I sometimes feel like our technology can own us.

A collection of links and thoughts.

This holiday season, pick up some books to aid the budding web designer/developer in your life. Even if it’s you.

I created a WordPress plugin that automatically creates Lessn short URLs for published posts. Lessn is a free, self-hosted URL shortener, created by Shaun Inman.

My fundamental problem with Web Inspector is … The CSS view does not resemble a stylesheet, and the HTML view does not resemble source code. Firebug does, and I find this makes development easier. But there’s a bit more to it. …

Yes, you should have WP Super Cache installed and working for your self-hosted WordPress site.

For use when you buy a new Mac: Forgo the tedium of changing default settings and customize Mac OS X to your nerdish liking.

Microformats are good, and Google recently announced they would start supporting two of them: hCard and hReview. Your favorite SEO voodoo daddy will tell you that Google will shine upon your site if they find you’re using extremely semantic markup with the likes of Microformats.

The apologist or procrastinator in all of us would say that ambitious project “just needs to wait” until we get a maxed-out MacBook Pro or Mac Pro with dual 30″ displays. But all that separates us from our idols is good old fashioned elbow grease.

There are many different kinds of image replacement techniques exhaustively detailed around the web. Many seem quite complex, and dated, and it seems that the most popular technique I see is the Farhner method, or text-indent: -9999px. However, there is a small problem with this technique: in Firefox it draws lines stretching across your screen nearly 10,000 pixels to the left.

Okay, so you know how to make an optimized video for the Web with HandBrakeCLI, now let’s embed that bad boy into the webpage. … Oops. I always forget how to do QuickTime embeds. They are a rather involved affair so the name is quite ironic. Anyway, this post is mostly a reminder to myself, but it pleases me if it helps you.

HandBrake is an excellent application for converting your favorite Flash files, VOB folders, or almost anything else really, for use on your iPhone, iPod or AppleTV. But it also has another use: creating great videos for the web.

I got tired of the boring look of a standard Apache web directory. So instead of browsing folders the default way, I built a small index.php file in the root, grabbed all folders dynamically, injected them as HTML5 and styled them with CSS3. Since I work with Coda all day, I chose to emulate their Sites View interface.

I’ve created a WordPress plugin to fix an issue I have with the WordPress Dashboard: the HTML editor is not a monospaced font. I don’t like reading code in 13px Lucida Grande, so I wrote a plugin to add a stylesheet with 12px Monaco.