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So after giving a few days to cool down after my first attempt at using e-Textmate for windows I decided I’d try installing it once again and see what happened. The install was nothing to exciting, since I’d already done it once. I tried a different tactic this time, I only installed TortoiseSVN and actually read a bit about how it works. Using TortoiseSVN I was able to grab the ActionScript bundle and get it installed. I have not had a chance to actually test it, but it’s there. So progress.
TextMate for Mac
I did break down and download the trial version of TextMate for the Mac here at work. First thing to note is that it came with the ActionScript bundle when I installed it. Next I started to use it to replace Flash 8 as an ActionScript editor. (I haven’t used Flash CS 3 much yet so I’m hoping that the need to have a separate editor is a thing of the past.) The results so far are promising. I love the column editing, where you can select characters in the column on multiple rows and edit them at once. It’s a very powerful feature. Using the bundles is handy but seems a bit clunky so far, while I love the features I’m not sure I love the way to use them. There area million keyboard shortcuts to various things but I’ve yet to learn any of them.
For the Mac I’d probably stick with TextMate, but I’d need to request that it’s purchased which is always an issue and I’d be curious to test out a new version of BBEdit first. Barebones has always had a killer product and I don’t know if it would be fair to stray without giving them another go.
What’s the fuss?
So why all the nonsense over a text editor? Well It started mostly because of trying to write ActionScript, CSS and HTML. Having a really good editor is key. I tried SEPY and found it way to sluggish to use. TextWrangler was great but kind of limited (Amazingly good for free software though), BBEdit is great also but again limited because we don’t have a current version. Flash and Dreamweaver as editors aren’t bad, but the could be better. Flash Develop for PC is great but kind of buggy at times and well PC only.
So in the end I’m going to give TextMate another go and wish that Adobe would just bring out another version of Homesite.

This site uses MovableType. Before MT, I used a combination of static pages and Blogger.com. I tested a few CMS systems in the development of the site, Drupal, Joomla and several others but decided that MovableType was the best choice. Lately I’ve been reading a bit about Wordpress in various magazines. So I installed it on my laptop and started to play around. The install was so quick and simple I was concerned that I did something wrong, set up wasn’t too bad and the interface is pretty clean. It’s not complicated and runs smooth. I looked into the templates a bit and it looks like it would be very simple to customize a template. Some of the code is a bit buried in various PHP files but for the most part the main template has most of what you need. I’m sure there’s some documentation available that lists other hidden features.
Would I switch?
Good question, there’s a conversion tool built into WP but in general, I can’t say that I would. Maybe if I found some features that I considered to be “Must Haves” I would. In general they both seem pretty similar.
Anything stick out that was not in MovableType?
WordPress does have two types of content items. Pages and Posts. Posts are your typical blog style content, while Pages are just that, they can be used to add static pages to the site. This stands out because it gives the system a bit of a CMS feel to it.
Overall
I would probably try to use WordPress for a new project maybe to see just how it survived in the wild. Right at the moment I don’t have anything that I’d use if for but that doesn’t mean I won’t anytime soon.

In the recent Practical Web Design, I came across a mention of “TextMate” a powerful Text editor that the person was using. I found a version of it for Windows, E-TextMate. Watched the screen cast and was blown away, it was crazy some of the things this thing was doing.
So I went downloaded, installed it, watched as it insisted on installing CYGwin and was on my way to checking it out. The first thing I did was look to see if there was an Actionscript Bundle for it, there was but it wasn’t pre-installed. So I went to look into getting it to install and found they used a technology called “Subversion” to handle installing and updating of Bundles. I started looking into that and found a binary for Windows installed it and then spent several hours toying with trying to get this bundle to install. Several hours later, I un-installed “E” as it’s called, “Subversion” and well I’m still stuck with “cygwin” since it doesn’t seem to come with an uninstaller or get added to Add Remove Programs.
The kicker is that I never even got to test out “E-TextMate”. I was so pissed at the nonsense you had to go through to try to get a text editor working that I didn’t care about the cool features. Now I’m sure that most of the problems here were just the fact that I didn’t know how to use the technology. I’m sure it’s powerful and great once you get it working but you know. It’s a text editor. How freaking complicated do you need it to be. Install, maybe download a plug-in and be off.
I could blame the documentation, maybe the fact it’s a port of a OSX program to Windows, or the fact that “Subversion” is a command line tool. In general I’ll just post that I’m not technical enough to install and get a text editor working.
Very cool app, just not for mortals apparently.

