Tumblr Dashboard Notifier Safari Extension»
This is my first attempt at a Safari Extension. It uses the new Dashboard API to poll for unread posts in the background while you browse the web.
The source code is on github.
Compatriot Theme v.4»
The latest version of Compatriot has been pushed to the Theme Garden. I’m finally eating my own dog food with this release. What you see on this blog is identical to what you’ll get upon installing the theme. I’ve got some font-embedding action going on this time around. The header is set in League Gothic and the body text is in Gentium.
Tell me if you’d like any functionality added. I still have a few ideas in the works, but I figured I’d at least make this update available in the mean time.
Apparently someone at Tumblr HQ thinks the theme is an aberration, which is fine by me. I’ll make a pretty one someday, I promise.
ashabi asked:
Hi,
I use your Compatriot theme for my blog. I have a problem with it showing all the notes when i click "show trivial". It just goes back and forth. It also happens on an Is there a way to fix it?
Ashabi.
I’m actually in the process of revising the Compatriot theme. In the next version, there will be no “show trivial” button. Likes and reblogs will be placed in separate columns and always visible. Hopefully I’ll have it done by Sunday.
While I’m working on that, you can fix the problem by going to customize->theme and clicking the “Use custom HTML” button. Then scroll down to the bottom of all the ugly code to here:
<script src="http://static.tumblr.com/3jc4ci5/w2Yktl7ph/cofunctions.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
And replace the part that says http://static.tumblr.com/3jc4ci5/w2Yktl7ph/cofunctions.js with http://static.tumblr.com/3jc4ci5/xi7l0occs/cofunctions.js.
My apologies for the inconvenience.
The Wall Street Journal cripples its Print Page feature
And digs itself deeper into irrelevance.
Traditional publishers have resorted to perverting their online content with needless pagination and obnoxious advertisements.
So what does poor Jimmy Reader do when he has to print a physical copy of the article for whatever reason? Click the nice “Print Version” button, of course.
Oh, what’s that, Mr. Publisher? You can’t get ad revenue from a print page? Some readers are resorting to clicking “Print Preview” and then pressing their convenient little Read Later bookmarklet because they’re fed up with your shenanigans?
Ah, so rather than offer readers real incentives to pay for content or employing less obtrusive advertising techniques, you make your Print Previews completely worthless.
And if you think that’s funny, try requesting a WebReprint. The Wall Street Journal now charges $475 to link to one of its articles. For a month. And then the URL expires.
Tumblr Staff: Dashboard API: Part 1»
Get it while it’s hot!
Dashboard posts are now accessible from the Tumblr API, and there’s a shit-ton more coming to the API over the next few
weeksdays.While I’m sure you guys will concoct plenty of things we haven’t even begun to imagine, the things we’re super-excited to see are any …
This calls for celebration.
Via: Tumblr Staff
Video Camera Glasses»
I’m so psyched that this is now a financially viable consumer good. I would love to show people what a day of school is like.
Tagged as:
gadgets
Longlegs by Sister Suvi
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
56 Plays
I am just now discovering that Sister Suvi is dead. I wish I could have seen them live.
One day, someone will write a book about all the bands that did not quite make it. They will travel the world, from Rio to Austin to Irkutsk, and ask the people: “What was your greatest band that never was?” The author will collect stories, testimonies, oral histories of the indie-rockers, folk-singers and go-go crews that exploded listeners’ hearts right open—and then called it quits. The tale of all the groups that only live on in legend.
Sing a song for Sister Suvi at McSweeney’s
Of all the bands I’ve listened to in my short human tenure, Sister Suvi is the best that never was. Their one and only album, Now I Am Champion, is still available for purchase here.
Tesla Motors Goes Public»
So this is exciting:
The IPO filing on Friday from the six-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, marks the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Co made its share debut in 1956.
Too Epic is Reborn»
The former iteration of my home page was underwhelming at best. It made abysmal use of Google App Engine’s offerings to the point that my GAE account had been reduced to a free, low-latency static file server (which is by no means a bad thing).
But alas, my bank account balance is running low: I figured I should have a nice place to refer potential freelance clients to. So I took a few days out of my winter break to come up with a new design and get to work creating it. Going into the project, I had a few explicit goals:
- It had to be purple.
- It would serve as a lightweight portfolio with screenshots of past work.
- The underlying content would come from tumblr (that link is not much of a sight to behold for the time being).
Initially, I tried just implementing the site as a tumblr template and loading the rest of the content (twitter, flickr, last.fm, AIM) through JavaScript with some simple $.getJSON calls. After a few days of private use, I decided this method was too unreliable:
- Twitter’s JSON API failed to return the data I asked for about 30% of the time.
- Users with JavaScript disabled would wind up not seeing half the site.
- Tumblr occasionally goes down a few minutes for maintenance, and I’d rather have as much uptime as possible.
So, with these observations in mind, I returned to my former mistress, App Engine, who welcomed me with outstretched arms. I am by no means a proficient Python programmer, but I was able to hack together a passable backend that stores incoming data at regular intervals.
The end result is something that hopefully looks decent and renders reliably. I’m using a ton of experimental CSS, some of which is webkit exclusive for the time being: custom scrollbars and -webkit-transitions come to mind. The redesign should, however, look half decent in most modern browsers. I have not even tried visiting in IE; I’m guessing it won’t be too colorful, seeing as most of the colors are in rgba.
I’m prone to borrow and experiment with ideas unapologetically, but I must give credit where credit is due:
- All the pretty icons come from Glyphish.
- Much inspiration and background-texture theft from Meagan Fisher’s post on 24 ways.
- The heading typeface, League Gothic comes from the League of Movable Type, purveyor of prime open source fonts.
- @font-face embedding was vastly simplified by Font Squirrel.
- jQuery will forever hold a special place in my heart.
- Tumblr might be somewhat to blame for my obsession with faux picture frames.
- The ever helpful Hao Lian ensured that I didn’t make any fatal Python blunders.
I’m sure I’ve overlooked a few, but so it goes. Now, if you’ll humor me, here’s something I’m proud of that I haven’t really seen elsewhere. Despite having a Python-powered backend rendering the initial page, I’ve got my script checking for new content every 30 seconds, so if I happen to be listening to a song or posting a tweet or getting onto AIM when you visit, the page will dynamically update in (almost) real time. Feel free to poke around and critique the source code.
I have a few novel ideas for making good use of the tumblr-powered content. Stick around long enough and I might even get around to realizing them. In the meantime, please send comments, questions, amorous solicitations, and potential freelance website work my way via email.
