Now that I’m in college, things have been changing. Mostly old habits, but one thing that will change is my sites. And by that, of course, I mean FlashStuf. It’s always been geared at my own age bracket, and a quick demographics report courtesy of quantcast.com confirmed that the teen crowd is really who my site attracts. Well, I think it’s about time for a change so I’m starting to, continuing over the next few months/years, move up an age bracket into the “young adult” audience for FlashStuf and out of the teen audience. How I’m going to do that isn’t quite obvious after only two days on my own, but that is the direction I’m headed in.
If you are a FlashStuf visitor or have some ideas that could really take us in this direction, just drop a comment.
Life
FlashStuf, internet
One piece of software I couldn’t see life without is Enso. I’ve been using it for some time, but basically it provides a quick, unintrusive way to launch programs, play music, or look up things on the internet.
It’s all done by pressing and holding the caps-lock key while you type the command. And you can add more commands by simply downloading them.
Oh– and my favorite, probably most useful command (or at least most nifty) is the calculate command. You simply type in an equation (like 2+2), highlight it, and press CAPS LOCK+c (it’s the first command). Release caps lock, and automagically 2+2 becomes 4.
Enso just recently became free to download and keep, so if you want to try it out you can download it here.
Software
Okay, now I’m satisfied. The new K2 theme will work justt fine. And, as the title notes, it has AJAX which is just a fancy way of saying you can submit information such as comments and searches and get results without the page reloading (save some time).
I’m gonna make some more categories too. Enjoy!
Websites
blogging
I’ll be heading to the Outer Banks today for the next week, so there won’t be any updates to FlashStuf and probably no new posts either until I get back. However, as you might’ve noticed from my last post, I can make posts from my phone now; so if I come across anything worthwhile, you all shall be the first to know (or, second).
Personal
FlashStuf, vacation
So I recently set up this WordPress blog of mine to receive emails that, when received, would be posted right to the internet. And being able to send email from my Motorola Q makes that pretty awesome. So this is just a test of posting on this here blog when I’m no where near a computer or the internet. In Vienna right now, as a matter of fact.
Websites
I stumbled across this software that will make music simply from pictures. It uses the RGB values of each pixel to determine notes, and the brightness to determine each individual note’s length. The software is called RGB MusicLab, and is free. You can download it here.
I did some experimenting with it and as you might imagine, some pictures don’t make the best music. But I used a picture I had in black and white and it actually created a pretty interesting “song.” The original picture is below, followed by what it is converted to and read from to make the music by the program.
Software
It was one year and a day ago that I officially started this blog. Of course, at the time it was under a different name and was a bit more philisophical than the now-FlashStuf-and-web-development-randomness that Late Night Fiction has turned into. And I just realized that today, so there it is.
Miscellaneous
blogging
And so it is done– the new self-hosted Late Night Fiction! It was a bit more of a pain than simply exporting and importing; I had to save each image that I’ve posted (luckily there weren’t many) and then upload them all to the server (since I didn’t have access to my files). Also, users got erased, as I didn’t have access to my database either since this was previously a “1&1 Blog” installation.
Otherwise, we made it unscathed and I’m in the process of adding tags to all the posts and adding the cool widgets and such. It looks like the tags will be phasing out a few categories as well.
Internet
blogging, development
I set up the FlashStuf Blog today, getting it customized and such, when I realized how much better it is than this one. See, they both use WordPress, but this blog is my host’s, 1&1, version of a blog. It came with a simple setup and plainly I didn’t think I’d actually use the thing, so I thought it’d be no big deal. But I just installed WordPress myself for FlashStuf’s blog and I saw all the customization I suddenly had not only in the theme and plugin departments, but just an overall control over the actual code that goes on in the backend. Once I play around with it some more, I’ll be moving this blog into my own installation because by-golly, that is what you (and I) deserve– fanciness.
Internet
blogging
Well, relatively long. If there was one thing that has been consuming my free time in the past few weeks or so, it’d be Futurama. I recently, er– discovered –all 72 episodes so I’ve been spending what time I don’t spend interacting with the outside world, watching Futurama.
But otherwise I’ve been gathering some much-needed energy to finally finish the next major release of my Easy Site Package. I’m aiming to have it done by mid-August, but if not it’ll be September at the latest.
As for FlashStuf, I went wild on it today, fixing up the broken registration form (no new users for two months?– OH!) and making a fully mobile version of FlashStuf Profiles, with a few fixes to the desktop site. However, I’m making yet another (hopefully the last) blog for FlashStuf.com and the development I do on it. It’ll also be open to contributors, for the one day that we finally decide to expand. Anyways, it will be at blog.flashstuf.com, hopefully soon (once the subdomain finally clears– I think 1and1 is having problems today).
Personal
FlashStuf, Matt Baer Design
