Up until a day or two ago, on OS X I had always used iChat as my AIM client until a friend of mine recommended something I had heard about but never tried: Adium.

Adium has now stolen my heart, with its highly customizable (and even more minimal-than-iChat) appearance, and exceptionally high tweak factor among other things. In addition to this, Adium is open source, with an extremely active development community. This means that tons of different styles, extras, and plugins are available; in fact there’s a dedicated web page for this because there’s such a large number of them. If you have a Mac, and use AIM (or nearly every other IM protocol), Adium is definitely worth checking out:

Website
Adium Extras

At last, I’ve found a plugin that allows me to actually tag articles with Textpattern, versus being limited to Textpattern’s maximum of two categories.

If you’re a Textpattern user, you should definitely check this out:

http://www.truist.com/tag/textpattern/

In case you’re wondering, in no way am I endorsing Godaddy (not that I would mind doing so if you guys are willing to give me a buck or two). Rather, I’m endorsing Gomommy (for free!), which is … totally the same.

Just check this out:

www.gomommy.com

He he he

Feelings of hurt, sorrow, frothing at the mouth, rage towards said ’scientists’.

Why, you ask, might I be experiencing these seemingly unrelated symptoms? It is because I now mourn the loss of one of, if not the best, planet in the whole entire universe: Pluto.

I’d write a song for you, oh ‘dwarf planet’, but alas, the sadness is too overwhelming. Oh jeez, I’m not long for this world–soon I’ll be with you, my sweet demoted planet, soon we’ll be together!

I feel bad for them, those icons on my dock. Never again will they have as much fun as they used to, bouncing around before going to work. ‘Twas a gig and a half more RAM that did the whole bouncing thing in, and honestly I can’t say I regret it.

I scored a great deal over at Newegg for a gigabyte of RAM for my iMac for only $78.99. Wow! I ordered two it was so cheap, plus I think there’s a significant performance boost between 1.5 and 2 gigs of RAM. It’s crazy: 2 gigs of RAM from Crucial, $227.99, and directly from Apple, a cool $300.

Cool.

I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I really don’t like PCs. Yes, I’m a Mac guy. However, I didn’t used to be. Until a few months ago, my computer was a wheezing, 800 or so Mhz Dell laptop. It could do the basics ok–web browsing, email, word, things like that. But enough of my sob story. To cut to the chase, I had been wanting a far better computer for quite a while, and after having to put up with PCs and Windows for years the natural choice was to get a Mac. So, I got a lovely iMac named, um, Guido. Obviously, this new computer could and can do anything thrown at it (well, so long as it’s a universal app which is its Achilles heel, but that’s another blog post) but of course I still did not it for the basics, so for internet of course, I instantly downloaded Firefox, which was my favorite browser… for Windows. I instantly found it to be hardly as visually appealing as most other OS X apps, and it lacked some core OS X features (namely spell checking within textfields) as it doesn’t utilize Cocoa, an OS X API which lets applications have that visual aesthetic akin to OS X, you know–the flashing blue buttons and form items, things like that. Until now. Josh Aas, who seems to be a lead Firefox developer posted about this just-released Alpha in his blog. Note: This is experimental software, so use at your own risk.

That said, I downloaded it just a bit ago, and although for form elements it doesn’t render things as well, nor is at as sleek as Safari, but it makes Firefox that much more worth using on Macs. In any case, Safari’s my top pick for browsers on OS X, but hey, I’ll keep an open mind about Firefox and who knows, maybe Safari will soon be begging for my attention.

