Efficiency 30.01.08

Feed Consolidation:

I recently discovered (thanks to Jon) that you can use Tumblr as a kind of Gatherer for content feeds that you may be generating on other websites. You know, like Flickr and things. As such, I’ve added the BooBooBumpyBear feed to my account along with my JPGMag content, which should start coming through once I start adding content again. I’ll save you from my Twitter feed though: imagine the inanity! Hopefully RedBubble.com will work out some RSS magic like that soon and then it’ll all be nicely sewn-up. I had briefly looked at Yahoo Pipes for this but I’m yet to roll my sleeves up for that. Other people are doing similar things with Django, too.

Code Navigation:

I’ve recently been getting back into XHTML/CSS for the day-job (replacing the no-job-all-play lifestyle we recently had) and with this, rediscovering the joys of navigating large, shared stylesheets and such. Gosh. Navigating either old code of your own or that of others can be a big head-scratcher / bore.

Whilst working through a new project the other day, I realised there’s a lot more that the software we use can do to help with this. Something un-intrusive on your coding style / syntax highlighting preferences but which allows you to quickly navigate a page of code to locate whatever naughty rule it is that’s causing you problems in your browser. I came up with this rough idea:



(Screenshot is of TextMate – my CSS Editor de choix) Quite simply, if you struck the right key-combination (what about hitting Return 3-4 times? How often do you do that otherwise?), a window pops-up with a Title field and a colour palette so you can label your new division of syntax and colour-code it as you choose (maybe that’s too much; maybe the program should choose the colour for you). A pale shade of this colour would then be used in the background of this division of code (pale enough to avoid clashing with the syntax colouring) and a small navigation panel in the gutter, which remains there at all times, consists of coloured blocks and titles which can be clicked on to take you to the specific area of code that you like. You can get as particular as you like, depending upon your preference or the scope of the project. Perhaps an optional description field could exist, for the aid of other developers on a shared project.

Just an idea. I’m no software developer and have no idea of the difficulties (or not) of making such an idea possible. It would be most useful as an add-on to current popular CSS editors (it’s certainly not enough to form the basis of an new piece of software) and maybe a browser extension thingy would be useful to keep the colour-coding in place when pasting your code into a browser (ie. in a CMS). Who knows. Also, I don’t have much experience with any other kind of programming but perhaps this would be useful for other kinds of coding (not just CSS)?

Interface Concentration:

I’ve started a Flickr set called ‘Silly Interface’. This is where I’ll post screenshots of silly / funny / unusable software interface-type-things which I deem suitable for (the very specific) ‘silly’ categorisation. There’s only 2 there at the moment but you have to start somewhere, eh?

OS Optimisation:

I recently started to actually use FontExplorer X. It’s been sitting in my Apps directory for over a year but I’ve never really looked at it. I’ve thus discovered that having all of the fonts in your system activated can be a big contributing factor in the regular grinding-to-a-halt of your CS2 apps. Who knew? Everyone else but me I’d wager. FEX allows you to quickly activate / deactivate the fonts you want nice and easily, and keep a base set of system fonts alive at all times. I know it probably says this on the instructions but blonde hippy web designers are allergic to those, actually. No more 5 minute Illustrator loading times whoo!