AaronBaecker.com

Refreshing Glasses of Water on a Hot Summer Day in Bermuda

The few of you who have followed this blog with any regularity know that it goes through periods of activity followed by long stretches of inactivity.  You may consider this a period (albeit brief, so far) of activity.

The updated design of AaronBaecker.com has been in the works since summer of 2010.  On the surface, it’s a re-imagining of the site’s look-and-feel.  Under the covers, it takes advantage of some of WordPress 3′s new functionality, as well as implements the site in HTML5.  There’s not really any CSS3 gimmickry here, yet, but it’s on my radar.

HTML5 won’t be a big deal to those of you who don’t know much of anything about the way web sites are created, but it’s an intriguing bit of data to those who may dabble in the web space.  This isn’t just HTML5 in terms of those tags that will be recognized by all browsers – it’s HTML5 through-and-through with some bits of magic applied to make it work in legacy browsers (yes, even IE 6 delivers a fair representation of the site, I think).  You’ll notice the site doesn’t actually validate to HTML5, but I’ll blame that on a combination of WordPress auto-generated markup and embeds.  I think that realistically accounts for all of the validation errors.

I’ll take you on a brief tour of the new site:

Web Fonts: I decided to use web fonts on the site, primarily just to try out some “hot, new technology”, but also because my lack of design skill means that any added bit of visual interest can’t hurt, right?  You’ll see three web fonts included as stylesheets, if you care to browse the source.  The fonts I chose are from Google’s Web Fonts, here: http://www.google.com/webfonts

Header Background: The header background image at the time of this writing was taken by me during afternoon tea at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess in Hamilton, Bermuda.  Try the rum Bloody Mary, it’s awesome.

Advertising: I’m sticking with Google AdWords, but created two new ad sizes and themed them to match the site’s color palette.  That was quick and easy to accomplish.

WordPress 3: I’ve been very happy with the ease of administration in WordPress 3 – particularly as someone who doesn’t post all that frequently.  The biggest upgrade, by far, has been the automated upgrade process that makes patching WordPress simple.  Version 2 of WordPress was a pain to upgrade and led to countless sites getting hacked because they were out-of-date on patches.   Now, if your site is out-of-date, you have no one to blame but yourself.  Log in and click the upgrade button once in a while!

I have an overall love/hate relationship with WordPress.  As a publisher, the tool is simple and straightforward to use.  As a developer, I tend to think it’s poorly documented and more complex than it needs to be – particularly the whole “loop” concept and the sheer volume of functions in the API.  I work with a lot of Web Content Management systems and feel like some of the enterprise systems that are extremely feature-rich are easier to develop with than WordPress.  Drupal is also easier, if you’re looking for another open source alternative.

Development Tools: I use Coda & TextMate for Mac, FogBugz for Issue Tracking, Kiln for Source Control.  The latter two are definitely overkill, but I use them for other projects so I might as well keep things consistent!

It has probably been 4 years, or so, since the last visual update to my site and I think it’s long past due.  I hope you find the new site more appealing, as I do!

Field Notes + HTML5 For Web Designers

I have had an addiction to Field Notes – the awesome pocket-sized notebooks – for about a year now.  Couple that with Jeremy Keith’s “HTML5 For Web Designers,” which is available from A Book Apart, and you have a lovely composition.  All of this is to say that with the advent of WordPress 3, it’s time for a refresh of my WordPress theme (because it’s awful more than anything else).  So I’ll be putting these items to good use over the coming weeks.

This'll make your heart skip a beat!

Ever since I recently upgraded to OS X 10.6.4, I have had problems with the Keychain giving me the error “Access to this item is restricted.” when trying to access passwords stored in various keychains.  I first had this problem after the hard drive in one of my systems crashed and my data had to be restored from backup.  It appeared at that time that the permissions and probably something much deeper on Keychain Access application files were so screwed up as to render Keychain Access’ permission to read items out of a keychain worthless.  I finally fixed that problem by dipping into the original OS X install media to extract the original Keychain Access application files.

This time around, it appears as though the Keychain Access application has again been modified – leaving me with a set of next-to-useless keychains.  You can imagine the drama that played out on my end when I was trying to figure out how I was going to recover all of the passwords that I had so responsibly and securely stored.  I ran Disk Utility, which found and repaired some permissions issues on a few of the Keychain Access files, but that didn’t fix the problem.  So what I finally resorted to – again – was opening a backup and restoring a pre-10.6.4 copy of Keychain Access back to my hard drive (in a different location on disk).  This resolution was successful and allowed me to retrieve all of my keychain items.

Keychain Access Looks to be Updated in 10.6.4

I now need to probably build brand new keychains from them that I can open in the most-recent version of Keychain Access.   I’m also ready to ditch Keychains altogether for everything except the login keychain.  When Apple provides a utility that is supposed to securely store items, it shouldn’t leave me potentially high-and-dry twice in the span of less than a year with the prospect of not being able to recover any of my secure items.

The RSS feed is undoubtedly one of the best innovations in the relatively short history of the web. By boiling down all or part of a site’s content into a simple, portable format that readers can subscribe to, a site’s updates come to the reader, rather than the reader having to make a consistent stream of visits to keep up with the site.

Throughout the past few years, I have used or tried out Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, NetVibes, NewsHutch (defunct), and FeedLounge (defunct) before finally settling on Google Reader as my feed reader of choice. Google’s product started off as an awful mess that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, but has progressed into probably the best web-based feed reader available. I say that because of it’s easy-to-use interface, Firefox integration, and the integration with the Google suite of products that make it easy to access.

