I’ve played with some similar ideas over the months/years, but could never seem to get anything together. I don’t have time to make a complete WordPress theme these days anyway.

You might need to use FireFox 3.5 or Safari 4 to see it all. I haven’t looked at it in Internet Explorer yet.

Coming from an historic peace church, I’m not much for patriotism and the holidays thereof. But I’ve always liked watching the fireworks, and this afternoon I found myself — quite inspirationally, mind you — whistling Stars & Stripes Forever. Sometimes things just stick with you.

A family member gave us a gift card to Cracker Barrel¹ recently, and it was a fun Fourth-y place to eat brunch, even though it’s somewhat stressful to take a 15-month-old to a sit-down restaurant. Afterwards, I picked up Practices of an Agile Developer and Dreaming in Code at the nearby Books-A-Million², though I am now annoyed to see that it looks like I could have gotten them both for half what I paid, had I purchased them from Amazon’s Used section. I’m glad I got them, though. Hopefully I can find time to get through Practices this weekend.

Jennifer is sitting in her chair next to mine working mapping out our debt snowball³. I’m hoping she finishes soon so we can go crash.

Oh yeah, and I hope to make this blogging thing a regular deal.

My dream consists of having a killer website, informative blog, spectacularly designed, to serve as both an ad for my services and as an interactive resumé.

Sadly, life always gets in the way of having enough time to get everything done, and when I do find the time to design things, I find myself uninspired.

And I also used to get great enjoyment from the blog comments left for me. Funny thing how, when you don’t write anything, you don’t get any feedback.

So.

With family and job now taking up most of my time, I’m going to try to write again. Articles on web and desktop technologies, personal and spiritual thoughts, family anecdotes, and maybe the odd baby picture or two may make appearances.

Enjoy.

MOTHER-IN-LAW: “Daniel, your son is absolutely precious.”

ME: (smirking) “How about that?”

More cool stuff coming soon. Like repairing the layout on non-front pages, IE compatibility, and some small software projects. (Oooh.)

Yes, I know the other tabs don’t work yet.

I might rethink some elements of the design later as well, but it’s done almost completely by simply applying a stylesheet to the K2 scheme.

I also have some Growl styles almost ready to release, and they’ll be available under the Software tab.

Since it’s a known fact that one’s site design can inspire or discourage content creation, this will hopefully inspire me to blog, or at least put some kind of content up here. That only works if one actually likes the design, though, and I’ve been known to quickly grow tired of my own creations.

Time shall tell.

For starters, we need some rating metadata. Stars as used in iTunes would be a pretty straightforward method. Tagging (a la flickr) might not be such a bad idea either, though it’s usually most useful on content for others to find, like public photos. But both of these could put added as panes in the Feed Info panel. Color tagging for individual posts would be a plus, too, a la Mail.

It might then be helpful to adopt the Mail Rules model, so that I can color or otherwise automatically manage posts from my highly rated feeds (Jennifer’s blogs would be colored RED when they arrive, and I might like a sound to play).

I don’t know what Brent has planned for NNW 2.x, but while writing this post, I found these NewsGator forum threads:

• Rating items
• Color labels for folders and feeds

Based on those, it looks like at least ratings will be making it into the next version for sure. Colors might be best served on feeds and cascade to their posts (if we can’t set colors on both feeds and posts).

I’ve googled and googled, but I can’t seem to find anything.

Help!

So, here’s my idea: Someone needs to write a blog editor, similar to MarsEdit or ecto, that supports simple HTML, graphical tables and image insertion.

Let’s see what current OS X frameworks and applications can do in this vein:

• TextEdit can export HTML and has a decent table creation interface, but chokes on saving images into its HTML, opting for a “Web Archive” file instead. These Web Archives aren’t packages as I originally thought; they contain their images inline in the file, relying on a file:///myimage.tiff URL scheme to refer to them.
• Safari now supports the contentEditable property on objects, but requires quite a bit of JavaScript to fill in the cracks make it into anything useful.
• Mail.app somehow exploits Safari’s contentEditable system to create a decent-yet-buggy rich text editing environment. This might be the closest thing to what I’m looking for. I wonder if the framework is documented anywhere, or … heh … how many hacks they had to use besides implementing contentEditable in WebKit?

Maybe a better solution would be to create a WordPress plugin to which one can upload a Web Archive and automatically create a post, saving the embedded images out into a unique directory keyed to the post slug. I thought of saving the images right into the database, but that would lock the user into using the plugin forever. It’s not good practice to store data in a non-standard way.

Since writing the previous paragraphs, I’ve found out about textutil, which you can run web archives through to convert them to plain old HTML and JPGs (if images are in the archive). Why not create an AppleScript Studio app that uses XML-RPC and textutil to simply allow the user to utilize the existing OS X rich text editing environment (like in TextEdit), and upload a post to WP.

Better yet, how about just making rich text editing a feature of the next version of MarsEdit or ecto? Brent? Adriaan? Are you listening? (Remember, I paid for MarsEdit and donated for Kung-Tunes.) Seems like I heard something about that in plans for one or the other of those two.

Update: I haven’t played with ecto in a while, it seems. ecto supports rich text editing, but not with inline images. Gotta have those inline images. No reason not to. TextEdit does it. C’mon.

The Rules (as given to me): “List five songs that you are currently rocking the living heck out of. It doesn’t matter what genre they are from, whether they have words, or even if they’re any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying right now.”

I decided these were to be songs that during the past few days have either gotten stuck in my head, and/or have made me smile when they randomly came up.

1. Seasons of Love - Rent soundtrack
2. Heaven - Salvador
3. If You Just Believe - John Elefante
4. Think Of Me - Phantom of the Opera Soundtrack
5. Blue Danube Waltz - Johann Strauss II

Honorable mention: The Carnival of the Animals: The Aquarium - Camille Saint-Saens

Though it’s not very well represented by my list, I’ve been on somewhat of a classical kick lately. It helps me concentrate.

Update: Okay, I’ve tagged Steve, Sam, and Andy. It’s up to you guys to carry this thing on. DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN!!!

Ahem. Sorry.

So go read Guy’s blog. He’s got a funny monkey picture in today’s post. And I’m all about funny monkey pictures.

Looks like life is going well for him. Me too. But more on that in another post.