kuniform

Tom Green at Digital Web Magazine has a great tutorial on using the video captioning feature in Flash CS3 to create accessible Flash video content. Wow, I can’t wait until my copy of CS3 arrives, sometime this week, along with my new MacBookPro! Yaaaay!

Yup, I pulled down the ‘kuniform is dead’ page even though the new version is not up yet. I had to! It was time to announce the launch of kuneshdesign.com, the presence of my new consulting gig.

I’ll be posting here again shortly to talk about some of the decision-making and technology that went into creating kuneshdesign.com, including some thoughts about why I’m launching a contracting business, plans for the biz, and a bit of the technical tricks behind the portfolio section.

Here on rail one, we have Amy Hoy’s article on using script/console to do debugging. It’s chock full of tips and tricks, and was super-useful when I was tooling around over vacation. It’s Hoyesque! You know you’re rockin’ when you become an adjective or an adverb. At least, a positive one. Don’t even ask what Kuneshesque has been used for.

Over on rail two we have some n00b picture of Rails model associations. Given that I am a n00b, I like it. It’s nice. Nice, not earth-shattering. So, on to earth-shattering. Holy crap! It’s Matt Biddulph’s hackdiary. I saw Matt give his presentation at RailsConf 2006 and thought, “that’s one smart cookie.” Then I saw this script, and thgouth, “that’s one smart CAKE!”

Check out this script which lets you take a Rails app, converts the associations to a GraphViz format that you can then import into OmniGraffle. Since the mac lacks a decent entity relationship diagramming tool and I am too lazy to create one by hand, this is a lifesaver. It totally justified hours of web browsing and and reading on New Year’s Day.

As I noted earlier, I’ve been using Mint (so tasty and refreshing) along with Dreamhost’s built in stats counter software, I’ve had a bit of Google envy. Upon telling some web developer friends I’m using Mint, they would say things like, “You dummy! Why would you pay $30 for that? Google has it for free.” Thus far my answers have been to say things like, “But Shaun Inman is a person. It’s only $30. Google has $100 billion.” Then I go off on a diatribe about how, though I respect the heck outta Jeffrey Veen, Mint seems better, interfaces, marketing, building to flip sucks, blah blah blah.
Apparently, I need to get out more, and find more interesting friends. Today, though, my right brain was singing its intuitive praises as I read this objective and detailed comparison of Mint and Google Analytics by David Shea. Seems like he’s also redesigning his website. Heck, even his old design kicks the living crap out of mine. Will you be my friend, David? Awwwwwww.

As part of the redesign of kuniform.org, I am updating the navigation and flow of the blog and the site, adding lots of little touches to support community features. This has led me on a journey through the Wordpress plugin directory for resources and I’d like to share the initial list of plugins and my impressions of them with you.

• SilentBits’ SEO Plugins for Wordpress has a great list of search engine optimization plugins that add sweet semantic touches such as a customized title tag for the document and meta description meta keywords for each post, using data from that post. I’m not sure this one will work out for my whole site without customization, but if your site is entirely managed via WordPress, this nifty site map plugin may work for you. It covers both pages and posts you’ve created in WordPress.


• I am ditching the notion of archive links. Nobody has a reason to follow them, and nobody does. Instead, I will be adding related and popular links. For the related posts, I am using WASABI’s WordPress Related Entries 2.0, called “invaluable” by PingMag, dontcha know?


• To link to the most popular entries on the site, I am going to try out Alex King’s Popularity Contest.


• For responding accurately to Google search results, which is one of the primary means the site is found, I’ll try out theundersigned.com’s Landing Sites 1.3


• I already am using Akismet for spam filtering, Social Bookmarks for letting people link to my pithy articles, and Bill Rawlinson’s FeedList for integrating my del.icio.us bookmarks into the site.

That PingMag article has lots of other interesting plugins, listed too. After I launch the redesign I’ll share my war stories on which plugins worked for me and how I got them integrated. Once I know I’ll be using them, I’ll end up donating to each of the authors above for their efforts in creating and supporting these applications.