jaacob.com

Upgraded to the new Wordpress 2.1, simple as always. The admin’s a bit cleaner (although I’m still not a fan of the blue) and things appear to be organized a little better. Seeing the autosave down at the bottom of my post window is a nice touch. Font sizes appear to be boosted up a bit — a bit easier to read. The new Blogroll feature seems to be marked improvement over the old Links bit, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. I’m currently only running a couple of plugins (Akismet, Feedburner & Markdown), all of which are playing along. (If anybody knows of a way to auto-translate old posts from Markdown to Textile…)

Also had to splurge for the new version of Mint — wow. Great update to the interface, although it feels a bit … pokey. (Most likely it’s just my machine, Firefox has been running slower and slower each day.) The new Bird Feeder Pepper looks incredible, but the setup is a bit of a bitch — I’m still not sure if I have it installed properly. 99% of what Shaun Inman puts out has an unbelievable amount of polish on it, but I can’t help feeling when I read through his documentation that there’s a bit of the curse of knowledge going on there. Definitely worth the $19, and I love the new look of Junior Mint. I’m sure there will be a flurry of small fixes and updates over the next month or so, as the new forums are hoppin’. As a sidenote, the new haveamint.com looks great, with the integrated account management, forums and Peppermill. Hopefully we’ll start seeing some cool new Peppers!

I recently picked up an iPod shuffle for the sole purpose of using it while I exercised. I’ve never been the type to walk the streets with the world shut out, most because I found it too cumbersome to deal with my iPod Photo; the added weight, the cords, do I keep it in its sleeve or risk a scratch, etc. (I baby my toys.)

The shuffle has transformed me into a walking Apple commercial though, complete with white cords. Clips inside my jacket, comes with slightly shorter headphone cables (thankfully), I push one button and away I go with a soundtrack to replace the consistent asking for change that is the norm on Portland streets.

I wasn’t sure how I’d take to the lack of a screen — I’d say it’s a mixed bag. I only put full albums selected by hand on the thing; I’ve found I try and memorize the order of the albums so I can push “forward” 15 times to get to the next one if needed. iTunes gives you a neat “AutoFill” feature that erases what’s on there and fills it up with a grabbag from your library — you can even tell it to give more weight to songs you rate higher. Because Britt’s got some crap country songs in the library, I’m too scared to use it though. The last thing I want is to be walking downtown to Heads Carolina, Tails California.

I thought having more opportunities to listen would give me a chance to catch up on all the podcasts I’m subscribed to, but this is one area where the lack of a screen really nixed that. You can’t just throw on a few episodes of whatever and then decide what you’ll listen to, because each episode has the same intro music that lasts upwards of 30 seconds, then intro talk where they (hopefully, finally) announce what that episode is about. By the time I figure out which one I want to listen to, I’m already at my destination.

One of the best productivity boosts I’ve gotten from it is throwing a long pink noise mp3 on there and listening to that while reading/writing in a public space. Working on the computer I use the excellent app Noise from Blackhole Media — no need for the shuffle. (Turn it down pretty low and start working, you’ll be surprised how well it works!)

I can’t say it any better than the Shopify guys did on their blog so:

Running an online store is a dream, right? You receive an order in Shopify, package up your product into a box or mailer, use some tools provided by the shipping company to create a shipping label and stick it on the box, and then wait around for the mail guy to come and pick up your packages, etc, etc. What happens when you start getting 30-40 or more orders per day? You either have to do all of this busy work yourself or you hire people to do it for you. Not only this, but you need to actually store your products somewhere and provide a place for your employees to work and package your products.

What if there was another way? What if you didn’t even need an office or employees to do all of this work for you? If you fulfill your orders with Shipwire you don’t need an office or employees to spend 8 hours per day packing items. Shipwire will do the most labour intensive part of your job, as well as store your inventory for you. All this, and at very reasonable rates.

With Shopify’s new Shipwire support you get integration with Shipwire’s order fulfillment, and real-time inventory services. Now all you have to do to ship your order is click a single button in the Shopify admin interface. Now that sounds like a dream to me.

A dream indeed. Great job Shopify!

Every time it snows here in Portland, I’m amazed at the lack of capability the city has dealing with the environmental change. Nobody can drive in it (although we all seem to manage out at Mt. Hood just fine), nearly all businesses shut down and the highways turn to parking lots with only a few inches on the ground. Down in Texas, you expect that sort of reaction since it’s, you know, Texas — but I think they’ve got nearly the same amount of salt & sand trucks down there as they do here.

Since “every time it snows” is really “maybe once a year”, it makes logical sense that the city doesn’t have a ton of infrastructure to deal with it — it sure was a shock the first time around though.

I’ve got to walk downtown this afternoon so hopefully it’ll stay light and fluffy, avoiding turning to rain like currently predicted. I’ve got Benoît Pioulard’s Précis currently playing; with the view, it’s a great atmosphere to get some work done.

Do you look back fondly on a time when the majority of email clients didn’t support CSS? Do you long for table-based layouts to be the only legitimate method you can ensure your message appears properly in everybody’s browser?

Have no fear. Microsoft, with their upcoming release of Outlook 2007, has transformed the email client from quirky but manageable with the IE6 rendering engine, to a giant thorn in my side, since 2007 will now use the Microsoft Word 2007 rendering engine.

Just a few of the luxuries we’ve been enjoying that will fast be methods of the past, seeing as Outlook has an estimated 70–80% of the corporate email market:

• no CSS background images
• no CSS positioning (this is iffy enough that I hardly used it anyways)
• incredibly poor support for margin & padding
• wonky support for nested div’s and things as simple as background colors set via CSS
• no animated GIFs

Apparently this is all being done under the ruse of security — even though IE7 is supposed to be the most secure version ever?

Check out the full list of what Outlook/Word 2007 supports straight from the horse’s mouth.

Thanks to SitePoint and David Greiner at Campaign Monitor for the disappointment and ruining my weekend. :)

It’s time for an overhaul around here; completely new visuals, better navigation, and a rethink on what type(s) of content I’m going to put up here. The 40+ drafts I’ve got saved in Wordpress are deleted, it’s time to start fresh.

For the time being (mostly because I can’t stand this look any longer), I’m switching over to Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme while I develop version two of this site.

If you’ve stuck around this long through the silence, I implore you to stay around a little while longer!