For reasons that shall go unmentioned, I’ve been looking for nice LotR fonts. There’s a lovely collection of rune and tengwar fonts at Orlando Bloom Central, but I was looking for the Latin alphabet in an Elfish style, or a nice Carolingian or Uncial font. Thundrune seems to have some.
Some mac moments:
Wired ran an article recently on bloggers burning out. They mean the big-time bloggers, of course, not us small fry, but the phenomenon is the same.
Although I’ve been burning out on fandom for most of the time I’ve been in fandom, blogging has never worn me down. I’ve been canning content recently where other bloggers might shut down, but the joy of blogging hasn’t gone away. In writing fanfic the tropes pile up until you’ve seen them all, but with link blogging, there’s always something new and fascinating on-line. You never really reach the end of the Internet.
There’s a Dashboard Gadget repository up already, the Dashboarder. John Gruber has more to say on the Konfabulator issue, including an interesting quote from Larry Niven on paying for fan ideas.
Sadly, I am out of town and missing MacWorld Boston 2004. Apple is also out of town…
I’ve been playing around with UTF-8 entities, since I always want one I can’t find. Here are some links I found:
I generated my own entity page with PHP as well. As soon as I decide where to put it up, I’ll link it.
Tiger (otherwise known as Mac OS 10.4) won’t be out until next year, but some forthcoming features were revealed at the developers conference. Dashboard looks scrumptious. It also looks like Konfabulator, a resemblance which has caused many snide remarks like the one up on their homepage, but John Gruber explains that the concepts behind Dashboard go way, way back.
He’s right about Konfabulator being an unbearable resource hog, yet it’s the web-page basis of Dashboard that’s its biggest appeal. I made my own Konfabulator widgets, but it sounds far more pleasant to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make a Dashboard gadget. Look for a color wheel gadget once I get my hands on Tiger.
I have a couple of Safari links outstanding. I was looking for a WordPress spellchecking plug-in, but in my searching I discovered that you can spellcheck in Safari just by checking Edit | Spelling | Check Spelling As You Type. Now as I type this blog entry, it’s getting spellchecked.
Todd Dominey linked a preview movie of an RSS reader being built into Safari for OS 10.4.
I’ve had my first comment spam in WordPress - insidious comments that look relevant, and only the URL field is used for spam purposes. I recognized it as spam since it all came from the same IP, though the URLs varied. (I didn’t visit them.)
So I’m trying out the built-in spam blocking. In WordPress 1.2, just go to Options | Discussion and add IP addresses, URLs, or keywords to the textbox at the bottom of the page, and hit Update.
There’s a new Cyberduck out, which I’m hoping will be less flakey than the last one. I’m downloading it now over a connection that feels slower than dialup. (Cyberduck is an open-source FTP client for Mac OS X.)
WP plugin of the day: Belongs to Cat - I haven’t tried it, but it looks handy.
I’ve added a WordPress custom field for entry freshness, which so far I’ve used only on the canned entries. Custom fields are easy to add on the editing page, but getting them to display is another matter. The documentation is obscure as usual. What you have to do is put a the_meta() command into your template (index.php), and then style ul.post-meta, .post-meta li, and, optionally, span.post-meta-key.
What I did was add <?php the_meta(); ?> to the end of my feedback div in index.php, right after the line with the comments_popup_link command. To style the meta output, I added the following to my stylesheet:
ul.post-meta {
display: inline;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;}
.post-meta li {display: inline;}
.post-meta li:before {content: ' | ';}
So now instead of saying this entry was spam in a can, I can do it automatically and the meta data will appear at the end of the post. (Wait for it…)