Iconpaper is a great website. Relatively trustworthy source of customisation stuff for OSX. Browsing today, I came across a large-type Adium theme, Bloc, which suited me down to the ground. It’s tracked on Macthemes; basically a goldmine for people who like to tinker with how OSX looks.

After having had a couple of small problems with the original, I sleuthed to try and get in touch with the author of the theme. Turns out, he’s a very nice bloke who agreed to do me a theme in the same style as my website. Whilst it may be difficult to believe, I love the way this site looks, and I couldn’t be happier with it (sad, right?)! I’m pretty sure that those of you who use Adium and aren’t lame should give it a go. If you don’t like my personalised variant, there are some other great colour schemes bundled with it.

No real reason for this post, other than a big thanks to krayon (the author) and to try and throw some more links his way.

So therapeutic.

That’s all today was for me.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment, in the twitter community (if it can so be called) about twitter’s business model. Since I started caring about how premium accounts could affect my experience with the site, I began thinking about how I would monetise the site.

The key factor to this, in my opinion, is that it always seems to be approached from the angle of “how can we least irritate the users of this site, but still gain money from their use of it?”. This, to me, is a fundamental flaw in the logic. You are much more likely to successfully monetise a site if people actually benefit from what they’re paying for. It’s obviously easier to do this by offering perks to paying users in the same vein as flickr or vimeo’s increased bandwidth/storage space limits, but you really have to rack your brain for a decent model when it comes to most of your users having free accounts.

Untargeted advertising is awful. It’s intrusive, mostly irrelevant and makes designers cry. Google tried to combat irrelevance by keyword matching content of sites or, more controversially, emails. It almost worked, except for the fact that it somehow didn’t. No-one clicks Google text ads unless they’re specifically trying to generate click revenue for a site. This means that the advertising has failed. It’s not a scalable or future proof way to monetise a site, so it’s out. No untargeted ads.

Facebook have recently been really picking up the game with respect to advertising. I mention that I like movies and music on my profile. I talk to my friends about web development, gaming, social media, photography and more and I get small ads (which are obviously Facebook-approved and sit inline with the design of the site (I don’t want to get into Facebook’s design. That’s a whole other can of worms)). They also offer me the ability to vote-up or down an ad. I’ve not seen the movie Slumdog Millionnaire, and I have no interest in doing so, so I vote the ad down and don’t see it again. Brilliant.

Now, if I were a sensible businessman, I would take these ratings and apply them to conversations I have with my friends about movies. If one of my friends mentions that they like movies, and maybe even give as much detail as sharing similar film taste, my voting-up an ad would make it more likely to appear in their ad rotation. Brilliant. That, to me, is the way that targeted advertising should be done. Friends talk about things together, they recommend things, they get adverts that logic dictates they might like. They’re not all going to be winners, but it’s a solid foundation that, with enough data and participation, could provide a self-perpetuating engine for revenue generation that all the owners have to do is assign keywords to and release to the wild. Yes, a lot of programming has to go into this sort of thing, but the rewards are potentially phenomenal. Especially with the userbase that Facebook has.

So, where does that leave twitter? I don’t have any statistics, but I see a lot of businesses have adopted twitter. I’m a particular fan of indie Mac developers and I exercise this enthusiasm by following their updates on twitter. I’m a bleeding-edge kinda guy and I like to know when new stuff is coming out that I can play with. What if you were to apply the same model to twitter? You already have the interaction between consumer and business right there, but it lacks the audience in some cases, so we make it special.

Say every twitter user has their own tag cloud (for those of you who don’t read any other blogs, a visualisation of word density/popularity comparative to overall volume) to target ads to. I mention the word “Mac” or “Apple” (probably) on a freakishly regular basis and so do a lot of my followers/followees. I, therefore, see a valuable type of advertising which has a special kind of (purchased) tweet with a wider scope. Say the good people a PotionFactory want to send out an ad, they hit up twitter, buy a “penetweet” (I should TM that it’s so good), associate some keywords and BAM, anyone who follows PotionFactory sees the ad. Anyone who’s friends with someone following PotionFactory who has a high enough keyword density of any number of the keywords PotionFactory bought when they bought the ad sees it. It appears inline with their tweets, it doesn’t say the word “sponsored” on it or anything tacky like that, it just sinks down with the rest of the tweets (or maybe stays up longer for a premium (not too long, though)) and everyone goes about their day.

