Updated October 2, 2009!

With Snow Leopards new services support, I’ve updated the old “Send to Evernote” service to include three services:

• Clip Text to Evernote: This is the original “Send to Evernote” service, with the improvements provided by Snow Leopard. This service takes selected text and turns it into an Evernote note. It will also grab the name of the frontmost window for the title of the note so that you’ll remember where you clipped it from.

• Clip URLs to Evernote: This takes any selected URLs, and downloads the contents of those URLs into Evernote. Very handy if you have a reading list of URLs and want to save them for later.

• Clip Files to Evernote: This will accept files and folders and attempt to clip them to Evernote. In some cases this will fail if the file isn’t supported by Evernote (although premium users can attach anything they want). If it is a supported file type, the document’s contents will become the note, rather than just attaching as a file.

Installation’s easy. Just unzip the archive, and put the services you wantin your ~/Library/Services/ folder (make one if it doesn’t already exist).

This will also let you get rid of the little elephant in your menu bar if you like.

Thanks to Andy I for this terrific resource. CSS and web development in general really gets me down. I feel like I’m just fixing other people’s bugs all day long. Having a site like this one that inspires creativity is a real pleasure. At least until I try to make Drupal do it.

Using CSS to do Anything

Everybody knows about using .htaccess files to redirect, say, foo.com to www.foo.com. There’s lots of cookbooks out there for doing this. But I was in a different situation; I registered foo.com, foo.biz, foo.net, foo.org, foo.mobi, foo.us, and foo.info!

(Note: “Everybody” refers to apache sysadmins, and foo refers to a domain name that I do not want to advertise at this time.)

One way to handle this would be to set up a ServerAlias entry in the httpd.conf file for every one of these domains. While this works, it doesn’t redirect the domain. Instead I end up with duplicate content for every one of these many domains.

I could handle this by writing a .htaccess file that covers every combination of, say, foo.net, foo.org, foo.biz, and so forth for every domain, but that seemed like an awful lot of typing. Yet, for some reason, I couldn’t find much of anything on the web to make this easier.

It turns out this can all be handled in your httpd.conf file using the “Redirect” directive.

What you need to do is set up two virtual hosts. One is for the domain you’re re-directing to, and the other is for any and all domains you want to redirect from. Then you add a “Redirect permanent” directive as appropriate.

Here’s an example, in which I try to route foo.com to www.foo.com:

# This is the master domain
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.foo.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/foo.com
</VirtualHost>

# Redirect foo.com to www.foo.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName foo.com
Redirect permanent / http://www.foo.com
</VirtualHost>

Okay, this is actually more text that an .htaccess mod_rewrite statement, but look at what happens when I add ServerAliases to the redirecting virtual server:

# Redirect everything to www.foo.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName foo.com
ServerAlias *.foo.com
ServerAlias foo.net *.foo.net
ServerAlias foo.org *.foo.org
ServerAlias foo.biz *.foo.biz
[and so on...]
Redirect permanent / http://www.foo.com
</VirtualHost>

I can use the same syntax to do a 302, 303, 401 or any other sort of redirect as well.

If you have a fairly simple array of virtual hosts, you could also use the default “catch all” virtual host to redirect to your main site, thus avoiding any need to explicitly define tons of ServerAlias entries.

OMNIFOCUS URI HANDLER

This applet enables you to create new tasks using an “x-omnifocus” URL. This is particularly designed to make it easy to add tasks from a web browser via a bookmarklet, without having to code a separate script for each browser. This also works in browsers that don’t support AppleScript. (I’m looking at you, Firefox!!!)

It also supports more advanced URLs containing context and project assignments that you’re likely to create from web page bookmarklets. This functionality can be utilized to make it easier to add OmniFocus tasks from other applications, shell scripts, etc., without having to hook into complicated AppleScript.

iNik.net just got upgraded to Drupal 6. While it was a fairly clean upgrade, in order to take full advantage of it, I kind of pulled it apart and am in the process of putting it back together. It’s likely that some stuff simply won’t work right. If you find bugs, contact me and I’ll get on ‘em.

