SuperSatellite

Twitter Background Templates

// December 7th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Creativity, Digital, Web

After watching some friends switching to some cooler Twitter backgrounds lately, I got inspired to do similar.  The results were… less than inspired, heh.  But, everything is better with more TOPHAT!

Twitter Background Template

Anyway, I pretty much designed it from scratch (can’t you tell?), which wasn’t a big deal, but I got to thinking to myself: “Me, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a template presized and ready to go so I can design it out all nice and know it’ll be right?” To which I replied to myself: “Self, it sure would.”

Now, these might already exist, I don’t know.  I didn’t take the time to Google it.  I just thought I’d throw it out and let the chips fall where they may.  What I’m sharing is a Twitter background template, saved as a layered Photoshop file (and accompanying blank JPG, if you don’t have Photoshop), with guides, and sized like it came right out of a Firefox window on a monitor with 1280×800 resolution (no extra toolbars).  The final image resolution is then 1264×869.

Enjoy!

Download Twitter Background Template (UPDATED 08.12.08! Now includes two templates, one optimized for 1280 width, another for 2048 with layout placements at 1280, 1650, and centered widths)

(You can follow me on Twitter @fienen)

Here’s a Big Fat Digest

// August 12th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Brain dumps, Creativity, Tech, Web, Writing

Okay, here’s a summary post to cover a bunch of different crap.  Turns out I’m very busy lately, and there have been some changes that will probably impact my normal blog posting routine.  I know… you’re heartbroken.  Now, I’m fully aware that I have no routine as it is, but I aspire to, and those aspirations are being interrupted somewhat.

So, the first big news is that I am now blogging “professionally” for .eduGuru, which is a web technology development blog sorta thing for higher education.  That means things that I used to talk about here will probably get diverted there.  Now, generic web stuff I’ll still post here, as well as things like dotCMS guides and my personal stuff will be here, so don’t panic or anything.  If anything, it means stuff around here will be less dry, and I’ll get to tickle your funny bone more.  And believe it or not, my first post is already up at .eduGuru.  I invite you to go read it, of course.  Here’s a snippet:

Is Hosted Search Really Ready for Prime Time?
In my years that I’ve now spent in higher education, one universal truth I have found is that nothing quite moves a project along like when someone much more important and much less web savvy than you deems an issue worth addressing.  Such was the case only a couple months after I had started at the university, when the Director of Marketing noticed that new information she had put up on the site wasn’t coming up in search results, and the results that were hitting weren’t particularly relevant to the topic in the first place.  Thus, a mission was born, to find a way to make our search better, and to do it NOW.  That’s the other thing about people higher up than you, when they say jump, generally you jump…
[read the rest of this at .eduGuru]

Naturally, that will probably appeal to all two of you.  Something more interesting, however, is that I have a new play idea I am currently researching.  It’s the sort of thing that I feel has the potential to be great, too.  I just got the memoirs of the chap that’s at the heart of the story that I finally tracked down on interlibrary loan (I only found one copy for sale online, and it was over $200).  I have one other book that I need to track down a copy of as well.  Hopefully it will be everything I expect.  I will give you more information once I have a better idea of if it will pan out the way I hope it will.  Research must come first though.

I relaunched Penpedia tonight.  I decided Drupal was a little too robust for my needs, and I don’t have time to learn it to a degree to really leverage its power well.  I’m like a monkey with a jackhammer when it comes to Drupal.  Wordpress, on the other hand, I know inside and out, so I switched to that for the new system.  I was lazy and did not design the theme, though I plan on doing some work to customize it a little in the near future.  So if you’re a fountain pen person, go give the new site a look-see.