So, there you have it. An unintrusive, targeted advertising engine built on the contents of people’s tweets, who they follow and who their friends follow. It easily fits in a tiered model (different tariffs give you access to more keywords, lower concentration of keywords for ads to be shown to users) and is far better, in my opinion, than the arbitrary character-limit-increase-based model that I’ve seen floating around recently!

I’d love to hear any readers’ thoughts on this, as I know most twitter users will have floated around their own ideas, if only internally.

Mine does. I’ll be playing tracks in iTunes and it’ll just stop responding, then Finder will stop responding, then you’ll have to reboot your computer.

Well, not anymore! I’ve found that if you yank the plug out really quick, then plug it back in before the OS notices what you’ve done, it rejigs the drive back to life and you can carry on as normal. Obviously, it would be better if it just worked, but where’s the fun in that?!

For the record, slow though it is, I recommend using USB2 for regular use. I transfer large files with Firewire, but idle with USB2. Again, not ideal but at least it’s a solution(ish).

So, ruined my back again today and have been bed-ridden. Lucky for me I do all my work on a laptop!

Windows 7 seems pretty cool, but ctrl-click didn’t work on my laptop and none of the Bootcamp drivers I could find worked with the 64-bit version to give me multi-touch on the trackpad. I’m totally not in the mood to mess around with this!

So, apparently it was the 25th Anniversary of Apple. I’ve been out of touch the last few days.

If you’re anything like me (and if you’re a Mac user, chances are similarities exist!), your computer is just the way you want it. Depending on how finicky you are, your icons are just so, your desktop is carefully chosen and anything that could potentially upset that ranges from a chronic annoyance to wildly enraging.
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It’s no secret at all that I love Textmate. I find now that working without the ability to wrap a selection in brackets/quotes, the perfect indentation, amazing predefined bundles and the ability to modify/create your own bundles nearly impossible. I certainly don’t see the point in working without all this great stuff! One thing I find that is fundamentally missing is FTP/SSH support. There is a way to emulate FTP support, but it’s cumbersome and it just doesn’t integrate with my workflow at all, so I don’t use it.

Until today I’ve been switching to the very capable Coda, but I’m way too used to the power of Textmate’s text manipulation for this to be a long term solution. With no sign of FTP or SSH support on the horizon, I got my Google on. I’ve found a pretty great solution that will integrate very well with my workflow, so I thought I’d share.

First off, I downloaded the FTP/SSH bundle for Textmate from fuerstnet. This gives you reload and upload over FTP and SSH, along with 2 keyboard shortcuts, direct from a Textmate project. I then set up a folder in the following way:

./project
./project/TextmateProject.tmproj
./project/.ftpssh_settings

I wont reiterate the step-by-step for setting this up, as it’s on fuerstnet and it’s relatively easy.

Once you’ve got this file structure, open your favourite version control client (I use Versions or terminal with Subversion, but only because that’s what I’m used to. Git is also pretty awesome) and check out your project to the ./project folder so that the path to ./project now matches up with your path in .ftpssh_settings file.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious that this method relies on the fact that you’re working on 2 identical copies of 1 project – not ideal, but it works.

Once you’ve got your checked out files, go to your ./project folder and drag all the files in there (except TextmateProject.tmproj and .ftpssh_settings to your Textmate project drawer. Now save your project and it’s ready for you to use. To edit a file on your server, open it in your Textmate drawer, make your changes, save it and use the FTP/SSH bundle to upload it (2 keyboard shortcuts: cmd-S, option-S and your file’s uploaded). You’ll get a tooltip to tell you that the file has uploaded successfully (if it has), and a quick check in your browser should show you that the changes have taken place.

As I said, this relies pretty closely on you having a close affiliation with a version control system, but as long as your files in ./project mirror what’s on your server, it will be a relatively seamless process. I only say to use version control as it streamlines the whole thing, and makes it easier if you’re modifying the files in more than one place, or you have a team working on them. It’s nice and easy to set up a version repository on a local machine, and it’s great for managing projects so I’d recommend it anyway!

If I’ve omitted anything, let me know in comments, and please, props to fuerstnet for writing the awesome bundle that makes this process possible!

So I couldn’t figure out any way of doing this, and I can’t stand stuff like this beating me so I’ve been messing about with it for the last hour and it’s finally working so I thought I’d share what I’ve done. Maybe this will get spidered, but mostly it’ll be here for my future reference!

The long and short of this situation is that OSX includes sendmail, but it seems to be some sort of alias for postfix, so you should actually be configuring postfix. Right now, I should probably clear up that I’m by no means an expert on any of this and it’s all been trial and error for me so far so if it doesn’t work for you, I can try and help but I can’t promise anything. …