Pocket Revolutionary

In case anyone was ever wondering what Spaces looks like at 1 a.m. on a particularly frustrating night.

Looking for an alternative pen (I love you, G-2, but I just want to know my options), I ran across the website for Tul pens. Their handwriting analysis toy (I don’t know what else to call it) was actually pretty imaginative and kept me on the site, made me send my wife to the site, and made me want to post it here. For a pen that’s inexpensive and sold only at OfficeMax, I thought it was surprisingly creative, and I might just check out their pens now. The lesson is that sometimes your “hook” for viewers can be engaging and only tangentially related to your core business to pique somebody’s interest. Of course, this also goes horribly wrong or just lame on a lot of well-known corporate websites with bizarre or completely random advertising, but for a relatively unknown or small company it can be very effective and you’re not risking very much if it does go wrong. I didn’t know who Tul was before, and if their website was just “good” then I would quickly forget who they were. If I didn’t like the handwriting analysis, then I might go somewhere else or I might skip to the catalog. Either way, the only way to keep my attention was to risk it on a Flash toy.

[via tul.com]

I was re-building the templates for a quick international website last week and wanted to swap the logos for the different languages. There are, of course, a plethora of manual ways to do this, but I cater to the lazy webmaster. I mean, isn’t laziness at least partially the point of using a CMS (and paying somebody an hourly rate to tweak the crap out of your templates)? This should have been easier (like five minutes), but either my searching skills suck or the final hack I did was not well-documented (it took fifteen minutes). Either way, I wanted to post instructions for using your Typoscript template to swap images in a TemplaVoila template you’re using (that’s right, you’re combining technologies… how Web 2.0 is that?). So, obviously you need to have a place in your HTML template to map a logo (or other image) to dynamically. I used a div tag. That took 3 seconds, and I’m pretty sure you know how to do that if you’re building a template for TemplaVoila to begin with. Next, I put the following XML into the TemplaVoila Data Structure to create a TypoScriptObject:
<field_logo type="array">
  <tx_templavoila type="array">
    <title>Logo</title>
    <description>map to logo</description>
    <sample_data type="array">
      <numIndex index="0">(logo)</numIndex>
    </sample_data>
    <eType>TypoScriptObject</eType>
    <TypoScriptObjPath>lib.logo</TypoScriptObjPath>
  </tx_templavoila>
</field_logo>
Then, at the beginning of the Template Setup for the website, I just added these two little lines to fill in a default image:
lib.logo = IMAGE
lib.logo.file = fileadmin/template/june_2008/images/logo.jpg
Then, the last (still really easy step) was to add the following line to my language setup in the Template Setup under the non-default languages:
lib.logo.file = fileadmin/template/june_2008/images/logo_es.jpg
You can see this line in context where it will replace the logo image when somebody loads the Spanish language:
#Setting up spanish language:
[globalVar = GP:L=1]
config {
  sys_language_uid = 1
  language = es
}
lib.logo.file = fileadmin/template/june_2008/images/logo_es.jpg

If you want to see this in action, you can just go to FulfillingDestiny.com in English or Spanish (or just go to the page and switch languages when you’re there, obviously).

37signals posted an article that echoes some of my own thoughts from this very blog:

Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

[via Signal vs. Noise]

It looks like the folks at Happy Cog really did a great job with the new WordPress 2.5 design. I’ve just started to play with it, but so far I’m just happy that the templates are in the “design” area where I expect them to be. In my ever-so-humble opinion, I think great design is just putting everything where people expect them to be. I mean, I could probably go into a Windows vs. Apple rant on that, but I won’t (though, seriously, that’s part of what makes Apple awesome). I’m not trying to say it’s that easy to make things intuitive, either. I am just happy that Jeffery Zeldman and Happy Cog manage to make it look that easy, and I can’t wait to dive into this some more.