Megabytes

1) MacWorld - San Francisco, January 14-18, 2008
2) MacCamp - Silver Falls State Park, October 26-28, 2007

I went to MacWorld for the first time last January and raved about my experience. Registration for the 2008 event has just opened. Discounts are available for early registration. You can get in to the exhibit hall for free with this priority code: 08-E-VF01 if you register by October 5, 2007. Use the same code to register for the conference by December 14 for other big savings.

I have attended MacCamp on a regular basis for many years. This weekend-long educational and entertaining conference occurs twice a year, Spring and Fall, and is sponsored by PMUG. Choose from two classes each offered Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning. Classes for this camp include Filemaker Pro 9.0, Numbers ‘08, Intro to iMovie ‘08, Getting the Most From Digital Images, Leopard Mac OSX 10.5, and Dreamweaver Made Easy.

I’ll be teaching the Dreamweaver class. In my class, I’ll lead campers through the Dreamweaver CS3 landscape and we’ll build a simple site using Dreamweaver’s built-in CSS layouts. This is one of the new features in the CS3 version.

Register now for MacCamp to receive a discounted price: $189 for a user group member, $231 for non-user group members. After October 2, prices are $199 and $241.

Your registration fee includes lodging at Silver Falls Conference Center, meals from Friday dinner to Sunday lunch, AND the classes! What a beautiful setting for a weekend of Mac-ing!

Fluidly-designed web pages automatically adjust the page layout and redesitribute the content when a user resizes the browser window. Unfortunately, any inline images are not included in this resizing effort. Wouldn’t it be neat-o if the images reshaped themselves when a user resized the browser window? Of course it would.

That technology is closer than ever. Two visual research scientists, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir have presented their research at the recent SigGraph 2007 Conference held in San Diego this past August.

Check out this YouTube video of their presentation. Will we see this as a new feature in Photoshop CS4? Or better yet, as a Photoshop plug-in!

I did a little digging around in the WordPress DOCS area today. The online help and support for this blogging software is quite extensive. Not only are there DOCS which describe every facet of the app, but there is a discussion forum, too. Sign in and you can post questions to other WP users. Even without signing in, you can search the forum.

So I was digging around, looking for the way to add a graphical calendar to my sidebar. I like the look of a month view, where days that have posts are highlighted and you can view posts of a particular day simply by clicking on a date.

There are many options provided by WordPress for navigating the posts of your blog. The default settings include a search box right at the top of the sidebar, as well as to list Archives by month, and posts by Categories. That’s a lot of navigating.

Still, I added the calendar. And a few days ago, I added the listing of the 7 most recent posts. The sidebar’s getting pretty busy. I think I’ll keep all of these options for now and get some feedback from you.

Which of these options do you use when navigating this blog? What do you use when navigating other blogs? Do you like to read all the posts about astronomy? Perhaps you prefer to read all the posts that occurred during your 3-week vacation. Do you just want to see what I’ve recently written about?

Let me know. Because no matter what method I like, it is what you, my readers like, that is paramount.

I have been using Word Press blogs for a couple of years now. This past year, I began modifying blog skins (themes). Because Word Press blog uses php and a MySQL database, you need a local testing server if you want to make changes and preview them locally.
So, I set about figuring out how to set up a Word Press blog on a local server. I found a great, step-by-step tutorial for just that: Installing Wordpress Locally Using MAMP. This is a 15-minute instruction written by Michael Doig back in December of 2005. Age aside, the instructions are still valid.
I ran into one stumbling block involving the file path that was easily corrected. In short, the steps are:
1) download and install MAMP
A MAMP Pro version is available which allows for easy configuring of an unlimited number of virtual hosts and dynamic DNS access.
2) get host, user and password from MAMP start window (Of course this link won’t work unless you have the server running!)
It’s so simple to install MAMP. You are running the server within minutes of downloading the app.
3) download Word Press and move the files to your htdocs folder
The htdocs folder is in the MAMP folder which is in your Applications folder.
4) edit the config file
Here’s where you edit the name of the blog, the user, password, and host if necessary.
5) change config file name
Mike doesn’t mention this, but it is in the Word Press docs. You’ve got to rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
6) run WP install
This is where I had a problem. The link Mike provided for the install didn’t work for me. I had set the Apache and MySQL ports to their defaults when I installed MAMP for a class I took earlier this year. Mike lists 8888 as the MySQL port and I had 3306. It turned out I didn’t need to include the port as part of the URL. I installed from this URL.
7) generate the password to admin account
An important piece. Word Press generates an unwieldy jumble of letters and numbers as the initial password (which you can change of course.) Copy and paste works best here.
8) login and play
Then - all of a sudden, you’re done!

There are so many chocolate-y good plug-ins for the Firefox browser. I have about a dozen that I use regularly. Let me tell you about a few.

1) Forecastfox
If you work in a windowless office, Forecastfox by Richard Klein and Jon Stritar, could be your window to the world. This plug-in lets you place weather icons in the status bar or the toolbar of Firefox. It’s inconspicuous, doesn’t take up much real estate, easily customizable and performs its service simply displaying understandable weather icons.

Hovering over an icon brings up a detailed and customizable weather report from AccuWeather.com.

2) Colorzilla
Here’s a quick and easy way to get RGB or HEX color codes. Alex Sirota’s Colorzilla plug-in places a small eyedropper icon in your status bar. Shift-escape enables the tool, hover over a color on a web page and color info as well as DIV ID displays below. A contextual menu provides easy copying of color codes as well as access to a color picker and a zoom tool. Nifty!

3) MeasureIt by Kevin A. Freitas
This was one of the first plug-ins I installed. When activated, you can measure in pixels the height and width of any element on a web page. This is useful for the web designer attempting to line up elements on a page or measure a logo or other image.