I’ve been working on migrating this site to Drupal v6.2. In order to do so, I’ve created some test/development areas to work through the transition. These areas required me to repeatedly copy my live (version 5) database over to various test and staging servers. I researched and perfected a few one-shot command line recipes to handle all of this. I figured I’d share them with the world.

Are you tired of seeing news about special iPhone-only websites, when you don’t have an iPhone to try them out with?

Well now you can enjoy the world of really tiny rectangular web pages along with all those iPhonies out there! Either use Firefox and follow this excellent guide or use your browser of choice to change your browser’s user agent to:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419

All right, let’s just get this out of the way. This pick isn’t a Mac application, it’s another web application.

However, it’s a web application that works flawlessly under Safari, but doesn’t work perfectly under IE. Happy now? I thought so!

The web site is stikkit.com. Basically, it’s an online junk drawer/snippet keeper, just like the thousands of similar programs that have been cropping up on the Mac for the last few years. (And yes, even with every word in there as a link to another organizer/outliner/snippet organizer, I didn’t nearly fit all of them.)

Today’s pick isn’t Mac-specific software, but rather a web based goodie from Google. You see, Google just updated Google Reader, their web-based RSS reader.

First, let me just say that I am a firm devotee of online RSS readers. I have a license to NetNewsWire, and I love it. It’s a great program. However, when I’m not at a Mac or not at my computer at all, it’s useless to me. Furthermore, online readers (if they’re good) fit seamlessly into my browsing experience. It’s all in one application, and serves as a launchpad for all my daily reading.

The Escape blog has another idea on how to make Digg a bit less slanted toward the top users: Collaborative filtering. Basically, make it so that you can get a view of articles dugg by people who dugg similar articles to those that you dugg. (I am so sick of the term “dugg” now!)

While this seems similar to the text mining idea I floated earlier, it also has the advantage of bringing up articles which are truly relevant and interesting for an individual user. Since the w

Many sites have already reported on the fact that the popular news site, Digg, is overwhelmingly controlled by a very small group of users. Furthermore, some users predict that unless Digg can again become a true interactive community, the site is done for, because it will become repetitive and untrustworthy; neither the word of the masses nor properly edited and authentic journalistic content.

Many of these complaints have one thing in common: They examine the large quantity of front-page (highly “dugg”) articles which are, in fact, duplicates of previously dugg articles from less well-connected users.

And so, I propose that what Digg could do to “save” itself (as though the wildly popular site truly needs a saviour) is to reduce duplication through textual analysis data mining. Or, less technically, by helping users find related, dugg, articles to the one they’re digging or reading.

Fark’s Drew Curtis doesn’t pull his punches as he takes on traditional media’s advertising model, web-based empire building, and pornography. You may not agree with him, but it’s well worth reading what he has to say. (From Ideagrove.com)

Bug tracking is a pain, but is very necessary for any size of development project. There’s good bug trackers and bad ones, and there’s folks who have turned bug tracking into an artform.

What there isn’t is simple bug tracking that any schmuck can set up. Well, actually there is, it’s called 16 Bugs.

Following in the “less is more” ideal popularized by 37 Signals, 16 Bugs provides a simple view of bugs, simple bug entry, and simple integration of users.

Me, I’m using it for my crappy software.

I was glad to see Digg take on more than just technology-related news. I’m swimming in RSS feeds, despite the help of Newsgator and NetNewsWire. Now I can get my news filtered by the great unwashed masses before it reaches my doorstep.

First, Digg’s going to have to attract more than male geeks to their readership or else it’ll just be a giant echo chamber. So get out there and digg some news, y’all!

Robert Young graces us with a very interesting dissection of what the trend of social networking means to today’s communicators and web entrepreneurs.

As I watch Penton shift from a one-way publishing company (we are the experts!) to a social network/community (we bring experts and users together!), this seems especially apropos.

To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the “products” are the people… or as Marshall McLuhan might say, “the people are the message” when it comes to social networks. So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”.