University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications

All the content from the Spring 2008 issue of communigator is now online. I wanted to do a more-extensive redesign of the site this time, but ended up in a time crunch on some early content so all the design changes were tweaks. They’re good tweaks, I believe.

Some articles received some special display effects courtesy of jQuery and some code examples provided by Dave Stanton.

• Unmasking Gonzo uses an “accordion” effect to display sidebar content and larger images are popped up using ThickBox.
• Alumni notes uses jTabber to provide a tabbed interface for its content.

The redesign is started already and will hopefully be in place next issue.

I did. So should you.

Sort of, it’s offset by two weeks (April 17 - July 17). According to Wordpress.com’s Blog Stats, the most viewed posts in that time frame were:

• Date sorting by filename in PHP
• Dreamweaver tip: Import and Export site definitions
• New Mac essentials
• Hooking up to the UF Campus Map
• College Facebook page launched

Yes, I still need to post here more often.

I gave a talk on Twitter Monday to Gary’s class, Online Social Networks and Social Media. I did not think I had my good game on.

Here are some links:

• Summize is now search.twitter.com.
• Twitter Fan Wiki
• twittervision
• twhirl, TweetDeck and Digsby
• Twitxr and TwitPic
• Twitter Facebook app

Stuff I somehow neglected:

• Twitterholic
• Political users: Barack Obama and Rick Bryant (local)

I really want to post here (and on the other blog) more frequently, but I just can’t seem to find the time or be in the right mindset to do so lately. So I thought I’d do one of these easy-peasy kind of posts to try to break out of the rut a little.

So, according to Google Analytics, the top five popular posts here for the first three months of 2008 are:

• Date sorting by filename in PHP
• New Mac essentials
• Dreamweaver tip: Import and Export site definitions
• Hooking up to the UF Campus Map
• My essential Firefox extensions - which I ought to revise one of these days.

I updated the WordPress instance that powers this blog yesterday to version 2.5 and cleaned up a little behind the process this morning (something had broken on the sidebar and had to be removed for now). I performed the upgrade using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, which was a lot easier than the old-fashioned way.

The admin UI is very different and will probably take some getting used to (probably moreso because I don’t do nearly enough blogging).

Except for two long list items, all the content from the Fall 2007 issue of communigator is now online. There is also still a little template clean-up for the issues’ tables of contents and the archive.

The addition of the hak_tinymce article editor plugin to the magazine’s Textpattern instance was a big help.

Inspired by CLAS (and not wanting to be too much of a laggard), I created a page for the College on Facebook.

The initial goal is to get news and events posted there.  Where else we go we’ll just have to see when we get there.

I’m heading out shortly to begin my journey to this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX tomorrow through Tuesday (flying back Wednesday). One way to describe it is to say that it’s a giant, five-day-long group hug for the builders of the web.

You can follow me around on

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Sched
• Upcoming

I thought I’ve done this post before, but couldn’t find it. Dave just got a MacBook Air so I thought I’d post a list of my essential things I download and install on any new Mac.

• TextWrangler - My free text editor of choice.
• Caffeine - one-click sleep preventer.
• SlimBatteryMonitor - Smaller and better than the built-in menu battery gauge.
• MenuMeters - ever-present performance gauges.
• MenuCalendarClock - I don’t even use all the free features.
• Fetch - ftp client, commercial but with a free education license. Though I frequently find myself using the ftp that’s built into TextWrangler.
• Flip4Mac - Windows Media components for QuickTime.
• Microsoft Remote Desktop Client because we have Windows machines under our desks at work.
• The Unarchiver - better than the built-in archive opener or unStuffIt.

Firefox is, of course, first and all of the above are downloaded with it, but that almost goes without saying. I’ve blogged before about essential extensions, but I see that needs a little revision. I use Firefox rather than Safari as my primary browser because I sync my bookmarks between too platforms and I get the same user experience on both platforms.