Customize your side switch

The little side switch, just next to the volume control, can be customized by you, to act as a rotation lock or mute. Now, it seems like an illusion of choice to me since all you have to do to mute is hold the volume rocker for a second or two and you have muted your iPad.

The rotation lock is a GREAT feature. Yes, I just went Tony the tiger and yelled great. I was quite pleased to discover that enabling that little feature made a variety of tasks much more comfortable, including watching movies and reading in bed. When I would shift position and the ever helpful iPad would go and rotate on me, I had to flip it flat again and let it readjust. With the rotation lock on, no worries, it holds a stable position regardless of your hand shifting.

An additional valuable bonus I found is when you are trying to view pictures / documents that are rotated incorrectly. Typically, the scenario would be that if I don’t want to turn my head sideways, I have to open my “rotate pictures” app, edit the photo and save it. With the rotation lock, I just lock it, flip it, read it and move on.

Short tip, but very important tip. Productivity enhancements are a favorite of mine, and I trust yours.

Plethora of web links

Another good find: http://www.alvit.de/handbook/

This is a page with links to all sorts of web content and developer tools and widgets. Enjoy

Blog Hacks

I have several blogs and online "properties" that I maintain and I wanted to share styles and content among them. I also wanted to minimize redundancy. To that end I am collecting most of the customizations here, with pointers to more detail in some cases.
First off, I needed to share content among my sites so I needed a file host. GooglePages fit that bill very nicely and can be found over at http://googlepages.google.com.

Shared Lib Includes:

These go at the top of every page / template I use

<link href='http://jking.net.googlepages.com/sharedBlogStyleSheet.css' rel='stylesheet' type="'text/css'/">

<script src='http://jking.net.googlepages.com/sharedBlogJS.js' type='text/javascript'>

These two files hold the shared styles that I can then customize further in individual site files.

Firefox Extensions for Web Developers (and blog hackers)

The days of looking at an area on a web page and guessing the pixel dimensions or color are over! Well, at least if you have a few tools and use Firefox. I like IE, but Firefox has largely replaced it for my day to day usage primarily due to the customization and tools available for Firefox.

Here are a few add-ins that I find to be very helpful for web development and hacking my blogs or other web properties I use.

1. The eye dropper utility.
   
   • This is a great little widget that gives you an eye dropper in the bottom of your status bar. If you click the eye dropper, you can identify the color of any area on your page in RGB or Hex.
   
   
   • Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/271
   
   
   
   



2. The measure it utility.
   
   • This add-in gives you a little ruler in the status bar that you can click to get a measurement overlay giving you precise pixel dimensions of any screen area. Great for measuring that new page element location or footer area and so on.
   
   
   • Get it at https://https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/539/
   
   
   
   



3. Web Developer
   
   • As described by CW: "Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page." I like this integration with the tool bar and the ability to work with CSS in particular.
   
   
   • Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/
   
   
   
   

Random Quotes / Messages

Random quotes are a nice addition to a site to add a little fun content so I am including directions here to put them on your own blog.

1. Select a list of quotes to put on your blog.


2. Go to the templates tab on your blog customization and select add a new page element.


3. Select the HTML / JavaScript element


4. Paste the following code into the block




<i><center><script language="JavaScript">
//store the quotations in arrays
//change this number to reflect the number of quotes
quotes = new Array(2);
//just follow this pattern to add more quotes
quotes[0] = "Shave your head, get a wet sponge, and flip the switch, 'cause you're about to get a Truthocution!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
quotes[1] = "I believe all God's creatures have a soul... except bears, bears are Godless killing machines!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
//calculate a random index
index = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length);
//display the quotation
document.write("\n");
document.write(quotes[index]);
</script></center></i>
</pre></li>



5. You can give the element a title if you want, but it is not needed


6. Save the element and drop in in your page where you want it.


7. Viola, you have random quotes...

Ok.... thanks for the applause, no really, thank you... Ok. So there are variations of this script all over the net. You can find a version you like better or hack this one up. Follow the links to check out sites with great little scripts and widgets for your blog, or watch here for more.

Hack your blog

While working on one of my other blogs, I have been playing around with blog hacks and tools. Basically what I've found is that blogspot is very similar to my favorite photo host (smugmug) in that is it highly customizable and uses standard naming conventions, styles and variables for templates.

Taking this into account, there is a growing community of "blog hackers" that have ready made widgets to drop into the blogs and it is fairly straight forward to make your own. I'm going to build a list of these hacks and make a link list as a starting point. Look for more content over time on this subject.