bitdepth — bbedit

Weaving a Web

One thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m increasing my presence online. I don’t know if the quality is increasing or if it is just more stuff, but I think that one of the reasons that I’m more prolific now is that is easier. I love using Blosxom to blog because I can create the entries with any text editor, but I always use BBEdit to write for bitdepth. But the bitdepth entries aren’t as frequent as I wanted them to be, but now with my increased use of Blogger for Screen Arts and now bitdepth digest, I blog more often using Blogger. The other things that I use often are Flickr and, increasingly, 43 Things. One thing that all these sites have in common are their fairly flexible and open APIs, which allows the information and the sites to interact with other applications and sites. What it means practically is that I now am able to blog using Flickr and 43 Things and to have Flickr images automatically show up on my 43things page as well as here on bitdepth.
Very exciting things are also happening with Technorati adding watchlists where you can follow discussions in the blogosphere based on keywords. I keep track of just about all of this stuff using NetNewsWire as if there isn’t an RSS feed, I’m not as interested in it as I don’t want to spend the time looking around to see if anything has changed. While Flickr and 43things are very fun and aren’t technically oriented, Technorati is a geeky data-rich backend that is starting to have some very cool applications built on their API.
So the exciting thing now is that we’re moving away from needing to use one application to view and share and just find and create and share. It’s exciting when you don’t have to code or understand how to code to use things (but if you can, it’s even more exciting now as you have a lot more to play with).

January 8, 2005 43things, bbedit, bitdepth, blogger, blosxom, flickr, netnewswire, screenarts, technorati

Bye Bye Browser

I’ve been using the browser less and less since I started using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds. It’s one the best shareware investments that I’ve made. It’s simple, well-designed and works well. Most of the time I can quickly get a lot of information via the feeds and NNW lets me check out things that I’m really interested in. When I used to click on a link it would open in my browser which is usually Safari, but I’m using Firefox a bit now. Now I’m using the latest beta which makes a good thing even better. Support has been added for Atom feeds and the weblog editor has been broken out into a new application called MarsEdit. The thing that has changed the way I look at things the most is that now (thanks to WebCore) I view pages within a tab that pops up in NNW. It’s a great idea and now I’m going outside to the browser less when I want to check something out. Simplifying things is always good.
MarsEdit is something that I wasn’t sure I’d use that much. But I’ve been using it a bit and I think that I’ll use it more. I’m not using Movable Type as much now which is what I used the weblog editor for before, but I am using Blogger and I can post to Blogger using MarsEdit with the quirk of not being able to set the title, but that’s on the way. I’m also thinking of using it a bit with this blog which is Blosxom-based with me editing the posts in BBEdit. The change in the interface of MarsEdit is that it now works and looks a bit more like email, which makes a lot of sense. The email workflow is closer to how blogging works intellectually. That being said, why am I writing longer posts now?

October 17, 2004 atom, bbedit, blogger, blosxom, firefox, marsedit, movabletype, netnewswire, rss, safari, software, web

Remembering the Web That Was

About a week ago my son asked me for some help with redoing his Web site. He’s seven years old and he likes to do things that everyone else in the family does and since most of us make Web sites that’s what he wants to do. He already has some locally hosted stuff. He wanted to blog so I set him up with Movable Type which he used a bit and then he saw me working on this site and he wanted to use what I used, which is Blosxom, so I set him up with Blosxom which kept him for a while longer. Then he wanted to change the look of the site and he asked me how I did it. He wanted to use HTML, like me, but I didn’t have time to teach him so I started thinking about the books in the computer bookcase and thought of Jennifer Niederst‘s Learning Web Design. I gave it to my son and he started reading and coding with BBEdit. Then he wanted more control over the look and layout of the site and asked me how I did that. I told him about CSS and then he wanted to learn about that and I discovered the CSS palette in BBEdit that makes things a bit simpler.

This got me thinking about how things were when I started making Web pages and how wonderful it was when I found out how to do things. The first book that made things easy and understandable was the now out-of-print Designing for the Web. I still have the book and it actually holds up pretty well. It was my constant companion when I first started teaching Web design to people. Then I moved on to Web Design in a Nutshell which is still my favourite printed reference.

