Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

Clean Home Theme for Habari

It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.

How About Giving Me Some Credit Hosers

You’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…

At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.

Firebug Add-Ons

I’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.

The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.

The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”

Excellent Design Bookmarklet Suite

Lately I’ve been contemplating switching to Safari, as Firefox still seems to be a memory hog, especially since I tend to leave my desktop on for days at a time. With the improvements to the developer tools in Safari 4, there’s less and less reason for me to hang on to Firefox. Couple that with this bookmarklet suite of design/development tools I just discovered, and the excuse of having to use Firefox for it’s superior developer tools flies right out the window.

The suite includes a configurable grid overlay, a ruler overlay, a measurement tool to determine distance between two points, and a cursor crosshair tool (I’ve not found how to use this one effectively, but it could be useful for figuring placement when using position: absolute).

I can’t speak to how Firebug and the Safari tools compare regarding javascript, as I don’t do much with javascript, save using various jquery plugins.

Hulu via Front Row

I’ve not explored Hulu much, but I came across a Front Row plugin, UnderStudy, that allows you to subscribe to various Hulu and NetFlix feeds and watch them in full screen mode via FrontRow. The Netflix doesn’t interest me, as I’ve got that either through my Roku player or my XBox 360, but until I get my mini fixed up and hooked up to the TV, Hulu on the iMac in full screen mode seems like a nice way to take a little break. Granted, you can’t navigate the whole site, rather you have to add feeds, but once you get some feeds for your kind of content, it’s not too bad. It has a few default feeds to choose from, or you can navigate hulu.com and copy a feed link to the clipboard, then enter Front Row and add the feed from the clipboard. Since I’ve not watch Hulu.com on the site, I can’t compare the quality, but the few clips I looked at via Front Row were quite adequate.