I take no credit for this beautifully nice style for Google Reader. I merely took the stylesheet created by Jon Hicks at hicksdesign.com which he provided for the Stylish Firefox extension and made a Greasemonkey version of it. In fact, I just cut and pasted code from another Greasemonkey extension to apply the CSS. So I'm sure it's a horrible implementation, but I just wanted to get the style working with Greasemonkey and not have to install Stylish.

I figured others might be interested in it.
This version is ported from Google Reader Theme v08

download the Google Reader theme for Greasemonkey.

Feel free to improve upon the implementation which I admit is a complete hack. Also, since this isn't my original creation, I may take this down if Jon wishes I do so. If you want to leave comments, you have to login first. I'm still trying to get this drupal installation up and running correctly.

Life has been busy recently... thus the lack of updates. So just for the sake of updating my blog, I'll give you a couple of very quick updates of what's been going on.

This week was AjaxWorld in NYC which I attended with Jennifer in order to gain some info and perspective for upcoming projects here at Blue Sky. The schedule was kind of brutal with sessions starting at 7:30am and going until 7 or 8pm. And we walked out of there each night with a bit of a headache and a little fried. It's a lot of information to digest at one time. And there's a lot of people pushing a lot of different things. But overall, we got a lot out of it and now we're doing some follow up investigation on our own. A good rundown on the conference can be found here. I'm not about to summarize it all in this entry.

After a long period of wanting to move my ailing blog from Movable Type to Drupal, I have finally made the move and imported my past content with some help (link to friendly import script creator to come, I have to find it again). Things look a little generic right now, but I'll be adding to it as we go along. I have also attempted to integrate the feed with FeedBurner as best as I can for now. There were many suggestions of how to do it. Some involved hacking node.module which, while easy, is hacking the core of Drupal and not something I wanted to do. So what I did was add a couple of lines to my .htaccess file.

I don't claim that it is perfect, and am happy to take corrections. There's still the question of how to handle dynamically generated feeds based on taxonomy which I don't see there has been really any good answer to, but this has me content for now.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)(index\.|rss\.)xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/orangehat [R]


Why did I move to Drupal?

There are a number of reasons I moved to Drupal.

• Movable Type was great when it started but it's clunky, cumbersome, and not nearly as powerful as Drupal.
• We use Drupal at work for our Intranet and documentation system and this will allow me to play around even more with it
• We just finished re-launching the Adirondack Camp website and moved it all into Drupal 4.7. There are a ton of things we want to do more with this site, so again, another reason to play around more with it.
• I'm much more comfortable with PHP than with Perl
• Drupal has an enormous community of developers and support
• It's easier to use

Those are the brief answers anyway. So expect to see lot of changes as I settle in to the new site. Enjoy.

No, not my feeding update. Har har. I updated the RSS feed on orangehat and am now serving my feed from FeedBurner

It's something I have been meaning to do so I can keep better track of feeds and test out FeedBurner a little bit for some other projects. I have removed the old feeds and am redirecting any requests for them to the new address. So if you haven't update already, you can update your subscription by subscribing to http://feeds.feedburner.com/orangehat

i'm tinkering... you'll see some changes here and there on the site. It's so unrealistic for me to think I'll be able to redesign this all at once. I just don't have time. For now, little changes. Incentive to keep returning. Hello Mario!

Microsoft announced their intention to release a standalone beta version of IE7 this summer. I sent this nugget of info out to an email list at work, and this was the response I got back.
only a suicidal maniac would use IE again if they didn't have to.

Not long after I sent out the email with the link to their blog, it broke... proving again, how amazing Microsoft software is. Follow at your own risk.

This is sweet. I have been playing a bit with Todd's Flash Slide Show which was a nice freeware flash app to drop in with an xml file one a site. No glitz. But also, not completely bugfree, especially for varying image sizes (No complaints todd, it's a nice app and free after all).

Now he has released SlideShowPro, which is a completely tricked out version with some truly exquisite features. I worried because more often than not with projects like these, someone has a simple idea that is great, interest swells, they try to make a new greater version, and it ends up being useless bloat. This is not the case here.

