Tag: site

SmartyPants 1.2.2

I know I’m half a month late in noting this, but Gruber confesses to why such a quick update to the 1.2.1 release of SmartyPants was necessary:

See, back in 1998 I became the owner of a South American woolly monkey, whom I named Paco, with the intention of training him to assist in my freelance graphic design work. Everyone told me this was a terrible idea, that it would not work, that at the very least I would need a chimpanzee or orangutan, that a mere monkey would never be able to do graphic design.
I was unswayed. Do you know how much food chimpanzees and orangutans eat? And for chrissakes, an orangutan can beat you up–I’ve seen those Clint Eastwood movies, those [BLEEP]ers can pack a punch. I do not need to be coldcocked by my lower-primate assistant. What I wanted was a monkey, a loyal friend who, when otherwise unoccupied, could sit on my shoulder and pick crumbs out of my hair.

Mediated persona

Gibson ruminates on how everyone now can have their own mediated persona, thanks to the meme of the weblog.

Font fix

Thanks to Mark Newhouse’s article on Unix fonts, I was inspired to revisit the fonts called for in the site’s CSS style sheet. Now, OS X users should be greeted by Lucida Grande at 11 px for for the main text font. All others will see Verdana, Geneva, Lucida, Helvetica, or Arial, in that order. Lucida is really there for any Unix readers that may happen by (say hello in the comments!). If you’re a Windoze user, and all you’re getting is Arial, then reinstall IE to see about getting Verdana loaded; it’s a much, much, much better screen font than Arial, and I’m not just saying that because my site looks better in it. Others will as well.

Eric/raoli

Fellow ATPM staffer Eric Blair is blogging at raoli.com. The jury is still out on what “raoli” means. 🙂

Froogle

Froogle, currently in beta, is a Google project for product price comparison.

RSS feed

Thanks to the nagging hints of some people, I have modified the RSS doc to show the full text of each post, rather than just a line or two. Props to Lee for the quick and easy tag fix.

Raena’s blog

Raena and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff, but she’s a fellow Mac-head and ATPM staffer, so she can’t be all bad, can she? 😉
Anyway, she’s been blogging a while…

retrophisch.com v2.0

So I think enough changes have been made to the site within the past few weeks to warrant a full version upgrade. 🙂
Inspired by re-reading Robin Williams’ The Mac Is Not A Typewriter, I chose a monospaced typewriter font and created a new banner logo, as well as a new tagline graphic. Thanks to Michael for assistance in finding the font. The new retrophisch logo next to the name banner has been ready for a while, and my heartfelt thanks to my friend Francisco for producing what I could only envision in bad sketches. The aforementioned Macintosh book classic also inspired me to move to smart punctuation, and was reinforced by Lee’s doing so on his own site. As previously mentioned, John Gruber’s SmartyPants provides this.
Lee created the parchment-ish background picture for me, and I am grateful. Michael and Lee both provided assistance with behind-the-scenes MT, HTML, RSS, and CSS stuff, and they have my thanks. Brian has inspired me to add a bulletin board to the site; I envision having respective private boards for my family and my fellow ATPM staffers. I hope to have those up in the very near future.

Smart punctuation lives

When you’re a type nerd like me (never would guess that from the monospaced logo for the site, would you?), things like smart punctuation matter. Things like having curly quotes, full em dashes instead of two short dashes, and nice ellipses. You know…ellipses. So thanks to John Gruber’s SmartyPants plugin for MovableType, you should now see pretty “quotes,” full–I said full–em dashes, and proper ellipses…
Thanks to Lee for the setup assist.

SmartyPants

Well, Gruber has released SmartyPants 1.1, and Lee’s using it. I suppose I’ve been mulling over its use long enough. Buckle up, smart punctuation is coming to a retrophisch.com near you.