My idea for a 2010 redesign

So it’s been a few years since we’ve seen a new logo for apple and I think it’s time for a refresh. The monochrome logo has been effective, but it seems as though the plain white “glassy” logo is becoming too cliche. I’d love to see them bring back a new 2010 version of the rainbow logo.

My guess though? We’ll never see anything like the rainbow logo again from Apple. At least not while Steve is still involved. It’s not “minimalist” enough. You’ve got to admit though, that this has some potential. I guess I’m not taking into account the millions of dollars they’d have to spend to rebrand all the Apple stores, billboards, and merchandize. In the meantime, I suppose this will do.

It was super simple to setup.

First of all, I had to buy the jbe.me domain name ( think J B dot ME ). Unfortunatly jb.me is not a valid domain, I’m sure someone much more important than I will grab it. Anyway, jbe.me was the next best thing.

One I had the domain I installed the YOURLS (You Own URL Shortener) script at that location. It’s a series of scripts that talks to a MySQL database with some pretty cool bookmarklets and an API. The API was key for the next step: the Twitter Tools extension. As many people know, I use twitter tools to post new blog entries to my twitter profile. Since I want to get as much of my URL-shortening as possible done through the jbe.me shortener now I needed to get twitter tools to use the new system. Twitter Tools has it’s own api that will let you create a shortener for any service that you could think of with some hooks that it install for WordPress. Then I threw a plugin together using the YOURLS API and now when I publish a post, Twitter Tools uses the jbe.me shortener to shorten the URLs. Pretty Cool.

The plugin isn’t public, only because I thought that there wouldn’t really be anyone else who would need something like this. YOURLS does have it’s own plugin, but I don’t think it integrates with Twitter Tools and that was a deal breaker for me. If there’s anyone else that would like this plugin just let me know and I’ll polish it up and put it in the plugin directory.

As a final step I decided to forward http://jbe.me to http://joshbetz.com with a simple PHP script:

header("Location: http://joshbetz.com");

I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but I’ve run some test and it seems to be performing decently.

The only drawback that I have seen on this whole process is the speed of my shared hosting account. I’m pretty sure it’s the actual bandwidth and not a MySQL issue. As always, I’ll keep trying to increase the performance of this.

Now, having the tweets on the blog is mostly for me. I didn’t want to bombard people that are subscribed to the RSS feed with this weekly mashup of all my tweets, but still be able to have the RSS feed to send to Tumblr or for anybody that wants it.

This is what I ended up doing:

function tweetRSS123($query) {
	if ($query->is_feed && !is_category()) {
		$query->set('cat','-1');
		}
return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts','tweetRSS123');

I got the idea somewhere on the web that I can’t remember. The big change that I made was !is_category(). Which just says if it’s a category archive, don’t do anything. So it won’t remove the category from RSS if you actually take the RSS of that category.

So far it seems to be working. It’s hard to tell if it’s going to get along with the W3 Total Cache plugin, but I think I’m finally at a point where it’s going to work. It’s going to be really awesome if this works because I just spent an hour throwing together a plugin to send it to Tumblr just-in-case, but I’d really rather not use it.

If You Want to Use It

So there are two ways of using this snippet in your own theme. The way I’m doing it is to put this in the functions.php file for your theme, which gets treated just like a plugin except that it’s on a per-theme basis. This is where you can put any PHP function that are specific to your theme.

The other way would be to to add just a little bit more code and install it as a plugin, which is probably what I’ll be doing a little later when I get some free time to throw that together. The advantage of using something like this as a plugin instead of in your functions file is that it stays around for any theme that you use. If you forget to add this to the next theme you use though, your category is going to show up again.

You’ll have to remember to change the ‘-1′ value to the negative of the category ID that you want to exclude. The value is negative because we want to exclude it. If it were positive it would only include that category, which probably isn’t a good idea for your RSS feed.

Basically what we want to do is make the slider advance to the next panel when we click go, which is the same as advancing to the next panel after we click the start/stop button if the slider ends up playing. It sounds complicated, but it will make more sense when we look at the code.

base.$startStop.click(function(e){
	base.startStop(!base.playing);
	if(base.playing) base.goForward(true);
	e.preventDefault();
});

What I’ve done is find the place where he sets up the Start/Stop button that I mentioned above. Since he’s already go something going on if the button is clicked I used that to add our line that says to advance one panel. It took me a second to figure out that we wanted to slider to be playing instead of paused. The reason for this is that we’re inside the click function, which means we’ve already clicked the start/stop button. This probably seems pretty obvious to most people, but I was coming at this from a different perspective I guess.

Anyway, this is what I’m using on this site now. I really like the functionality so far. It’s nice to see the slider actually advance when you click go instead of staying on the same slide for another couple of seconds.

When I saw that YouTube and Vimeo were offering HTML5 instead of flash video, I immediately tested both of the above mentioned issues. The fan in the macbook stayed quiet and the Dell Mini didn’t have any problems when I watched HD content with HTML5 video instead of flash. This is an example of the power of HTML5 video and why Apple decided to skip flash on the iPad.

The other thing that I really like about this is the fact that it pushes the HTML5 spec forward that much more. Obviously Google is involved in developing HTML5, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this on YouTube. Vimeo, however, is not involved — at least that i know of — in developing the HTML5 specification and just wants clean, efficient code. HTML5 is a good way to do that.

Finally, Adam Curry recently explained on “The Cranky Geeks” that it’s going to take a long time to derail flash video because of all the money invested in technologies used for ad agencies such as pre-rolls, but I think it would be pretty easy to develop a similar system that work in HTML5.

All in all, this is good for everyone except Adobe and flash developers. I’m not so worried about the flash developers though, the good ones have the skills to be useful in more than just flash video.