How-to: Music video style notifications for iTunes

Over the past two years of using Macs I've picked up so many little things that I take for granted and it's only recently since a friend has got a new macbook pro that I've started to remember some of them. Each track I play in iTunes appears at the bottom of the screen in a music video style notification, read on to find out how.

# Permalink Posted on Mon 24th November, 2008 in howto, osx, Growl, iTunes and iScrobbler with 2 comments

Should Arrows be Placed Before Link Text or After?

An interesting article at the Usability Post poses the question "Should Arrows be Placed Before Link Text or After?" I only tend to use arrows with previous / next links where I've always felt that the arrows should point away from the links but there are some interesting views from other people here too...

# Permalink Posted on Thu 30th October, 2008 in web design, usability and lsucs with no comments

Robots - To index or not to index?

I'm having a look around the site at the moment and trying to think what I can do to help search engines spider MilkHub better. After reading about sitemap files I've started creating my sitemap.xml and I'll be fleshing that out a bit over the next week or so and pinging that to the search enginges. What else can I do?

# Permalink Posted on Thu 25th September, 2008 in SEO, Google, sitemap, web design and lsucs with no comments

cURL Error 26: Failed to open/read local data from file/application

Last night I was battling against cURL Error 26: "Failed to open/read local data from file/application" and eventually found a very simple solution...

# Permalink Posted on Tue 26th August, 2008 in php, curl, error, web design, code and lsucs with 5 comments

The Survey 2008

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

# Permalink Posted on Thu 31st July, 2008 in web design with no comments

Tracking visitors with Google Analytics

Sorry to anyone who got a few old posts through from my blog last week. I've been playing with the Google Analytics code a bit and trying out new things, one of which is a way of tracking when people have come to my site after clicking a link in one of my feeds. I found an interesting article about campaign tagging which describes how to add extra query string parameters that Google Analytics will read and use to split up my statistics for me.

If you're adding my feed to an aggregator or a public listing please feel free to add a utm_source to the url so I can tell where people are coming from, as well as which type of feed they're coming from; I will pass through the utm_source to the links in the feed. For example, I've got this in the facebook importer: http://www.milk-hub.net/blog/feed?utm_source=facebook.

Next step is to track when people read the articles.

# Permalink Posted on Mon 9th June, 2008 in lsucs, Google, Analytics and Site Updates with 5 comments

New Growl works with Logitech

Today Growl released version 1.3.0 which has added a work around for Logitech Control Center 2.4. No need to Get your Growl back from Logitech any more!

# Permalink Posted on Mon 9th June, 2008 in osx, Growl, Logitech and lsucs with no comments

How-to: Get a # on MacBook with Kubuntu / KDE 4

I recently decided to give Kubuntu with KDE 4 a try on my MacBook, the installation was painless and aside from a few patchy bits (to be expected from beta software) it's running great. I was trying to fix a few bugs on the website and couldn't figure out how to access the # sign, normally alt+3 in OS X. Thankfully D_Ed came to my rescue...

# Permalink Posted on Thu 29th May, 2008 in macbook, kubuntu, kde4, keyboard layout and lsucs with no comments

Let Google Growl!

I've been using the Google Notifier for quite a while now and it works great except for one small gripe - the notifications don't use Growl. I've now found a plug-in called Google+Growl that adds Growl support. It works along side the Google Notifier and allows you to configure how you want your notifications to display.

# Permalink Posted on Sat 31st May, 2008 in osx, Growl, Google, WaffleSoftware, ColorPicker and lsucs with no comments

SFTP in Mac OS

When Interarchy updated to version 9 and some of the features I relied on stopped working I went in search of a new SFTP client. I've finally got around to writing up my findings. As you can see, the only client that I liked was still Interarchy so I ended up using the old 8.5.4 build. Luckily, Interarchy have since fixed things and I'm now once again happy with the way it works.

# Permalink Posted on Mon 26th May, 2008 in osx, Interarchy, software, SFTP and lsucs with no comments

Browser Navigation

Why don't more websites take advantage of the rel attribute for their relative links? Perhaps because there's not enough browser support? Opera has supported these attributes for as long as I've been using it and I recently found a couple of plug-ins for Firefox that give the same functionality but I cannot seem to find a solution for Safari...

# Permalink Posted on Thu 22nd May, 2008 in Bookmarklets, Navigation, Safari and lsucs with no comments

How-To: Get your Growl back from Logitech

For the past few days, since running some updates on my MacBooks, Growl's not been showing any messages. I've since found out that it was Logitech Control Center blocking the messages. The solution is quite simple, delete /Library/InputManagers/LCC Scroll Enhancer Loader then log out and everything should be fine. Thanks Zamboni.

Note (9 June): Growl 1.3.0 has a work around to combat this problem.

# Permalink Posted on Mon 12th May, 2008 in osx, Growl, Logitech, howto, lsucs and software with no comments

Image Replacement + Google

Dave Shea asked Google the all important question "what does Google think of CSS image replacement, anyway?" to which they answered "Google's okay with it, you won't be penalized for using image replacement properly."

# Permalink Posted on Tue 6th May, 2008 in web design, mezzoblue, image replacement, google and lsucs with no comments

How-To: Make Interarchy 9 more like Interarchy 8

When Nolobe released Interarchy 9 I screamed at the features that had been removed that I used daily without even thinking about it. Luckily 9.0.1 restores most of these features, although you have to get the settings right.

# Permalink Posted on Mon 21st April, 2008 in osx, Interarchy, howto, lsucs and software with no comments

Downtime

Sorry to anyone who tried to access MilkHub over the past few days, we had a power cut whilst I was away last week and it seems to have knocked redtop a little. I've done a backup of the affected disk and redtop seems to be running okay for now. I'll be replacing the disk when I can afford a new one, though hopefully the website will have moved by then.

# Permalink Posted on Sat 19th April, 2008 in redtop and Site Updates with no comments