"These are the gears..."

I just noticed the description of the Google Gears plug-in in Firefox:

“These are the gears that power the tubes!”

Interestingly, this is one case where the “big truck” metaphor actually seems to make a bit more sense…

Safari 3 beta for Windows

I'm typing this with Safari 3 for Windows, which is showing the Blogger rich text editor. This is not supported and kinda not supposed to happen.

Image upload and autosave appear to be broken. :-P



Update: If you're following along at home, Safari 3 does not implicitly create a <head> element when you programmatically (e.g. with document.write(...)) set the contents of an IFrame. This causes an initialization error in the Blogger post editor because there's no place to stash the <style> tag for spellchecking, which throws off the autosave initialization.

Without autosave, image upload to draft posts doesn't work, since Blogger autosaves before showing the upload dialog.

Another update: Damn Safari 3 is speedy-quick. It is now a contender for browser-of-choice.

Blogger Dashboard Widget 1.0.1 now available

From the “about fracking time” department…

If you’ve still have the Blogger Mac OS X Dashboard widget running, you may have noticed it pop up a little message this evening.

Version 1.0.1 of the widget is finally available, featuring the following improvements:

• Copyright date updated to 2007
• “Publish Post” and “Save as Draft” buttons flipped to match the Blogger web interface
• Logging in and posting works
  

Apologies to everyone who was left waiting for me to update the widget to work with the new Blogger’s Google Accounts and Atom 1.0. Now that the dropped ball has been picked up, happy Dashboard-blogging!

Challenge me at Rock Paper Scissors

Through the many magicks of the Internet and Facebook’s new application platform, I am available for Rock Paper Scissors challenges.

I made an internet thing

To coincide with my switch from FTP to Blogger’s domain hosting, I’ve changed up this blog’s template (now a simple variant on Darren’s Denim) and unveiled a new homepage at http://www.grogmaster.com/.

This new design is more groggish — and therefore more representative — than the last one, which is something I’ve been wanting for a while now.

The “internet things i found” section is a compilation of my shared items, from del.icio.us, Google Reader, and Facebook. I made a pipe with Yahoo! Pipes to combine and normalize the three feeds, which I then pull in via JSON. It ends up getting the job done, though the implementation is a bit sketch. Still, it’s better than having to handle the fetching and parsing on my own server.

I also pull in the last three posts from this very blog via Blogger’s GData JSON support. MochiKit is used to make HTML generation sane, and to parse the date format that GData outputs.

I based the overall structure on the Holy Grail CSS layout, which does three columns (though I’m not using the left-most) in an ideal source order. I still have to stick some stuff in the footer, perhaps a copyleft/right-type statement.

Still to come are better links to and integration with the other websites I’ve scattered by online identity to. I’d really like to work in a Last.fm chart, but it’s a real pain to get the look and size right.

Oh, and as a last bit, this new design actually works in IE6, since I can test on my own machine with Parallels.