And for your enjoyment there's this:
And for your enjoyment there's this:
Those ConvergeSE guys have great timing! Right on the heels of our brand new site they've launched the conference site. Besides the awesome scrolling design and robotic battle dinosaurs (scroll down and see what happens to him!) the conference itself looks amazing.
Nate and I will be doing a workshop based on the Kicktastic project we're working on, so if you want to find out our secrets in person, register on February 16th. We'll try not to ruin the otherwise great list of speakers.
ConvergeSE is April 27-28 2012 in Columbia, SC.
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The ShopTalk show is a live podcast by CSS Tricks/Wufoo master Chris Coyier and Paravel pointman Dave Rupert. Chances are we'll talk about the Kick Awesome Show and maybe even this new website! Send in your questions now or join us live to pick our brains.
February 2nd, 1pm. Mark your calendars.
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After I got my UP wristband several people asked me to let them know how it was working out. Now that I've had it for a month and a half I think I have a pretty good idea of how well it works. In my last post I said I was only interested in the activity and sleep cycle parts of the band and after using it that's still true. In all honesty, the food tracker isn't very helpful anyway.
There are actually two types of activity...normal active mode and workout mode. The normal mode worked as advertised...I would get a little buzz every 30 minutes (that's what I set it to) to remind me to get up and move around. It was also pretty effective at giving a me a quick glance at how active I had been throughout the day. Days I worked at the computer my activity was super low with just little bumps when I got up. But weekends where I was busy in the house or playing with the kids was much better.
The workout mode seemed way less accurate to me. For instance, I ran a mile on the treadmill last night and it only registered half a mile. Apologies, I misread the treadmill (first time using it). The workout mode is indeed pretty accurate. Also, when you're actually moving you can start up GPS mode in the app on your iPhone and track things better...but that means I have to run with my iPhone and I haven't found a good arm band to hold it yet. I wasn't expecting a startling accuracy, but would have hoped for something a bit closer. Either way, it does help me remember to be a little more active while I work, and that's a good thing.
The sleep cycle tracking seems pretty accurate, but the waking me up refreshed thing didn't happen too often (see chart above). Now, to be fair, we have a 4 month old that doesn't sleep through the night and my other 3 kids battled the pukefest that's been going around for about a week so it's very hard for me to get a solid night's sleep. Keeping an eye on this as it might be better in a few months. What was cool was seeing my sleep cycle and an actual number of how many hours I slept. I quickly saw a direct correlation between my mood and that total hours of sleep number, and it's made me more conscious of making sure my body gets the rest it needs.
Here's where we go downhill. Jawbone has had a lot of trouble with the UP devices and are offering full refunds to anyone who bought one, even if they keep it. Why? Major battery issues and button issues have plagued the bands. I'm already on my second one after the button just stopped working and the battery life dropped to 3 days. The second unit is still doing well so far. The hardware several practical issues, too though. It's so bulky that working on a laptop and trying to type is impossible. Also the button's corners are kind of sharp. I was playing basketball with my nephews and gouged my side through my shirt. It was not pleasant.
I still have a lot of problems syncing. It doesn't work about half the time. Unplugging and replugging several times usually gets it to start, but it's a pain. Sometimes whole chunks of the day don't make it, either. Otherwise the software is really really basic but gets the job done. I wish they would make a way to see more than just one day at a time. Like a month overview of my sleep patterns or exercise would be fantastic. Thankfully that's something that can be added to the software and based on a questionnaire I got they're already thinking about it.
Not yet. Clearly they have a few bugs to work out and the software needs to mature. I would hope v.2 has a much smaller form factor, too. But it has made me much more aware of my activity and sleep cycles and I think the few pounds I've lost are a result of seeing the data. It's a really great idea; just needs a bit more work.
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Jawbone – the makers of fine bluetooth headsets – have expanded their product line to include Up. Official marketing copy is “Band + App Inspires healthy living.” Great, but what does it do? Quite a lot, actually! Thanks to a bunch of sensors inside this tiny wristband – and a simple iPhone app – it can track your activity and your sleep. It can also help track your eating habits and let you start up challenges with a friend, but I’m more interested in the first two.
Up can actually tell when you’ve been inactive for a certain period of time and buzz to remind you to get up and move around. Seeing as I sit in front of the computer all day and have tried setting little alarms to do this and failed miserably I’m excited by something that will just know when I need to get up and remind me. Added benefits of this are that it tracks a metric ton of other activity like steps, distance, intensity levels and even GPS so you can literally track how active or lazy you’ve been every day.
