Too Epic

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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.

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.

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 weeks days.

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.

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:

1. It had to be purple.
2. It would serve as a lightweight portfolio with screenshots of past work.
3. 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.

Version 3 of the Compatriot theme is now available with infinite scrolling, keyboard navigation, and music posts with album artwork. Enjoy.

staff:

Tumblr iPhone 1.1 Sneak Peek!

It’s been submitted to the App Store and should be live this week!  Here’s a preview from its wonderful developer, Jeff Rock:

• Video posts. Choose from your camera roll or capture a new video right from the app (iPhone 3GS only).
• Native editing. Need to add tags or update a post on the go? Just tap the ‘edit’ button on a post in the Dashboard to load it up in a native post editor.
• Search. Supports searching across Tumblr, in your Dashboard or on just your posts.
• Built-in web browser. No more losing your place when you tap a link in Dashboard. Now a web browser will pop up and let you investigate the interwebs.
• Post upload status. Never wonder how long it’s going to take that Audio post to upload again.
• Post geotagging. Even I’m not sure what this is for, but I’m sure that it’s going to be awesome.
• Rewritten Dashboard tab (replaces the Sites tab). See all your posts from each of your blogs, including drafts and queues.
• Rewritten Advanced Post Options. New support for Save as draft, Add to Queue, Publish on, Custom post URL’s, Send to Twitter and Ask a question.
• Dashboard now only reloads on command. Not every time you tap the tab. Sorry about that one :P
• Better quality photo posts. Photos are now sent with less compression.
• New bookmarklet format for links. More info coming once 1.1 goes live.

Note: The rest has been removed for brevity’s sake.

Whoa.

I’m excited. And the first thing I did upon reading this was start playing with URLs. Turns out the tumblr website components of the 1.1 release are already up and running. See:

• http://www.tumblr.com/iphone/drafts
• http://www.tumblr.com/iphone/queue

I still can’t figure out, however, what the URL is for viewing just your posts.

Woohoo. Compatriot is currently featured on Tumblr’s Theme Garden page.

I’ve been making a few tweaks to this blog recently, namely: infinite scrolling and keyboard navigation (try pressing j and k). Hopefully I’ll be able to get around to incorporating some of them into compatriot in the near future.

Edit: Turns out the featured section is apparently now just a random list of 8 themes. I do not regret making this post.

To whoever is responsible for the redesign of Tumblr’s mobile site. I’m guessing an updated Tumblr app isn’t too far off. I just wish there was an apple-touch-icon for the mobile dashboard and an option to view the page in chromefree mode from the homescreen. The application is nice, sure, but nothing beats full screen landscape browsing goodness.

staff:

lloyda2:

It is not helpful in designing a theme that Tumblr throws in inline style attributes in its preview.

Thanks for catching that!  That was left over from an ancient bug.  We just pulled out the style attribute, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.

I might as well use this as an opportunity to list a few more issues lingering in Tumblr:

1. The iframe which appears in the top right of each Tumblr user’s blog employs deprecated attributes and is responsible for four markup validation errors. No biggie: this one is a minor annoyance.
2. Permalink pagination is broken, and has been for at least the past few months—possibly since the feature was first introduced. Going backwards in time works just fine, but there’s something wrong with the {NextPost} url which causes every single instance of the {NextPost} tag on every single permalink page to link to a (seemingly random) recent post submitted. See for yourself: Go here and press newer. Then do the same for this post. See?
3. I feel like this one was intentional, but when I perform an indent from tumblr’s nice wysiwyg text editor, the resultant blockquote has a bunch of nasty style crud attached to it, eg:

   <blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;">

   I think this is unnecessary: the stylesheet of the user’s theme should be able to handle a blockquote appropriately.

Much thanks for listening to your users and for being continually diligent.

Back in February, my mother commissioned me to churn out a redesign for her website to go along with her upcoming book of short stories, set to be released in September. Her former site, also written by myself (back in 2005), was a series of hand-updated html pages. I took this redesign as an opportunity to add some much-needed dynamic content to the site.

Because my mom was a bit intimidated by the prospect of maintaining a conventional blog, I decided to rely on tumblr as the basis for the news section of the site. The prime criterion that led to selecting tumblr over self-hosted lightweight blogging engines, such as Chyrp, was tumblr’s straight-forward dashboard interface. Even my technologically inept mother managed to figure out how to click “Text,” fill out two boxes, and tap “Create Post.”

The rest of the site was hobbled together with jQuery and Simplepie. Simplepie is a goliath of an RSS parser (the single PHP file is a whopping 348 KB), but it was easy to bend to my will for use in a google calender-backed events page. I’m also filtering posts through Smartypants for typographical correctness.

I’ll probably come back to optimize the site further down the line, but for now my client is appeased, and I’m sleepy.