You can read more about it from What Do I Know - SlideShowPro now available. The interface is slick, it's not bloated but is flexible to allow for complete customization, optional audio, and the clincher... rss feeds from flickr or you can use your own custom feed.

I haven't touched it yet, but if you look at the demo examples on his site, you'll see why I am so impressed.

If you recognize this graphic then you are among the coolest of nerds. My favorite Atari game for the 2600 was Adventure. Never in my lifetime will I have as much fun being a dot.

So my friend Doug sent me a link to Panic's new t-shirt store. The T-shirts are definitely nerdcool. I bought a couple. But what he was pointing out to me was the user interface. They have implemented a cool drag-n-drop interface to the store where you can literally drag the shirts you want into your shopping cart and watch your cart update with the item. Your cart, is actually a mimmic of the OS X menu dock at the bottom of the screen. When you remove an item, you can drag it off of your shopping dock and you get a puff of smoke showing the item disappearing, just like in OS X.

There's a lot of UI study that goes into online commerce. The easier and simpler the better. These guys have done a nice job of moving forward. Now to study their code a bit. Incidentally, they also have this functionality on their homepage. If you drag an application's icon to the arrow at the top of the page, it will immediately start downloading the program.

If you don't know Panic, they make Transmit, the best FTP program for the Mac as well as some other cool software. They're based in Oregon, and they seem to get it. They keep things simple and cool.

Play online! You can play a flash version of Adventure online or check out the list of different methods to play today.

It's a little late (voting ends Thursday at 10pm EST) but the Bloggies are here to recognize the best of the year in weblogs.

While I am currently on a self-imposed temporary hiatus from Gothamist, it still feels good to be part of the collective effort that has been nominated for Weblog of the Year and the quite confusing category Best Non-Weblog Content of a Weblog Site. That makes me laugh. Confusing humor is part of what it's all about anyway. I wish the awards were called something else. Just saying "bloggie" makes me feel dirty.

I'd also like to pimp one of my favs for Best Web Development Weblog, Dan Cederholm's SimpleBits.

Vote for the 2005 Bloggies now...

So I have upgraded to Movable Type 3 finally. A bit late perhaps, but I hadn't justified the expense of the license. Ravi has kindly offered his assistance in that department in exchange for development on the new Huge website (as of yet no re-launched).

One of my main issues, a common one, is with spam. Spammers seeking out blog software to exploit the commenting and trackback features are a constant headache for all of us. While I have taken some steps to lockdown the commenting spam, I hadn't yet locked down this security, stupidly, and woke up this morning to 200+ trackback spams. Lovely.

So this morning was spent doing some spam cleanup, and securing orangehat from further spamming nonsense.

The main part of this involves installing MT-Blacklist, an absolute masterpiece from Jay Allen. Of course it will always be a work in progress and isn't perfect, but it casts a pretty wide net around comment spam preventing a majority of it, and managing the removal of the rest. Thank you Jay.

I have implemented the requirement for users to register for a freeTypeKey account in order to leave comments. What is TypeKey?
TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.

Your info is secure, you will be sent no spam or anything for that matter. And it allows me to lockout the idiots who think they can boost their website ranking by spamming. Plus, once you create an account, you can reuse the same login on other blogs that require it.

So while going through this process, I ran across the Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam which is a very well written description of how to prevent spam from overtaking your blog. Siz Apart is the company that makes Movable Type, and while they have a vested interest in promoting their own TypeKey service, the article is relatively unbiased and points out cons to using the service as well as pros. It runs through different levels of steps from installing plugins that aid in spam prevention to steps to secure the base MT installation (like renaming your comments script). I found it very helpful and insightful, particularly the list of pros and cons for each suggestion.

So there you have it. And yes, speak .::.::.:..:::.:. is now orangehat. It fits me better, just leave it at that. As for the design... it's still crap, but a work in progress. So changes will occur as we merrily roll along.

Update: I found an extremely interesting article on The Register entitled, Interview with a link spammer. It provides some insight into why people use comment spam as a means to boost ranking, and what their motivations are. Truly interesting, albeit infuriating at the same time.