If you’re like me you want your files to be mobile, but find USB flash drives a less-than-ideal solution. USB flash drives get lost and they don’t connect well into mobile devices, like my iPhone. Emailing a file is okay, but it’s annoying, too. What if you want to email your friends a file that exceeds the file-size limitations of your email provider. What if you want to make the file available to many people, some of whose email addresses you may not know, like your Twitter or Facebook friends? Dropbox is the ultimate solution!

With Dropbox you simply create a free account (click here to sign up and you and I will both get 250MB of free space!) and that’s it! You can upload files directly from the website, put them in your public folder, and copy the direct link to the files to share with your friends. Then, when you’re at the library, you can return to the website on their public computer to access you’re file.

Dropbox - folder options

dropbox · files · free · storage · tip · tool · web

For a couple years I’ve had a photography site at photography.brentdanley.com that few people visited. I built it as a project to learn the Flickr API and the JavaScript framework Prototype. I’ve been wanting to incorporate it into my main site for a while, and now it’s done.

Click on the Photography link to check it out.

The new Photography page at BrentDanley.com

css · flickr · jquery · photography · php · phpFlickr · webdev · wordpress

Google, meet Bing. Google must have been impressed by Bing’s image-rich search page, as indicated by today’s imitation. Many of their users are not.

Google recently rolled out a feature of it’s primary product, Google.com, that allows users to display a picture as the background.

Freeze frame!
The Official Google Blog, June 2, 2010

The art of a homepage
The Official Google Blog, June 9, 2010

I like the dominating whitespace of Google.com. It has a utilitarian simplicity. However, I also love seeing my favorite lighthouse every time I actually navigate to the Google site to do a search.

Google.com background image

Tomorrow the default background will go back to the white we all know and many love.

What do you think of this new feature? Will you use one of your own pictures or one of the many gorgeous images available in Google’s gallery? Let me know in the comments.

design · google · photography

Yesterday I read an interesting article in .net magazine of Dries Buytaert, the founder of popular open source web content management system (CMS) Drupal. In the interview Dries mentioned a new offering from Drupal, Drupal Gardens. Drupal Gardens is a hosted Drupal solution, much like WordPress’s WordPress.com. It allows people who may not know Drupal or who need a quick site to build on on a powerful system with little cost or experience.

Brent's Drupal Gardens site

drupal · drupal gardens · webdev

I changed my Twitter background. It’s a photo I took of the Saco Heath Preserve in the summer of 2007.

The Twitter background of @brentdanley

I tried many times to get a screenshot without any protected tweets. When I saw this I grabbed it quickly.

I use dimensions of 1600 pixels wide and a sidebar of 250 pixels wide. I then fade the right and bottom of the picture to a solid color and set the background to that color, for those people with large and wide-screen monitors.

background · gimp · socialmedia · twitter

The Mind of a Web Developer: An Illustrated Diagram
Matt, Mingle2, June 13, 2007

The Mind of a Web Developer

humor · programming · web development

Kirsten left me a voicemail at my Google Voice account. They got the transcription wrong.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Hi Larry and just testing your new ways. I love you bye.

google voice · transcribe · voicemail

While checking out Google Trends today I learned that Tiger Woods may have farted, Screech isn’t in People Magazine’s cover photo, Bill Clinton is in North Korea negotiating the release of two American journalists, and Ashton Kutcher posted to twitpic a photo of Demi Moore’s butt.

Google Trends: "tiger woods farts" is on fire

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blog · google trends · keywords · popular · statistics · topic

I haven’t been satisfied with The Rhetoric’s theme for a long time and have been intending to design/develop my own from scratch. In the past I’ve always selected a well-designed theme and modifying it to meet my needs.

To prepare myself for this adventure I read the WordPress Codex sections about theme development. I also read the applicable chapters of WordPress 2.7 Complete: Create Your Own Complete Blog or Website from Scratch with WordPress by April Hodge Silver and Hasin Hayder.

Yesterday I spent a long time in Photoshop doing design mock-up. The early stages were frustrating and a bit humorous as the design shifted wildly and often in not-so-good directions. I was only vaguely sure of what I wanted; I know I want a fairly simple and clean design that fits my personality.

Design mockup - The Rhetoric

This afternoon I readied a local sandbox for theme/plugin development: I created a MySQL database with a copy of data from this blog for testing, installed and configured WordPress, and created a folder to hold the files for the new theme. A development sandbox allows me to play around with the new design without confusing and annoying the visitors of the live blog.

When the new theme is done I’m going to create several custom plugins. That should be fun, too.

Then I’ll update my resume.

codex · custom · mysql · php · plugin · theme · wordpress

Sometimes 140 characters just isn’t enough room to express our thoughts, activities, quotations, recipes, tutorials, diatribes, announcements, affections, tips and lessons. Our most valiant attempts at compendium often extend beyond the limitations imposed by Twitter. The solution is quite simple: all a tweeter has to do is include a URL to point to a blog post, photo or video.

But, what if the URL is too long?

This URL is 176 characters: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416594787/ref=s9_intb_gw_tr02?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1Q4Z3EN485H4KY6HXSVS&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

URL shortening services have sprung up to satisfy the burgeoning need for shorter links. They accomplish this by storing lengthy URLs in a database table with a corresponding alias. When a user points to the shortened URL the longer link is fetched from the database and the user is automatically redirected.

While perusing tweets I noticed Justin Russell had posted a link using a short domain that looked close to his own name, http://jusr.us/. Upon inquiry he pointed me to an open source PHP URL shortener called Phurl.

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.htaccess · php · phurl · redirect · twitter · url