Now I don’t read a lot of books about basic stuff since I’m trying to do more with CSS and focussing on the content and less on the presentation since sometimes working on the look is a great way to delay writing. It was neat in the old days because there weren’t as many Web sites and many of the questions weren’t “how” to do something, but “if” something was possible to do. It was fun because everyone was learning and trying things out. There was the constant push to cut things down and to wrap your head around a different way of thinking to code stuff. Now I code stuff by hand with BBEdit’s help and I really like it. I’m closer to the code and by trying to code stuff cleanly and to standards it isn’t as big a deal to do a redesign in terms of needing to redo lots of pages.

I’m also realizing how many design and coding principles that I’ve assimilated into my own practice. I don’t look a lot of stuff up and firmly separate out the content from the presentation. In a funny way I think that many of the practices that I follow are all aligning… the same for thinking about teaching, editing, writing and creating almost anything. I think about what to say, how to say it and then playing around with the presentation. The simple version is “think, plan, make it work, and make it pretty.” When I don’t follow that process is when I get off topic and spend more time exploring a technique and less time exploring ideas.

Seeing my son build his pages made me remember how wonderful it is to see something appear in a browser after you code it. The sense of wonder that made the Web so special. The amazing feeling of seeing a new page and figuring out how it was done and checking out the code to confirm what you thought. In some ways it is a bit of magic – seeing behind the curtain at the machinery inside. I’d forgotten about a lot of that and now I’ve got a little bit of it back thanks to my son asking a few questions.

November 30, 2003 bbedit, css, history, jenniferniederst, john, learningwebdesign, web, webdesigninanutshell

Presentations and Storytelling

Doc Searls got me thinking about presentation software which has become a current topic with Apple’s new Keynote software. PowerPoint dominates presentation software and I really hate it. Maybe that’s not completely fair. I hate PowerPoint in the same way that I hate Flash…not so much the software itself, but how it’s used. With most applications there is a way that you are supposed to use them…it’s how they’re designed. You can work with them in a different way, but you’re going against the grain. PowerPoint seems to tend toward mediocrity in the direction that it pushes people.
Derek K. Miller explains “Why PowerPoint is like a sauna in a Saab” and Doc’s article “It’s the Story, Stupid” should be read before anyone prepares a presentation.
Years ago I had to make PowerPoint presentations for other people as part of my job. On the 7100AV that I used it was slow and an incredible memory hog. I didn’t help it a lot since I’d usually make up the shows in Photoshop as a series of images and bring them in. I much preferred doing things like that using Director and later Flash. But one of the hidden, but very useful features of Adobe’s Acrobat reader is the full-screen mode that turns a PDF file into a presentation. I’ve done some presentations that way.
The last presentation that I gave was supported with slides that I created in Photoshop and then assembled with QuickTime Pro as a series of stills. It worked well.
Now when I’m writing something more structured I’ll start in OmniOutliner which is probably the best outliner I’ve every used. Most other things that I write will be in BBEdit (where I’m writing this now). Whenever I have to do another presentation I’m thinking of using BigShow which was written by Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch. It’s very small and simple and uses XML. I’m thinking that if I organize things in OmniOutliner and then maybe use a bit of AppleScript to reformat things into the proper XML it can be a quick way to whip something up.

January 18, 2003 aaron hillegass, applescript, bbedit, big nerd ranch, bigshow, derek k miller, director, docsearles, flash, keynote, omnioutliner, photoshop, powerpoint, presentation, quicktime, software, xml

Top 5 Shareware Applications I’ve Paid For

Hmmm… I seem to be in a top 5 mood… The top 5 applications that I’ve registered or use just about every day are as follows (in no particular order)… NetNewsWire Lite (I haven’t registered it, but that’s because the Pro version is in beta now), BBEdit, Graphic Converter, Transmit, and Joe’s Filters For Final Cut Pro. Over the past year I’ve come to depend on these things… in some ways they are the silent heroes who work away in the background, but each one of them have talented people working away making my life easier.

December 31, 2002 bbedit, graphicconverter, joesfilters, netnewswire, shareware, software, transmit