Jim Dalrymple.com

Things just keep getting better. Now I’m typing on my iPhone into WordPress — doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’m doing it in an iPhone optimized interface.

You can check out the plug-in at wphoneplugin.org.

You know you’re having a bad day when you show up to give a speech and answer questions only to have eggs thrown at you.

Sometimes I feel pretty stupid — this week was one of those times. I’ve been running my server without Spam Assassin because I really didn’t need it. However, lately it’s become necessary, so I decided to set it up.

Right away it started picking up spam email and marking it correctly. Then it started marking emails spam that really wasn’t spam. So I setup the Junkmail and Notjunkmail email boxes so I could train the Bayesian filters.

But it didn’t really work. Then I realized that there was no cron job setup, so the damn thing wasn’t learning anything. I downloaded Spamtrainer ran the fixes and the rules and everything is running fine now.

I really like what CSS can do for a Web site. I try to build everything now without using any tables whatsoever and for the most part it’s worked really well. CSS itself has come a long way allowing you to do many things including shadows, which is what I’ve been working on recently.

There was really no need for me to have an image gallery on the site since Peter gave me a Flickr Pro account, but it’s one of those things that I wanted to work on for myself. I’m using a really nice piece of gallery software for WordPress called Gallery Manager.

Gallery Manager gives you everything you need and integrates well with WordPress itself. Having that out of the way, I wanted to give the thumbnails and images a nice drop shadow, but I didn’t want to use Photoshop, I wanted it all done with CSS.

So the thumbnails you see on this page have a slight bit of padding and a nice drop shadow, which gives them some nice depth.

I tried it with Safari and it works great, but when I align any of the thumbs to the right Camino and Firefox won’t show the images. Strange, but I’ll keep playing around with that.

Update: Shortly after posting this I found what I was doing wrong to make the images align right in Firefox and Camino. If it doesn’t look right to you, let me know.

I sat there this afternoon looking at my daughters Dell wondering why the hell it had to be so difficult to join a wireless network. A Mac is so easy — turn it on and it finds the network for you. That’s it, nothing else.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with an IDC analyst that said the iPod halo effect could be around for some time. The only catch is that Apple has to continue to innovate in order to keep building the momemtum.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t really get the new Podcasting phenomenon taking over the Web these days, you’re not alone. Macworld Editor Rob Griffiths, who admits to adopting technology rather quickly, doesn’t get Podcasting either.

“I have to admit, though, that this incredible surge of interest in podcasting has caught me completely by surprise. I have no idea why people find it so amazing and interesting. Though Podcasting is technically not a ‘new’ technology, since it’s been around for a few years, Apple’s recent change to iTunes and the Music Store has really brought it to the masses — hence it’s ‘new’ to a large number of people now.”

You can read the rest of Griffiths blog at Macworld.