Brandon showed me a cool site the other day I’d like to share.  It’s an online stock trading game called UpDown.com.  Basically, it’s a total nerd type game.  Think fantasy football, only with stocks (but I have a fantasy football league going too).  You start with a million bucks, and see how well you can play the market.  This sounds stupid, only it isn’t.  For one, it’s actually kinda cool, because you really are fighting the system, and you have limited time to do it (the stock market isn’t open 24 hours a day after all).  Plus, it can help you get an idea of how to play the market, should you want to do it for real later, so it’s great practice, especially for you kiddos out there who actually understand the only way you will survive retirement is to have your own money.  So go check it out.

Flickr vs. Picasa Deathmatch

// April 29th, 2008 // 25 Comments » // Creativity, Digital, Photography, Software, Web

If you have been following my tweets lately, you might have noticed that I’ve been fighting over which service I would prefer to use: Flickr or Picasa. This has resulted in far more headache than I would have initially thought, and I still don’t feel any closer to coming up with an answer. I thought by sharing my opinions, maybe you could toss some feedback my way that might help the decision making process. You may also ridicule and taunt me, as it pleases you.

I am not a photographer. I enjoy taking pictures, and I believe that I take relatively good ones, given my amateurish state. But I admit that it’s just a small hobby. Until now, I have used a Coppermine powered gallery that I kept on my personal server for managing and sharing my pictures. This works relatively well. To be perfectly honest, the only real reason I even care to switch is because I’d like to connect to more social tools through my photos. My own hidden little gallery site doesn’t do that. I also don’t have a lot of interest in keeping the software maintained, so I end up with older software that is a pain in the butt to update. But, I’m also not looking for 100,000 people to drool over my pictures. Mostly it’ll be stuff from plays I work on, or trips I take, things none of you care about (even though you try to act interested).

And here’s the matchup. Flickr is clearly a more socially driven web site. It’s purpose is more closely linked with my goal, I think. But, they lack a good desktop app for organizing pictures like Picasa does. They have an uploader application, which seems to work well enough, but I’d like my offline archive to basically mirror what I have online (at the moment, my photos folder is a pretty big mess, I admit it). Flickr is also pretty crippled if you don’t spend $24.95 a year on a pro account. Without it, you only get to use three sets (albums), which is, frankly, useless to me. You also only get to upload 100MB of photos a month, which if you are trying to migrate to their service, is also pretty useless. I said I’m not a photographer, but I still have a solid 2GB+ of photo (not that I need to share them all, but if I can, I probably will share most). However, with pro, you get unlimited everything for the most part. Storage, bandwidth, sets, collections, even video (if you care. I don’t).

Picasa has a slightly different purpose. It is geared more towards what Coppermine did for me; simply provide online gallery/album functionality. It’s desktop app is nice for organizing offline, and it integrates right into web albums. You get unlimited albums out of the gates, and a full gig of storage with no upload limits per month. But, extra storage (10GB) starts at $20/yr. Cheaper than Flickr Pro, but Flickr Pro gives you unlimited storage for five bucks more. Alternatively, you can do more for free through Picasa, just at a loss to some of the social networking features Flickr has. If you need more than 10GB, the price starts hurting.

My problem is basically that I can’t easily decide what kind of user I am, or what my goal is. I fall right in the middle of one big gray area, like Nick-at-Nite TVLand poop. Ideally, the systems should just merge into one super warehouse, like my crappy Photoshopped graphic above intimates. $25 a year isn’t much, but a lot of what I’d pay for I could have through Picasa for free. And using Flickr leaves me stuck managing stuff offline through something else. I could use Picasa as a purely offline file manager, but that’s like using it and wasting half the purpose of it. Half a dozen of one, six of another. I sure as hell don’t want to do both, I’d like one solution that answers my needs.

You could solve this problem for me, of course. Just sponsor a Flickr Pro account for me, and that will make up my mind for me. It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just that I’m cheap.

Update: I almost forgot to mention; Brad Ward has a nice blog writeup on Flickr over at SquaredPeg on Flickr, and using it to manage your photos.  I read it the other day and it was really what got me thinking that Flickr might be the way to go.

