SteveCastellano.com

One more housekeeping item: I’m a big fan of Google Reader. I was an early adopter of RSS and I look for feed links on any site that I find myself at regularly. Or rather I used to. Now I have a “Subscribe” bookmarklet in my toolbar. I subscribe to just over 100 feeds, from Google News (Canada) and my daily comics (Toothpaste for Dinner and Achewood among them) to synth geek sites and even RSS feeds for my favourite eBay searches. I also read Toronto Craigslist musical instruments religiously, as regular readers of this site may already suspect, which may seem like a huge waste of time but has netted me a couple of pretty nifty items, including a very reasonably priced Moog Etherwave theremin which I’ll be happy to tell you about sometime soon.

Google recently added this instant sidebar option that allows me to import a list of my favourite reader articles into a WordPress widget, which you should now see in the right margin, under the heading “news i read.” I haven’t been sharing articles religiously, because up until today I didn’t have any reason to believe anyone was following me in Google Reader. But now that the sidebar widget is operational I’m going to be a little more diligent about it, and I will hit the “share” button under any news items I think other folks might be interested in, and they should pop up here (the news items, not the folks). Please feel free to let me know in the comments if you think this is as neat as I do.

i’m saving it all up for the podcast now. this post is just killing space. andrew maxwell is the funniest living irishman next to dylan moran, nevermind leary, word has it he nicked his best stuff from bill hicks, who’s dead now, so who’s to know. what else. getting a gorillapod or two, flip video is cool, and oh yeah, WORDPRESS ROCKS. this blog runs on wordpress, i’ve just upgraded to 2.6, don’t even know what’s been improved, but every release is better. of course there are bugs now and then. some things break. but it’s not like your major commercial software companies, the bug report is public, you get to read the same one the devs read from, they don’t hide it from you and then make you wait on off-shore tech support for two hours before telling you it’s your fault. they take a swing at fixing it. if all the software on my computer ran as well as wordpress did i’d be running the goddamned planet by now. so if you’re not wordpress, or flip video, or andrew maxwell, or the guys who make the gorillapod, suck it.

Edit: Well it turns out the image gallery feature is still broken, so I take most of that back.

I gave a mouse a cookie this weekend. The mouse was a new Motorola KRZR K1m, the cookie was Parallels Desktop for Mac with Windows XP Pro. No one who hacks phones uses a Mac, as near as I can tell.* So if you want to hack your phone, or even use the bundled Motorola Phone Tools software, you need a PC or an Intel-based Mac running Windows under either Boot Camp or Parallels. I did consider both, but I’ve been running Vista on a MacBook at work using Parallels without too many complaints, and I couldn’t spare the drive space for a Boot Camp partition.

When I saw XP running in coherence mode though I was more excited about finishing the WordPress theme that I started a few months ago entitled The Foundation Remains (after the picture that I shot this past summer). Without wanting to start a Mac-PC debate, I’ve never been too crazy about how IE 6 makes my web sites look – mostly because of the way pre-Vista Windows handles text aliasing, i.e. doesn’t alias text. I had also run across some well-documented inconsistencies in how IE 6 deals with CSS, particularly in the way it adds padding to containers so that your pixel widths don’t add up, and how it tends to ignore minimum width and height specifications. But as the majority of visitors to this site are still using IE6, with IE7 (which I haven’t tested yet because I don’t have it at home, and from my limited experience it seems to play a little nicer anyway) just edging out Firefox for second place, I can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist. See? I care, sort of.

Once I no longer had to run from one machine to another to reload the beta site it took me less than a weekend to put the finishing touches on the template. It started out as a full-bleed fluid centre, static sidebar “holy grail” template with a minimum width, but shortly after I discovered that it was indeed the “holy grail” I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth (see above) and set my expectations a little lower. And what I had left was still plenty to do.

This template was coded pretty much from the ground up in Coda, tested in IE6, Safari and Firefox. But really, if you’re currently using either of the first two you should switch to something else. Let me know if you run into usability issues in whatever browser you are using.

*Edit – I just saw a VersionTracker update for BitPim 1.0.2.20071001 for OS X, released the day after I posted that. That means someone must be doing it.