Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

Back to BBEdit

by Brian Warren on 26 May, 2005

There are so many good text editors for the Mac. TextMate, skEdit, SubEthaEdit, Smultron, and even Xcode. I’ve tried all these, but none of them really stuck with me. I keep going back to BBEdit.

I actually bought and used skEdit for awhile. It has an elegant site manager in it and intelligently allows you to browse your site directory. It also has a classy auto-complete feature for you as you’re typing CSS. That said, I decided to drop it as my main tool. I still use skEdit if I have a lot of CSS work I need to do.

I also keep an eye on TextMate. It seems like one of the more innovative tools of the bunch. It has a clever feature of being able to collapse parts of your code based on the structure of your page. For instance, you can hide everything that’s in your <head> tags or all the code in a particular <div>. Neat.

That said, BBEdit is faster and more powerful. It has the few things I found lacking in skEdit, though it does lack that CSS …

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Victorious

by Brian Warren on 25 May, 20051 Comments

My fuses arrived yesterday and today I installed one in the Gaggia. Now I’m sipping a latte and feeling quite pleased with myself. A $12.50 fix which includes a spare. Not too shabby.

If I'm Grumpy… [update]

by Brian Warren on 19 May, 2005

My Gaggia espresso maker is broken right now. The lights come on but nobody’s home. But John showed me a site that has some troubleshooting info.

The Gaggia Classic

So I pulled it apart last night and found the fuse that was broken. I short circuited the fuse to test it and it worked! I’m off to home depot today to find a replacement fuse.

[update]
I spent a bunch of time at Home Depot, eventually finding out that they didn’t have what I needed. So I called Mark, the owner of Kaladi Coffee, my favorite coffee shop. He referred me to Home Espresso Repair in Seattle. They’re sending me two fuses. It looks like it will be a few more days before I can brew.

U.S.'s new Dollar Coin and the Web

by Brian Warren on 17 May, 2005

The U.S. is talking about doing another dollar coin. We seem entranced by this idea of catching up with the rest of the world with our money. We recently tried, somewhat half-heartedly, colorizing our $20 bills, though I’d say we have a little ways yet to go there.

The dollar coin makes plenty of sense if they do it well. The coin needs to be thicker than the current Sacagawea dollar, but not as big around. Thicker so you can tell what you’re about to pull out of your pocket, not as big so that it’s not cumbersome. In Europe I saw some great examples of this, and I enjoyed using their 1 and 2 euro coins.

One Euro Coin Two Euro Coin

I also suggest a $2 coin for the U.S. One annoying thing about the current dollar coin is to have $10 in my pocket, I have to have 10 rather large coins jangling around. If we have a blend of 1 and 2 dollar coins, I’d be …

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Two New Sites

by Brian Warren on 11 May, 2005

Vance Reeser has an awesome new portfolio site up – VanceReeser.com – complete with new demo reel that includes his latest treats in a nice tasty little package. I helped by doing the back-end code as well as the XHTML/CSS.

Aaron J. Orr has a new textpattern-based blog up at mynameisgarlic.com. It’s good stuff and has a nice little photoviewer. I got to help him with setting up of the blog, but it’s all his design. Drop by and send him a congrats on his new job!

Blocking Ads in NetNewsWire Feeds

by Brian Warren on 05 May, 2005

Being a profoundly geeky, I’ve been using NetNewsWire to do my regular browsing around the internet. Recently, ads have started popping up in the newsfeeds, and today I took action against them. Borrowing heavily from an idea of using a custom stylesheet in Safari to block ads, I added this to Jon Hicks’ tiger-style stylesheet for NetNewsWire:

  a:link[href*="/imageads."] img, a:link[href*="http://www.google.com/ads_by_google.html"] { display:none !important; }  

Bye bye ads!

Mr. Bones meet Smacky

by Brian Warren on 05 May, 20051 Comments

I bought an iPod today. There are a few reasons that I did such a thing. I do already have an iPod (I named him “Smacky”) and I like it a lot. I spend lots of time on it every day. In fact I’ve used it so much over the past 18 months that I’ve worn out the ear buds. I haven’t worn out the battery though (still 10+ hours last I checked).

So reason number one was that I was looking around at getting new headphones. I thought about just getting the Apple ones again, and I briefly looked at really high-end headphones. Then it occurred to me that the iPod shuffle comes with ear buds, and I know I like those. And hey it comes with an iPod too!

The clincher was last night when I offered to lend my iPod to my father in law who is wanting to record some speeches with a voice recorder. So I went down to the Apple store and picked up an iPod Shuffle and an iTalk. Anna named the shuffle “Mr. Bones.” I’ll send off my iPod to him tomorrow and …

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Pascha

by Brian Warren on 04 May, 2005

Ever since the Pascha celebration I’ve wanted to write about it. Things slowed down enough this morning so I could.

First of all. Pascha (PAS-ka) means Easter, or more specifically, the Feast of the Resurrection. The Orthodox use the two interchangably. On to the service…

On Saturday night at about 11:00 we were seated in the pews, somewhat droopy eyed as we had recently woken up from a nap that was meant to tide us over for the late night ahead of us, but ended up making us rather sleepy. Looking around I could see we weren’t alone. Despite the sleepiness there was an air of anticipation and people were eager to get started.

Before I get into the service, let me explain something a little bit about Lent. Lent is during the 40 days preceding Easter. Most people in the church do three things during Lent. They fast from certain foods, they pray and they give charitably. It’s a solemn time. A time to slow down and remove distractions from your life. So I only mention this to give an idea of what we personally have been doing leading up …

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