When talking about internet radio, for me at least, ad-ridden audio with a little music on the side (much of which is seldom what I’m looking for as the genres are far too broad) comes to mind. Folks, internet radio is so 2001. Say hello to Pandora. Pandora is internet radio meets Web 2.0., and as has been the theme of Web 2.0. (a near second bubble), it’s all about the user. Unlike many Web 2.0 sites which are dependent on user-created content, Pandora does not feature user-created music, but rather lets users craft their own radio stations. How is this done? It couldn’t be simpler. You go to pandora.com, type in a song or artist you like, and then instantly Pandora creates a playlist of similar music to that of the artist or song you specified. Like the song you hear? Give it a thumbs up (really like it? there are links next to the song info to buy it on Amazon/iTunes–unfortunately many of the more obscure artists aren’t available, at least on iTunes). Not so crazy about it? Give it a thumbs down, and Pandora will skip to the next song (you can skip songs 6, or 7 times per hour, I believe it is). You see, the point of rating each song is, based on your feedback, Pandora further tailors your station to fit your musical taste, and at the same time tries to expose you to music you may otherwise not have the opportunity or knowledge about to explore. Pandora’s a really innovative site, and I definitely recommend that you check it out.

…this is supposed to be a massive insult (no joke):

“You’re just jealous because no one goes on your myspace and you have no pic comments and no one ever talks to you.”

This was taken from an actual AIM conversation. I empathize for the youth of America. Actually, no I don’t.

My first impression of Textpattern has been quite a good one. For one thing, it was really easy to install, and was all graphical, which definitely was a plus (uncommenting lines in cryptic config files isn’t nearly as fun!). But the biggest thing for me, seriously monumental, was the way in which Textpattern handles templates/themes. More or less, you code the HTML skeleton, sans content, with no Textpattern standards to conform to, and then you merely insert special commands, almost like server-side includes where the various bits of blog-goodness should go. For instance, all the blog posts have a command (txp:article form=”default” limit=”15″ listform=”default”, which spits out a max of 15 articles per page, and compared to other CMS’ templating formats is elegant), and I just inserted that into a Div, and voila, a blog! MovableType is similar to this, but more complex, and don’t even get me started about WordPress. You see, WordPress has a templating language (!) written in PHP, which is hardly easy to learn (let alone use).

As you may notice the blog part of this site is directly tied into the rest, as far as design goes. To sum it up, in Textpattern it took all of 2-3 minutes to copy in the HTML/CSS from the main page and adapt it to the blog by inserting those special commands I talked about. It would have taken me–you know what, I was gonna say 2-3 hours to do in WordPress, and then I thought 2-3 days, but you know what? Even for a simple design like this, I doubt I could even do that in WordPress. And you know what’s crazy? I had used TextPattern for all of 10, maybe 15 minutes before setting up this template, and yet I’ve been using WordPress for months and it’s far more cumbersome. But in WordPress’ defense, I would definitely say that there are developers who use WordPress, and then there are the end-users.

Aside from templates and the like, there aren’t any huge distinctions between WP and Textpattern. From an administrative perspective, I think Textpattern has a much cleaner interface, and WP’s is just too busy. But on the other hand, I do kind of like WP’s admin design a tad more. Another big thing to note is the actual blog entry form, you know where you type in your article. What about it? Well, Textpattern is really lacking here. WP has a full-blown WYSIWYG editor, with ‘Bold’ / ‘Italic’ buttons, things of that nature–rich text editing. Textpattern? Um…no. That’s a bummer. Textpattern does support Textile, which is some sort of mark-up, but that’s just one more thing to learn, and I prefer nice little buttons anyway.

So, who wins this vicious, bloody war of the CMSs? Oh man, I don’t know–download both and see which one you prefer! That’s the beauty of free software. Woohoo @ FLOSS!

Well folks, this here is my brand spankin’ new TextPattern-powered (yeah, we’re fancy like that) blog. I’ll likely be posting at a fairly regular rate, so keep on your toes, as the next thing you know a post could sneak right up on you. I’ll quit my rambling. Hopefully the blog will be worth reading, or at least bearable, and I plan to write about a variety of topics; tech stuff (apple also), cool links, interesting articles or things on the web, anything really. I’ll try not to be boring.

Well, until then, you stay classy, San Diego.