My own feed reading activities have progressed to the point where I’m somewhat of a feed junkie – although probably nowhere near the level of the truly tech-obsessed. In a typical week, I cover a few thousand entries across my feed subscriptions. A fairly low percentage are actually interesting to me (as you can see, I’ve only read about 600 entries in a month).

Over the past few months, I’ve become a disciple of the “read feeds in batches” school of thought. Feed reading can waste a lot of productive time if it’s done frequently, but if I can wake up early on the weekend and plow through a thousand feeds while I drink coffee, I think that’s a productive use of my time. Granted, some items are fairly old (in web time) by then, but there are few things in feeds that need to be known or acted upon the same day.

If you’re a Google Reader user, check out the “Trends” link in the left sidebar. The statistics are interesting, and in the case of the “Inactive” Subscriptions trends tab, useful. I monitor this tab to see when it’s time to unsubscribe from a feed because it’s no longer producing any useful updates within a 3- to 6-month timeframe. You can also use the “% Read” statistic to see if there are feeds that are no longer of interest and just eat up time. Anything below 10-33% is probably not worth continuing to read – depending on the number of site updates.

I hope to see a few more of you subscribing to my feeds!

It was a very slow news week this week – at least as far as anything I found interesting. So here you have my “link of the week”:

Zeldman on the Vanishing Personal Site

Bloggers are now outsourcing. Photos go to Flickr, short bits to Twitter, links to Del.icio.us or other services, and it affects how centralized our experience is for our readers. I’m a fan of the all-in-one site, but I don’t post a lot of non-text content at this point, so we’ll see if I can put up with the “pain” of developing my own services when I get to that point!

The Last Pinball Machine Factory

I couldn’t tell you the last time I played pinball – not because I don’t enjoy it, but because I don’t see it anywhere (as the article states). I’m sure this is a fun place to work, however!

Haggling Tips from a Pro

Good negotiating skills are critical in business. Start getting your feet wet in retail situations.

Related Article from NY Times

Farm Economy Going the Way of Housing?

Rising land and commodities prices are prompting many farmers to over-extend themselves. We’ve seen how well that worked out with home buyers in (previously) hot markets. How will it play out in the farming industry?

San Francisco Not So Ideal for Tech Start-Ups

I’ve often wondered how being in the incredibly-expensive San Francisco metroplex was beneficial to a tech start-up. High initial costs are not known to be a good thing for any under-capitalized business. As David Heinemeier Hansson explains, it probably isn’t beneficial if you’re looking to build a lasting business with real value.

Mark Cuban on CEO Pay

I can’t say that there are any real surprises here. Basically, the structure of CEO equity packages tend to put them at odds with long-term investors because they only need a (relatively) short-term jump in the stock price to be set for life.

Veerle on Adobe Kuler’s New Feature

Adobe Kuler – a web-based color palette tool – introduces the ability to upload a picture and have a color palette extracted from it. Very helpful for designers of all colors ;-)

Tips for Locking Down Your Mac

It’s fun for us Mac users to laugh at lowly Windows users (particularly those stuck with Vista), but we still need to remain vigilant.

Weak Rivets May Have Sped Titanic’s Sinking

Apparently, quality control in iron rivets wasn’t what it used to be.

A few of my favorite items from the past week:

Fire and Motion

Forcing your enemy or competitors to adapt to you is one key to winning.  From Inc.com via Joel on Software.

Ball Skills

A demonstration by Tim Nolan, a professional juggler and basketball entertainer.

Solving the Enigma

The fascinating history of cracking the German encryption mechanism.

Webby Award Nominees

See who’s better than you on the web ;-)

Wow, two days in a row with a post. This may be a new record!

Anyway, I added pretty much the full range of Google products to the site tonight:

• Google Analytics (GA) – I have used this product on other sites and some of my clients actually use GA. It’s a nifty tool and quick to implement. I just slapped the appropriate JavaScript in my theme’s footer file.
• Google AdSense – Even mentioning this product is probably against their Terms of Serivce, but I’ll do it anyway. Things got off to a hairy start because I couldn’t log into my account (for whatever reason), but a quick email to Google resolved the problem. I set up ad units to match my site’s theme (using OS X’s handy “Digital Color Meter.app” to quickly grab the colors off of my screen, rather than have to look them up in my stylesheet).
• Google Webmaster Tools – This is a very handy web application to get information about your site from the Google search engine, as well as to submit a site map to aid Google in indexing your site. Submitting the RSS feed is about the easiest way to handle a blog’s site map.

The overall process took about an hour, even accounting for some technical difficulties. Not bad at all!

I finally got around to putting my new WordPress theme into action today.  No, it shouldn’t have taken 5 months to do it, but that’s about the speed I operate at when it comes to my blog.  Those (few) of you that have followed my site over the years would most-assuredly agree.

For those of you that are interested in WordPress, here’s a short synopsis of the steps I took in this process:

• Downloaded WordPress 2.5.  It was time to upgrade and WordPress 2.5 is a fantastic blogging tool.
• Purchased Coda from Panic.  I had taken advantage of the 15-day trial version of the software when I last updated the blog, and it made development a breeze (if nothing else, than for the embedded Transmit engine!).  If you’re a Mac-based web developer, there’s almost no way you should be without either Coda or TextMate.
• Mocked up a site page in XHTML and CSS until I got about 90% of the look-and-feel the way I wanted it.  Being totally unfamiliar with WordPress, I was prepared to crash and burn once I actually tried to turn the design into a theme.
• I copied the Kubrick default theme files into a new theme directory and started dissecting each file to adjust the mark-up to match my mocked-up page.  I overwrote the style.css file with my custom CSS.
• After about 2-3 hours of playing around with various elements of the site, I’m satisfied that I’ve covered enough to let the site run for a few days untouched now.  Once I get more content and comments on the site, there will undoubtedly be more changes to make.