Working for yourself means you don’t have to be up at any certain time. Having kids means you do. I have trouble marrying these two things together. Often. I’ve heard about sleep cycle technology for a while, but it never seemed worth it to buy some sort of dedicated equipment and have to remember to put it on, charge it, etc… Needless to say I’m very interested, though. If you don’t know - UP can actually track your deep and light sleep cycles, combine it with how long you want to sleep and wake you up at the right time in your cycle so it doesn’t feel like a truck ran over you. Because when your kids wake you up every morning…it feels like a truck ran over you. Plus it just buzzes so it’s a nice silent alarm.
Finally – how does all this work? Well, it’s a waterproof, durable wristband that a cap pops off the end and plugs in to the headphone jack on your iPhone. Then it syncs all the data it’s collected and lets you track/share/etc… Also, it’s battery lasts for 10 days. Also, it’s only $99. I’ll be honest…I’m having trouble coming up with a reason not to get one. Combine price, ease of use, waking me up refreshed and keeping me active – it’s a win/win.
I am cheap though. But it would make a great birthday or Christmas present (hint to wife or family members). If you’re interested go check it out.
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I never thought I’d be looking for a way to scrounge up the extra money to buy a thermostat, and yet here we are. Nest looks like a fantastic product from former Apple employees Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. Packed with all kinds of sensors, gorgeous industrial design and intelligent software that learns your routines, you can tell the details have been sweated over for a long time. Take a look at the installation guide to see what I mean.
Long story short, these guys are tackling a huge problem with current iterations of thermostats and helping us to save energy and money, all while making it fun. Go check it out →
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Background gradients in CSS3 are a pain. Multiple syntaxes, color stops all over the place. And that’s just for a linear gradient. Anything other than that makes my head hurt. Thankfully Jumpzero has just released the beta of their Gradient App.
It’s a beautiful, simple app that makes it easy to select the exact colors you need, the direction and type of gradient, and then it spits out all the vendor prefixes you could possibly imagine. It will even do RGB and RGBA in addition to HEX codes. The UI is really great and I find myself actually enjoying making gradients. Who’d have thought?
I have no idea what Gradient will eventually cost, but you can grab it for free while it’s in beta. So go do it. Now!
]]>Before we jump in I’m assuming you know a bit about Structure. It lets you create pages based on URL’s not templates. But it does use templates. Confused yet!? Ok. If you’re creating a blog you will need to do a few things.
Create two templates - A “show a list of my entries” template and an “individual article” template.Here’s basic versions of what the two templates should look like:
<!doctype html>
<head>
<title>{exp:structure:titletrail separator="|"}</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" dynamic="no" limit="10"}
<article>
<h1><a href="{page_url}">{title}</a></h1>
{body}
</article>
{/exp:channel:entries}
{paginate}<div class="paginate">
View More: {pagination_links}</div>{/paginate}
{/exp:channel:entries}
</div><!--End Content-->
</body>
</html>
<!doctype html>
<head>
{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" limit="1"}
{if desc}<meta name="description" content="{desc}" />{/if}
{if keywords}<meta name="keywords" content="{keywords}" />{/if}
<title>{title} | Blog | {site_name}</title>
{/exp:channel:entries}
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" dynamic="no" limit="10"}
<article>
<h1><a href="{page_url}">{title}</a></h1>
{body}
</article>
{/exp:channel:entries}
<div id="comments">
<h2>Comments</h2>
{exp:comment:entries channel="blog"}
<blockquote>
<cite>
{url_or_email_as_author}<br />
{comment_date format='%M %d, %Y'}
</cite>
<article>{comment}</article>
</blockquote>
{/exp:comment:entries}
</div><!--End Comments-->
<h2>Form Header Here</h2>
{exp:comment:form channel="blog"}
<label for="name">Name</label>
<input name="name" id="name" type="text" />
<label for="email">Email Address</label>
<input name="email" type="text" id="email" />
<label for="comment">Write your message here.</label>
<textarea name="comment" id="comment">{comment}</textarea>
<input name="submit" type="submit" value="Submit" />
{/exp:comment:form}
{/exp:channel:entries}
</div><!--End Content-->
</body>
</html>
Doesn’t work at all. Why? Because if you have a URL like http://site.com/blog/P1 Structure doesn’t recognize the P1 segment and will either serve up a blank page or go to a 404. You could use Freebie and rebuild pagination yourself, but honestly…why? That’s too much work.