Want to tell the world what you’re listening to, what music you like and be able to “network” based on what you listen to? Last.Fm looks like it might be the way to do just that. Tagged as “The Social Music Revolution” the site features may of the ideas you see on most social networking sites, profiles, friends, groups, blogs and “kEwL kIdS”.
First I love the idea, well parts of it. I like being able to finally have a way to list what I’m listening to on my site. This is available through a few different ways on the Last.fm site. All of which provides a way for you to import you latest tracks into your site. I had previously built an Applescript for iTunes to handle the posting of what I’m listening to for display on my site. This is a bit more sophisticated and available to other machines that I use, such as my PC at home.
While I highly doubt I’ll ever use the networking aspect of this much, it’s nice to see how many people out there have similar musical interests. It would be great to see Artists get involved in this project. Having a way to connect with the artist might be interesting. Though this is done quite a bit with Myspace and many forums hosted on Bands sites. This usually leads to a lot of the “evils of the internet” which to me just means a bunch of morons posting “me too” responses, flaming and spamming.
How It Works
Sign up, download the application, run the application while listening to your favorite music player (definitely supports Windows Media Player and iTunes). That’s pretty much all that’s too it.
The application posts the Arist, Album Title and Track Title to the site where it stores the info for you. Also the application will bring up a Artist Bio, TAGS associated with the artist and Similar Artists. There’s also ways to make radio stations based on recommendations, see friends, groups and so on. I’m not going to go too far with this because I’ve just started using the application so I don’t know many of the features.
So far I see only a few things about it that I really don’t like. First one of the biggest problems that plagues the internet. kEwL kId$. You know the type. Basically they’ve soiled Last.fm with their upper/lower case crap spellings for tracks. Apparently Last.fm stores only the first person who “scrobbles” a song. (Scrobbling is what they call the act of listing and storing your song info.) This leads to morons and other people who are just lazy about track listings cluttering up the system. There’s a pretty long thread about this in their support area, theories range from people without lives who like to grief the world with their dumbness, to people doing this purposefully to hassle people with “leaked” copies of music.
Overall I think I’ll run this for a while to see how well it goes with incorporating my listings into my site. They have two main ways of accomplishing this. Styling the list which is converted to an image which is stored on their site, or a Text, RSS, XML file that you can use. I’ll have to work on writting a script to process the XML. I need to learn this anyway so this is at least a fun project. And fun projects are the most likely to keep my attention long enough to actually get anything accomplished.
Later…

Google refuses to post text of Belgian ruling – Technology – International Herald Tribune
The article here isn’t really the point of this post. Actually the post is about the technique the site uses to display the article text. Depending on your resolution and the size the of your browser window, you’ll see 2-3 columns of text.
At first when I saw the site I though…”Using more then one column to display the text of an article is big web blunder and very poor usability, because your making a user scroll down the page then back up the page to read the content.” And honestly in most circumstances this would be true.
Here’s the but…While I still think more then one column of text is a bad idea (I’ll say why later) this site handles the in a rather clever way. if you take a second to look at this page, you’ll notice a few things if you begin to adjust the size of your browser window. Did you see that? No? Try again, wait for it. Hint, look at the last bit of text in the article. Move the window up to where there’s three columns, now move it a bit further, scroll down a bit and notice that the end of the article is disappearing. Did you see that? There’s a next button, which leads you to the rest of the article. Try resizing again until you see it.
I’m very impressed with this sites technique. I can’t wait until I have more time to investigate what they are doing. I’m betting it’s a lot of Javascript and CSS.
Oh back to the more then one column issue. While I still stand by the fact that in most circumstances having an article or long piece of text spanning several columns on the web is bad. Poor usability and poor for accessibility. In this case the developers have solved this problem, if you look at the source you’ll see that the full article is in one piece not spanning table cells. Also they’ve gone a step further, in the Masthead and left column they’ve included a “change format” link under “Article Tools” which changes the article to a standard 1 column layout.
Very nice technique. On thing to note, without Javascript enabled the article does not display. A serious issue for any browser that doesn’t support javascript. I wonder what they’ve done to deal with that issue. If only I had more time to investigate.

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