Shrinker: Simple URL shortening for Mac OS X
After several years, mainly of inactivity, I recently released a beta of Shrinker, my Mac OS X app that makes using services like is.gd, bit.ly, TinyURL and tr.im a whole lot easier.
If you want to try out the beta, head on over to the product page at Puffing Bear and download it today.
I will hopefully be ready to release a version 1.0 of Shrinker fairly shortly. It’ll be free in the sense of “free beer”. Its primary purpose was as a learning project for me, so I’m not interested in opening the source at the moment. That doesn’t mean I won’t be at some point in the future, though.
I’m making it free for a few reasons. First, I don’t think I’d make any meaningful amount of money out of it. Second, it was conceived as a learning project for me, and to scratch my own itch – a lack of a similar tool for the Mac. And, finally, I’ve received so much wonderful help from the Mac developer community, both directly and through searching blogs and mailing list archives, that I felt I should try to contribute something back. I haven’t got around to it yet, but there I’ll put a full list of acknowledgements in the About panel and on the website before I release version 1.0
I hope you like Shrinker, and please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.
It’s official
I am the greatest. The iPhone said so:
And I didn’t Photoshop it, either.
iPhone development
Now this is very exciting.
I predict that the iPhone SDK will be seen as a watershed in the history of computing, as important as the the first PC. For the first time, proper mobile computing will be a reality.
I can’t wait to get started developing my first app.
The river of news is diverted
I made the difficult decision to change my RSS reader the other day from the lovely NewsFire to the newly free NetNewsWire. As it happens I actually have a licence for NNW from before it was made free but I didn’t like it enough and went back to NewsFire.
Today, I achieved the nirvana of a news reader with no unread items in it. I feel like I’ve had my house steam cleaned or something. I’m still not 100% sold on NNW, but, like NewsFire, its integration with my blog editor MarsEdit and my del.icio.us client Pukka is great and it has the killer feature of synchronising with Newsgator Online so that I can read feeds from my iPhone and keep the unread/read status consistent on my MacBook Pro and the phone.
I miss the beautiful interface and animations of NewsFire, but I fought the three-pane RSS reader for too long. I think I’ll be with NWW for a while. Maybe when David releases NewsFire 2 I’ll give it another look.
Getting WordPress, mod_rewrite and Leopard to work together
I’ve been trying to get Leopard, Apache 2 and WordPress working together for a while now. I want to use the WordPress friendly URL feature, and this requires the Apache mod_rewrite module to work too. There are various places around the web that have partial solutions to these problems. Here’s the procedure I followed – YMMV
First off, WordPress is installed in /Users/jameshiggs/Sites/blog. Leopard comes with Apache 2.2 installed, but has PHP disabled by default. To correct this, go to the console and change directory to /etc/apache2 and open httpd.conf in your favourite editor. For me this means typing:
sudo mate httpd.conf
You’ll probably have to enter your admin password. Find the line that reads:
#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
and uncomment it so that it looks like this:
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Next, we need to make sure that your user directory allows .htaccess rules. To do this, create a file called jameshiggs.conf (obviously, you’ll need to replace my user name with yours) in /etc/apache2/users. The contents of that file should read:
<Directory "/Users/jameshiggs/Sites"> Options Indexes MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory>
Again, you’ll need to replace my user name with yours.
The final piece of the jigsaw is to configure WordPress to use friendly URLs – which you do from the Options > Permalinks page. I’ve selected the second option which makes URLs look like this: http://localhost/~jameshiggs/blog/2007/12/25/sample-post/. If WordPress can write to the site root then it will automatically create the .htaccess file. If not, you’ll need to create it yourself in the root of your blog site. On my machine, the file should look like this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /~jameshiggs/blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /~jameshiggs/blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Finally, you need to restart Apache – the easiest way to do that is to go to System Preferences > Sharing panel and untick Web Sharing. Once Apache has stopped, tick it again and Apache should start up. And that’s it.
Let me know if you have any variants to this procedure.
Thanks to Bagelturf and Ariadoss for hints that helped me get this running.
Facebook and iPhoto
I’m probably the last person in the known universe to find out about this, but I’ve been very impressed recently with the Facebook iPhoto Exporter. It adds another tab to the Export dialog that lets you create albums, upload photos and tag your friends in them. Very slick.
Here’s what it looks like in practice (click for full-size):
Not loving Stacks on Leopard?
Via Matt Legend Gemmell I found Quay – a way to have Tiger-style hierarchical folder menus in your dock, in case Leopard’s Stacks aren’t doing it for you. It’s shareware and costs only €7.