This doesn’t work either for the exact same reason. Structure doesn’t recognize the category URL’s. Obviously category pagination doesn’t work either. Again, you could use Freebie and rebuild categories with a bunch of if-statements. This would be a bit easier – but then if you needed to paginate categories with Freebie….well that sound you just heard was my head exploding.
Finally, because Structure uses the {page_url} variable instead of {url_title} EE seems to have a lot of trouble doing things like comments on the article page because it can’t find the Entry ID from the URL. My past solution is to make clients enter both the {url_title} and the {page_url} making sure they match. That’s a huge opportunity for mistakes, though and your clients have no idea what the heck you’re talking about.
To fix our category and pagination problem we are going to need to trick Structure. How do we do that? With a third template. Did you know that if Structure can’t find a {page_url}, but there is a template at the root of that directory it will try to read that instead? So in our blog example – if we setup our Structure page at http://site.com/blog we can go create a “blog” template group and copy the “list all your entries” template to the index template. Then we make a few modifications.
<!doctype html>
<head>
{if segment_2 == "category"}
{exp:channel:category_heading channel="blog"}
<meta name="description" content="
Blog entries in the {category_name} category." />
<title>{category_name} | Blog | {site_name}</title>
{/exp:channel:category_heading}
{if:else}
{redirect="404"}
{/if}
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
{if segment_2 == "category"}
{exp:channel:category_heading channel="blog"}
<h2>Viewing entries in the
<strong>{category_name}</strong> category.</h2>
{/exp:channel:category_heading}
{/if}
{if segment_2 == "" OR segment_2 == "category"}
{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" limit="10"}
<article>
<h1><a href="{page_url}">{title}</a></h1>
{body}
</article>
{paginate}<div class="paginate">
View More: {pagination_links}</div>{/paginate}
{/exp:channel:entries}
{if:else}
{redirect="404"}
{/if}
</div><!--End Content-->
</body>
</html>
We just add some if statements to check the segment for the category trigger in the URL. So now if Structure couldn’t find the http://site.com/blog/P1 or http://site.com/blog/category/category-name URL the fall back template will know what to do with it. Extra awesome bonus points: not only do pagination and categories work, but so does pagination in categories. I don’t know how I found this out, but it works great!
This one’s actually pretty easy and I think I ran across it in the Structure forums. There’s a special Structure tag to grab the ID out of the {page_url} so you can pass it to the comments and comment form.
<!doctype html>
<head>
{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" limit="1"}
{if desc}<meta name="description" content="{desc}" />{/if}
{if keywords}<meta name="keywords" content="{keywords}" />{/if}
<title>{title} | Blog | {site_name}</title>
{/exp:channel:entries}
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" dynamic="no" limit="10"}
<article>
<h1><a href="{page_url}">{title}</a></h1>
{body}
</article>
<div id="comments">
<h2>Comments</h2>
{exp:comment:entries channel="blog"
entry_id="{exp:structure:page_id}" parse="inward"}
<blockquote>
<cite>
{url_or_email_as_author}<br />
{comment_date format='%M %d, %Y'}
</cite>
<article>{comment}</article>
</blockquote>
{/exp:comment:entries}
</div><!--End Comments-->
<h2>Form Header Here</h2>
{exp:comment:form channel="blog"
entry_id="{exp:structure:page_id}" parse="inward"}
<label for="name">Name</label>
<input name="name" id="name" type="text" />
<label for="email">Email Address</label>
<input name="email" type="text" id="email" />
<label for="comment">Write your message here.</label>
<textarea name="comment" id="comment">{comment}</textarea>
<input name="submit" type="submit" value="Submit" />
{/exp:comment:form}
{/exp:channel:entries}
</div><!--End Content-->
</body>
</html>
Just add entry_id="{exp:structure:page_id}" parse="inward" to the exp:comment:form and exp:comment:entries tags. Like I said, easy. Once I started using this my clients didn’t have to put in two URL Titles anymore! Much better. Did you find this useful? Am I doing it totally wrong and there’s a better way? Let us know in the comments.
There are so many lessons we can gain from Diego Stocco’s ingenuity here. I’ll try to spell out a few for you. In the meantime, enjoy the music!