalannarisse.com blog under the category: Tech

Squid Fingers

I always forget the name of this site so I’m posting about it so I never forget again. Squid Fingers, virtual home of designer Travis Beckham, is the place to go if you want cool, free background patterns for your site.

How not to design a logo

Following along the same logo design lines as my last post. Web Designer Depot has a nice post about how NOT to design a logo.

Brands of the World

Designing a logo and need some inspiration, check out BrandsoftheWorld.com. It’s chock full of all kinds of logo designs, some great, some bad. But there’s lots to browse through.

Embrace 960

The 960.gs website has templates of every flavor to create websites based on 960 pixel wide designs. Available for your downloading and designing pleasure are templates for Photoshop, Fireworks, even Visio (eck) and a nice CSS template as well. So go forth and multiply!

I heart you MagCloud

MagCloud is a self-publishing magazine service similar to lulu.com that takes care of all the hard stuff for you like managing subscriptions, printing, and shipping. All you do is upload a PDF and the rest is cake. I am so very, very excited about this idea that I’ve been dreaming up schemes. I’m hoping to be done with the first issue of my new project by mid February. I’ll let you know how it goes! PDFs of your magazine layout can be up to 100MB and page number can be up to 60 color pages.

TwitterLocal scoops up tweets based on locale

TwitterLocal is a service that finds twitterers based on location. Pretty neato. It also has a list of top twittering cities based on tweet activities. You can add RSS feeds for tweets based on locale. There is also an Adobe Air desktop app so you can track tweets straight from your computer.

Screen capture apps

Sometimes good ole print screen or command+3 isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to capture drop down or a cursor. Here are some options for Mac and PC.

Tech Smith Camptasia and SnapIt
this is more video oriented Screen Flow
Snap Z Pro

It’s Blame Matt Mullenwag for everything week

I tried to go to my wordpress.com blog and got the following:

Goshdarnit!

Something has gone wrong with our servers. It’s probably Matt’s fault.

We’ve just been notified of the problem.

Hopefully this should be fixed ASAP, so kindly reload in a minute and things should be back to normal.

Tom and I thought it was so cute that we have decided to declare this week “Blame Matt Mullenwag Week.” So you can pretty much go ahead and blame him for anything you feel like. Pretty neat, huh? Sorry Matt, we love you, but it just sounds like a really fun idea to blame you for everything, ok? It’s just one week.

Adding wmode=transparent to swfobject.embedSWF

Thanks to Aran Rhee on google groups, my bug is fixed and I can go on with my life now!

Problem: My css drop down nav was showing up behind my swf. I needed to add a wmode=transparent but I was using swfObject 2.1 and couldn’t figure out how to add params. Thank you Aran! I owe you a beer.

Aran Rhee

From: “Aran Rhee”
Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 09:21:51 +1000
Local: Tues, May 20 2008 3:21 pm

Subject: RE: swfobject using the param (wmode)

You are passing the params object as the wrong argument to the embedSWF()
function. Have a look at the docs – It specifies:

var flashvars = {};
var params = {};
var attributes = {};
swfobject.embedSWF(“myContent.swf”, “myContent”, “300″, “120″,
“9.0.0″,”expressInstall.swf”, flashvars, params, attributes);

As you can see, the flashvars object goes first, THEN the params object.

Aran