Unfortunately, I’ve decided to remove the rotation on my contact form. I’ve always known that it made the text not render properly in Safari, but I never got around to doing anything about it.

Now, my contact form is just plain old straight. (But the super fun fun button is still there!)

I’ve also had a little spam problem. Originally, I just had a field hidden via CSS, that asked not to be filled in. If someone disobeyed the instruction and filled in the field, then they must have been a stupid spam bot. This worked at first, but not anymore.

To fix this, I simply swapped around the ‘name’ attributes, so spam bots will think the hidden field is actually the subject field, and be lured into filling it in. Let’s hope this will work!

Thank you Akismet for that pie chart. Why does my blog get so much spam?

Macs are great. They don’t crash too much, and you don’t have to restart them too often. However, it’s still good to shut down & restart them regularly.

After doing a bunch of work in Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, I opened up my iStat Menus Memory panel, and found that my Mac was using 2.3GB of swap files! (I’ve seen it use even more than that sometimes). My 4GB of ram isn’t enough, so it had to save some things on my hard drive as well.

This can slow down your computer, and uses up hard drive space!

Even after quitting all the  programs I had open, the swap files just stuck around.

When I restart my computer (after writing this blog post), my Mac will clean out all it’s swap files, and I’ll gain a bonus 2.3GB of hard drive space! (which means a lot, when you’re the sort of person that just keep finding ways to use it all up)

When Is Good just saved heaps of our time organising a dinner with some friends.

The quick survey, where people select what dates their available on, narrowed the whole month into 1 day we’re all available!

(In only a couple of hours — no hundreds of emails back and forth, ‘reply-all’ing everyone!)

No, I didn’t win… but I was in the top 50!

The McFarlane Prize is for Excellence in Australian Web Design. It’s judged based on accessibility, usability, the design, and the code behind it all. I submitted DouglasHeriot.com when it wasn’t even finished yet (it still isn’t, but it was even less-finished than it is now), and didn’t ever expect anything to come of it.

It was 6 months ago now when I got an email:

They said they were going to publish a book of the top 50, and I had 2 days to send in a few things! I sent them everything they asked for, and then didn’t hear anything back for another 0.4712 years (~6 months!) I assumed it wasn’t happening, as it was originally supposed to be ready in a fortnight, in time for the announcement of the winner.

Today, I got another email, saying that I can now get my free copy of the book!

You can see a preview on the publisher’s website. (I’m on page 42-43)

I can’t wait to see it!

You can also buy the book for AU$89.95.

Nothing more, nothing less… just an ‘Error’

Another reason I don’t use Windows. Actually, to be fair, Mac isn’t immune to random errors either (but usually a little less random)

Bonus points — How many times can you spot the Microsoft logo?

No, I’m not talking about my blog

I don’t really want to unsubscribe from Smashing Magazine, but I think I have to — I don’t have enough time to read most of it anyway.

Here’s an article that I came across that pretty much sums up my opinion on posting too much:

http://writetodone.com/2009/01/17/7-reasons-posting-less-frequently-can-increase-your-blogs-popularity/

In related news, my RSS reader shows a record-breaking low in unread items, after pruning back my subscription list. That feels a lot more satisfying than seeing 200 or so. (Although it’s not as bad as someone I saw with tens of thousands of unread items…)

This is one thing that always annoyed me after switching from Freehand to Illustrator. I just couldn’t work out how to extend a path — eg. you draw an open path, then want to come back and add some more on the end. In Freehand, you would just select the end point, then use the pen tool to keep drawing as usual, but in Illustrator this would just start a new path.

Method #1 — Add Anchor Points Tool

This is a pretty bad one. My first solution was to just use the Add Anchor Points Tool to add a bunch of points just before the end, and then drag them around to where I really wanted them to go! Not fun.

Method #2 — Join

My next idea was to just make a new path, then join the 2 together. It works, but you don’t get to see the bit in the middle until the end. This is especially annoying if you want to make it curvy.

Method #3 — The Pen Tool

This is the proper way, that I eventually found by accident, and then in the help files as well. It’s like what I was originally doing in Freehand, but slightly different. Instead of using the ‘Direct Selection Tool’ (white pointer) to select the end point, you use the regular Pen Tool to select the endpoint first, then you can keep drawing like usual!

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? Am I the only one that didn’t know this already?

The 15th of October in 1582 was a very special day. For fun, try typing it into iCal on your mac. (From the View menu select “Go To Date…”, and enter in 15/10/1582). If you’re in month view, you’ll find it’ll show you September, an no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find October of 1582! If you go to week view however, you’ll find October, but something will be wrong…

There’s 10 days missing!

I can’t really explain it all, but there’s a pretty interesting article on the Panic Blog that does it pretty well.

Well yes, it’s actually 2010 now, but it was supposed to be 2009.

It finally matches my website! It still needs a bit of work, refining the style of the sidebar, (and maybe even adding some animation to it, like my old theme).

So much stuff has happened in the last year since I wrote a post. Sometime soon (maybe) I’ll write something about it…

Update: Oops… I forgot to update the copyright notice to 2010. To fix that, I replaced it with some PHP code to always display the current year, so I never have to remember again! echo date('Y');