For your viewing pleasure

// March 31st, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Digital, Web, XHTML

Hey look, the theme is done! At least, done enough that I’m ready to start taking feedback. Use the comment form below for that. Even if it’s just to say “neat colors” or “I h8 u kthxdie.” But really, feel free to let me know what does and doesn’t work for you. I’ve tried keeping things simple, but engaging enough to make it worth looking at. I’ll also consider making it into a downloadable theme, if people are interested anyway. But I am very interested in what you think of it. I’m not really a designer at heart, but I do think this is a big improvement over the last layout.  I have one more change slated for the main frontpage, but I’m battling a vicious, nasty little bug, and I’m not gonna hold up the theme because of it, so that part’ll get done when it gets done.

I have not yet upgraded my blog to the famed Wordpress 2.5. No, instead, I am taking the cautious route for a change, which is a little unusual for me since I normally am not afraid of being bleeding edge. The thing is, I am dependent on a couple plugins I’d rather not lose. And having just finished this theme, I want to make sure all the hooks and functions I call aren’t being deprecated. I did help a buddy get going in 2.5 last week though, and it looks okay.  I just wish they’d done more with care towards backwards compatibility.  In the end, once I upgrade, you actually shouldn’t notice. So, you probably don’t really care. Sorry to waste your time on this paragraph. I love you for it though.

On that note, am I the only one that doesn’t like the WordPress site?  It always feels like content is out of date/sync with other parts, and the support areas are painful to navigate and find what you need.  I feel like I get led in circles a lot.  And the forums always come across very hostile, even those users marked as “moderators.”  That might just be me, but it always seems like for every question with a good answer, there is one with a snarky one and one with no anwsers.  But, at least the wiki has good information, which is all I normally need.  But if you want my advice, avoid their forums like the plague, and if you can’t, don’t even dare asking a remotely vague-ish question.

I am continuing to try to stick with an active social web presence. My attempt to live mostly through my NetVibes page didn’t go so great though, but I can say it’s sped things up in a couple places at least. It’s just that there’s too frequently not enough info in the feeds I’m reading, so I find myself visiting the sites about as much as always. I did do a new thing in the sidebar for my blog though, with the integration of Profilactic. Which is nothing like what you might think. It has nothing to do with sex that I have discovered (so far), and trust me, I’m looking. It’s a site designed for lifestreaming. That is, coordinating feeds from all your various social web stomping grounds. You can also use it like I did at the right to make a nice link list that can be styled up so people can see you in other areas. Then it adds pretty icons and all that jazz without you needing to screw with it (well, technically you do have to screw with it if you don’t like their default styling, which I didn’t, but it’s classed well and can be changed with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) easily). At the site, it then creates a mash up of all the sites’ RSS feeds that you can send to people who want to keep with you on various fronts, but at one source. One feed to rule them all, one feed to bind them. Stupid hobbitses.

Help me be successful

// February 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Creativity, Writing

Well, sound for Marisol is pretty well done.  Got some polishing, but all the hardcore mixing is pretty well done.  All that’s really left is just the last week and a half of rehearsals and shows before I can officially be evening responsibility free.

I also got a little of my voice back tonight.  I can get out full sentences and have them be understandable anyway.  I’d say it’s at 40%, which is better than this morning, when my voice was maybe 15%.  It has not been fun.  Hmm…I should make some tea when I get home.

Steve came up for an interesting idea for us that I’m planning on starting once this play is over.  Our group of friends are each going to throw $10 or so into a pot.  Then we take a theme, in this case horror in a modern workplace, and write a short story in less than 2,000 words.  We then read each other’s stories, score them based on certain criteria (no name on them, so in theory we can’t bias a score, and we don’t score our own), and top score wins the pot.  Interesting, no?

So, I am tossing it out to my bloggy friends to throw out ideas for plots or places and such that I might use to build a story off of.  Suggest anything that fits that theme: horror in a modern workplace.  It’s not that I’m uncreative, I actually have an idea in the works possibly, but why waste a potentially valuable resource like you, right?  Naturally I’ll share once the contest is over.