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Browser wars are still alive and well on my desktop. I love chrom*’s speed and each tab as a force-killable thread if needed. Not a fan of 1password integration, no form filling atm. Firefox is a beast and Safari, well, meh. Chromium’s my new default, we’ll see how long this lasts.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Forrst – designer and developer inspiration sharing.
• Mint – on my Droid now.
• MacRuby: The Definitive Guide – Matt Aimonetti’s Open Feedback O’Reilly book.
• Interface – iPhone mockups and prototyping, on the iPhone.
• heroku-sql-console – sometimes you need to get your hands dirty with SQL.
• George Starcher’s YouTube Channel – he’s got some great videos on how to set up a Mac to do podcasting with a lot of attention on getting really good sound as a source. Applying this to the next round of BDDCasts we record.
• ice cube – more recurring events.
• iPad Cabinet – an interesting kitchen hack. Recipes are a nagging problem in my attempts to be paperless.
• How to Set Up Your Freelance Business for the Long Haul – lots of things to do when you start out freelancing, this is a pretty good list.
• Ultimate Collection of Google Related Mac Apps – I had no idea there were this many. Calendar, Mail and Contacts are my main ones. They get sync’d through at least 4 different CRM-ish systems.
• Pimp Your Tables with CSS3 – prettier tables.
• Linode Backup Service – announced.
• Get your garage ready for summer – I just spent part of this weekend doing that. I’d buy less tools if I did this more often. Because I could find the tools.

Yes, I’m picking up where I left off, like nothing ever happened.

Spent some time with Meatspace Marketing today. I used Adam Salter’s sitemap_generator to help me build a decent sitemap. I wanted to have all my Organizers and Events listed for some google juice.

To make it juicier I used Norman Clarke’s friendly_id (which is awesome) so I could have organizers in my site map that looked like http://meatspacemarketing.com/organizers/prince-william-county-regional-chamber-of-commerce. And events that looked like http://meatspacemarketing.com/events/freeni-lorton-2010-03-02. Really cool stuff, I’ll never try to do this on my own again.

Interesting tidbits from around the web:

• Fetch – Before we built BDDCasts.com from scratch we looked at Spree to see if we could use rather than build. Spree was tied to a physical inventory and there were some plugins that tried to handle digital assets and infinite inventory but none of them felt right. Fetch handles digital assets and supports a ton of options for payment including Shopify and Google Checkout.
• FFF Tusj – A pretty cool font that Curtis had found.
• The Six Landing Page Conversion Rate Factors – I joined the Micropreneur Academy and Startup Todo and have been getting pretty serious about actually making money off the software I write and not just my time to write it. Lots of other things I need to figure out how to do or pay other people to do that doesn’t involve code, this is but one of them.
• kall8 – Toll Free Number for $2 month. I pay for Skype and have Google Voice so I’m not sure if it’s worth it or not, but I’ll keep it in my delicious.
• vCloud Express – an offering from Hosting.com. Not exactly the heroku model but as more of these people get into the space hopefully I can move all my apps to the cloud and not admin another box while not going broke at the same time.

I need to work on expanding chunks of time when I code and limiting those when I do other things, especially other things that don’t afford me opportunity or reason to write more code.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• 5 cool things to sync with Dropbox on your Mac – 1Password, check. MacJournal, check. I also do Balsamiq Mockups, BDDCasts (mostly rough and final cuts between @ihoka and I), documents for my VA.
• The Four Key Components of a Great Web Design – Noted.
• 12 Useful jQuery Plugins for Working with Tables – inevitably we all need shiny tables.

Code, watching Keira play soccer, hanging out with the family. Today was a pretty good day. Tried to scratch together a list of items that I’d like to hand off to a virtual assistant. That quick exercise yielded 25 things, I might need a fleet of assistants or a reality check. Probably the reality check.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• RSS Feed + GeekTool – teh awesome. I needed a way to focus on a couple RSS feeds without all the noise in NetNewsWire, specifically my Github and Pivotal Tracker dashboards. I had a problem with https in the beginning but simply dropping the SSL made things work like a charm.
• Wave back channel in conferences – sounds like a pretty good use.
• 10 Droid Apps – PC World’s list of a starter set of apps. A few of them looked really cool; Twidroid, Compare Everywhere and Key Ring.
• Missing Drawer – We got some feedback on BDDCasts to use something like ProjectPlus to deal with TextMate’s drawer. I’ve never had much problem with the drawer, sure it opens on a side depending on space, but meh. I tried out Missing Drawer and so far I’m liking the feel of it.
• Nice Find – Continuing with the TextMate theme I wanted to see what other useful plugins were out there and came across this, asynchronous find in project that can use git-grep. The other one in this category would be “ack in project”.

Finished editing Episode 11 of BDDCasts today (but it won’t go out until Monday). It feels like the rendering time of ScreenFlow 2 has gotten worse than ScreenFlow 1.5.x. I haven’t done any times, but it feels several times slower.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Verizon FiOS Backup – Unlimited computers in your house, one subscription, 50G for $7/mo, I’m seriously thinking about dropping Carbonite and Mozy.
• Coda Stuff – I might be one of the few people on a Mac that is pretty meh on the whole Coda thing. I have TextMate, vim and the only other thing I want is SubEthaEdit type collaboration in TextMate. I know it’s fixed by TextMate 2. Anyhoo, this is a big list of Coda plugins and such.
• Google Closure – probably the good news out of the google camp today was the releasing of some tools for JavaScript.
• Dashboard – is the other bit of news from google, it’s pretty scary when you see it all in one place how much google owns of mine.
• A few UI best practices – 6, exactly. Easily identifiable links might be the only one that gets some friction. Blue and underlined?
• 13 Mac Apps – I’m a sucker for these, especially ones that could be really useful. Of the ones I don’t have but still look useful are SuperDocker and iStat pro which might be information overkill.
• Time Machine Editor – hack away at your Time Machine settings and scheduling.
• Video Monkey – The heir apparent to the insanely awesome and retired Visual Hub. I pulled down 0.5 and it’s not as easy as Visual Hub, I’ll keep my eye on it though.
• 50 Common Mac Problems Solved – I’m linking to the printer friendly version because the original was 5 clicks through. A pretty decent list, worth a bookmark and a read.
• 10 Free Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass – ’nuff said.

Finally got the keys to the development server for the new contract. Spent a lot of tonight getting things set up (git, gitolite, ruby, rails, apache, passenger, redmine, an initial app skeleton).

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Unclutterer posted a tip on $4.99 versions of O’Reilly ebooks if you own the paper version.
• Rails in a Nutshell – Speaking of O’Reilly, this is the book in progress using the Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS)
• TUAW has a nice round up of all the new shiny in the Apple Store. New iMACs are really sweet, wouldn’t mind converting my wife to one and becoming a PC free household.
• Barnes & Noble also has a first look at nook, a new kindle 2 competitor. Highlights: expandable with SD card, AT&T whispernet and wifi, native PDF it looks like and based on Android.
• MailChimp has some email marketing benchmarks. Interesting because I’m doing a bit of research for an article. (Here’s another from MailerMailer)
• HiveLogic posted the Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009) – the Rode Podcaster Mic is on there, that’s my next upgrade for BDDCasts.