TedRoden.com

Ted Tries Enhancing Usability

I’ve been working on a side project for a while and over the last few days I decided to redo the signup process. Signup isn’t the most interesting part, but I thougt it could use some work. I’m no sox, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. So heres how it works now.

First, if you go to the site (while logged out), you’ll notice the welcome text on the home page.

You can just check for a username right there.

Hrm. “tedroden” isn’t free, I’ll try something else.

Perfect. Now the page expands…

So I click where it tells me and I’m all set. I can edit more information (if I want), start befriending people or enjoying things right there.

What do you think? Better/worse?

david:

Challah bread is a great way to eat butter.

I used to say that bread was just an excuse to eat things that are hard to eat on their own: Butter, Jelly, Peanut Butter, cream cheese, etc.

dalasverdugo:

I’m stoked to hear Nirvana on a commercial in 2046.

Sounds like fun. If you don’t feel like waiting, hear it now! I’ve actually seen this one, also here and here.

So anxious

I woke up super early today because I couldn’t sleep. I’ve got a really big day at work today, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I hope I’m not naïve for thinking this will all be sorted out again.

I’m going to enjoy so many things today… to take my mind off other things.

Hello World

This is the first and last time I’ll reblog from this blog.

enjoysthings:

I decided to make a blog for enjoysthin.gs so that I didn’t spam everybody who followed me every time I wanted to post about it. This is one of those posts.

Tonight, I put up a bunch of new changes. The most obvious change is what happens when you put your mouse over a “thing.” It looks a bit better and no longer prevents you from copying and pasting the words. Below is an example of the three different versions so far (newest at the top).

Speaking of versions, I’ve also started posting the changelogs which should list everything I’ve done whenever I post a new version of the site. You can read that at enjoysthin.gs/changelog. It’s currently at version 0.3. I expect to have all the core functionality finished soon (let’s say in the next week or two and call it 0.5).

Thanks to everyone who’s been using it and sending suggestions and bug reports.

Investing in Beer.

“If you bought $1000 of stock a year ago, you would now have:

• $91.28 if you bought Washington Mutual
• $21.29 if you bought Freddie Mac
• $20.79 if you bought Fannie Mae

But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the recycling REFUND… You would have $214.00 in cash.”

(reddit)

ShifD - Emacs (and vi) Key Commands

I was able to distract the guys working on shifd long enough to slide a couple of commits past them.

So for today, I'll just talk about one of the features I added when the rest of the staff wasn't looking. You can now edit and save shifd content using familiar key commands. ¹

First, because it was easy, I added vi shortcuts. So i will put you in insert mode. It opens up the text box, focuses it and waits patiently. When you've added your text, you can hit [escape] :wq and it'll save and close it.

Adding vi shortcuts made me feel dirty, so I quickly added emacs commands too. The emacs version is pretty much only useful on a Mac, because control-s means something very different on windows/linux. To start a new shifd note, you can press [control]-x [control]-f². To save the note, press [control]-x [control]-s. Not bad, eh?

There are a couple other shortcuts as well. For example, t will show/hide the input box, but those aren't quite on the same level of nerdiness, so I won't mention them all here. Go try it out for yourself.

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1. This stuff, like most of the internet, is disabled in Internet Explorer.

2. I know that this would generally prompt you in emacs, but you get the gist of it.

I've got something to say

Let it be known. I will no longer purchase DRMed music. I haven’t been buying it for some time, but I wanted to make it official.

Also, regarding the DRM secured music files that I have already purchased, I will be illegally downloading copies of those. Whatever the legality of that, that seems like a reasonable action.

As always, in the future, I will continue to try to buy music instead of downloading it illegally. This assumes that the responsible parties don’t make it too difficult for me to do this. I’ll happily buy music from the website of a band or record label, but I don’t want to have to register, confirm my email address before purchasing or use Paypal. I am happy to buy a compact disc or other physical format, but I’d appreciate a copy in mp3 form while I wait for it to arrive.

Thank you for your time.

McCain vs. Dungeons & Dragons II

jeffrubinjeffrubin:

John McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb seems to have a weird problem with Dungeons & Dragons.

Regular JeffRubinJeffRubin readers already know that Goldfarb compared the New York Times editors to a blogger, “sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of Dungeons & Dragons.” It was an unusual quote for sure, but if you want to paint bloggers as antisocial it at least sorta makes sense to invoke one of the nerdiest things of all-time.

Actually, it’s true, there is a lot of D&D played here. But they’re totally out of touch and still playing with the v.3.5 ruleset.

Child Pornography

Remember when Pete Townshend was briefly arrested because he had been looking at all kinds of child porn and get was released after saying he was researching a book? Whatever happened to that book?

I looked it up… it’s been abandoned, but it’s good to know the “I’m writing a book” excuse is a valid defense.

If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do, I’m writing a book on downloading movies.

A Modern Promise

The new Francis and the Lights album is officially out today in mp3, aiff and vinyl pre-order. I was lucky enough to get a copy of it a bit earlier this week and I can safely tell you, it’s worth the purchase in whatever format suits you best. I went with the vinyl.

The process to buy it is simple enough and at the end of it I was greeted with a link download the album as mp3s. Fantastic. I’m also in the process of downloading the 1080p version of the video… for free. This is evidence the record industry isn’t dying, we’re just witnessing a changing of the guards.

Also, the embedded muxtape player? Insert your favorite biz-dev keyword: game changer, it moves the needle, it’s going to provide hockey stick growth, whatever… it’s really something.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been troubled by a missing feature on some software that I’m working on. It’s just unlaunchable until I add it.

So tonight, I sat down to do it, only to discover that I’d implemented it months ago.