As nice as wordpress is, it can sometimes turn your life into a bit of a nightmare. Case in point the title in my previous post. I was trying to tell WP that I want straight double quotes (ie: “) and it kept insisting on beautifying it and turning it into curly double quotes. These curly quotes have a different meaning in Unix, so if you’re using a “cut-and-paste” unix command in your post title you’re kinda out of luck. There is a process called wptexturize that turns simple everyday quotes/doublequotes into what they call smart quotes. Anyways, to work around this you can use the following tables HTML names instead of the actual character when you’re writing your post:

If you’re a fan of those old 8-bit (amiga/atari) colour cycling animations, you should definitely check out these beauties…..Absolutely superb :-). More info here.
BTW. You can thank Mike Ferrari and Joseph Huckaby for the art and the accompanying code….

 Have a look at these experiments with HTML5 Canvas tag. Simply amazing.

Okay maybe this is a bit dramatic, but I really think the days of flash as a web media presentation platform are numbered. HTML5 is coming on strong, you can already do video streaming using the new canvas tags and now here is Akihabara, a set of libraries, tools and presets to create pixelated indie-style 8/16-bit era games in Javascript that runs in your browser without any Flash plugin, making use of a small small small subset of the HTML5 features, that are actually available on many modern browsers. More info and a half dozen demo games are here. Let the old-skool arcade games begin :-).

Well maybe a bit too simple. I couldn’t decide if this one was totally evil –under a cutesy name and interface– or just simply useful and cool, so I’ll let you guys decide. Hop on over to Texty and give it a whirl.

This new webapp allows you to create Texty’s (which are HTML snippets) through their WYSIWYG editor. The Texty’s get saved on their server and all you have to do to publish the texty on your web page is to include the one line javascript code on your page. Every time you log into their site and change a texty’s content, all pages that contain the javascript code will also automatically update.

Now the immediate problem with this is that if enough people start designing texty powered sites, then the search engines are doomed. You see texty’s one line javascript code actually goes back to their server and crafts a .js file with one document.write() call that includes all the HTML in it. Since search engines are not designed for this, most (if not all) will fail to traverse/index your site.

The neat part of a service like texty is that you can craft your HTML pages the standard way (maybe through a webbased editor like WriteToMyBlog) and add elements to that page that can be updated and changed by others without disturbing the main content of the page. Again keep in mind that the texty elements will most likely not get indexed by search engines.

Well, I found this little Gem a bit late for WWDC. I missed an early thursday session, since I was relying on the hotels wake up call system which — for some reason — did not work that day. Well not anymore, ALARMD comes to rescue. ALARMD is a internet alarm clock that you can run in your favourite web browser. It can wake you gently wake you up using built in alarm sounds or optionally tune into last.fm and wake up to streaming music. Additionally you can change the clocks font size so you don’t have to get out of bed to check your notebook on the other side of the room. Can’t wait for Siggraph ’07, this will definitely be useful then.

iPhone, aka. Apple Inc.’s Achilles Heel. Well, just about everyone was waiting for a SDK for the bloody thing. They wanted to rush to the AT&T store on June 29, buy a iPhone and start developing real software for it. You know, the kind of software that is actually useful. Well Apple’s idea of software development is this:

“You don’t touch our phone, you just use AJAX and HTML and design webpages that can be loaded (using wireless) on the phone”. Now I have no idea how this qualifies as a Application development platform, but according to Apple it does.

If you ever needed HTML/CSS help and had to google it or look it up in some book, you will appreciate this website.