Refresh Columbia » Tools & Utilities

Comment Trifecta

Jason Beaird — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:11:33 +0000

WordPress, Twitter and Facebook comments all in one place. I think we’re there. Like, really there. I posted yesterday about installing WPBook. Well, I just upgraded to the latest version (2.0.3) which I thought was just going to allow me to change the attribution line on Facebook Wall posts. As it turns out, this verion now pulls in wall comments as well! That’s right, you don’t have to click the post and leave a comment inside the Refresh Columbia “app”, you can make it right there on the wall and it will get pulled in as a comment.

To record Tweets about posts made here, I’m using Twitoaster. This nifty WordPress plugin monitors Twitter for @Replies, RTs and links to this post and adds them as actual WordPress comments.

Woot!

That’s all for now.

Wordle

Jason Beaird — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:37:07 +0000

I didn’t create the image you see to the right here, it was automatically generated by a web app called Wordle. I knew nothing about Wordle until today, but as I was experimenting with the Refresh Columbia intro text, Gray walked up and said “oh. It’s Wordle…” Maybe I’m the only person that didn’t know about it earlier, but just in case I’m not I thought I’d pass on this cool little web app.

Wordle: Beautiful Word Clouds

Easy Whiteboard Prototyping with GUIMagnets

Justin — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:39:54 +0000

Ahh. The ubiquitous whiteboard. Nothing is quite as “wide open” as an empty whiteboard. When sketching out your next UI, why not reach for something to make your job a bit easier? These magnets represent various form elements without having to draw them. They would also be very helpful when dealing with clients who don’t know the difference between a combo box and an option button.

GUIMagnets: Prototyping made sticky

Use Any Font Without Flash

Jason Beaird — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:20:12 +0000

You’ve probably heard of sIFR before – the dynamic javascript/flash combo that allows you to render segments of text on a site in any font. Well, there’s a newer technique called Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR) that does essentially the same thing using the the PHP GD library. This method still requires javascript, but creates images on the server rather than relying on Flash. NETTUTS recently published a great tutorial on getting FLIR up and running. Both of these solutions are essentially band-aids for the real problem of not having a proper method of web font embedding, but it’s nice to have another option.

Facelift Image Replacement: An alternative to sIFR

Firebug for IE

Justin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:34:13 +0000

Firebug Lite 1.2 was released today at OSCON. Those in the web design world no doubt are familiar with the Firefox extension that allows you to manipulate javascript, html, css, and the like from a debugging console. The newest version of Lite 1.2 offers enhanced functionality to non-Firefox browsers. For those suffering through debugging IE 6 and it’s ilk, chalk this up to one of those necessary tools.

Firebug: Web development evolved

Testing Paragraph Density

Justin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:52:42 +0000

TypeTester is a very nifty website that allows you to test what different fonts look like in your browser. Beyond that, though, it allows you to compare the affect of different css effects on your paragraph density. Do I like impact 1.3em with 3px tracking? How does it look with 1px tracking, but .25em wordspacing? This site allows you to find out as quickly as you can manipulate some dropdowns.

TypeTester: Compare fonts for the screen [via Design Reviver]