a generous designer’s blog

I finally caught up with myself and finished uploading my web design inspiration source to Flickr.

I always watching a few CSS gallery website’s RSS and a year ago I decided to take screenshots myself of the pages I like to browse them offline.

One year elapsed and the collection ended up with more than 700 screenshots of different kind, beautiful and interesting sites. I started to think about a cool community (I Shot Your Design) site to share it (with great new functions), but I’m not really a web developer, so the first (half) step was to upload to Flickr. On Flickr I can tag them or organize them, and later I can also access them and build a website on it with the help of the Flickr API.

Every weekend I will update with a few new screenshots, feel free to browse my collection of more than 870 screenshots of beautiful and interesting websites.

I’ve recently ran into a problem with my VMWare Fusion virtual machine: our favourite operating system, Windows XP Professional had outgrown it’s space. I use it for testing the HTML and CSS in different browsers, like (our favourite ) Explorer 6 and 7, Opera, Firefox, etc., but sometimes I also must provide some help to my friends and family, who stucked on Windows, with other applications. That’s why 6 gigabytes isn’t just enough.

I think it should be a common problem, but the solution is not so simple. VMWare doesn’t provide an option for extending the disk’s size in the virtual disk’s settings. (In addition you have to read three help support pages on VMWare’s site.) Maybe they’re afraid of dataloss. That’s not gratuitous, partitioning and formatting never was a safe procedure, so I also recommend a backup, and do this only on your own responsibility. Important: do not try to use this if you are using your Boot Camp partition inside WMVare Fusion.

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Some background story:

I’ve outgrown my 200 Gb backup disk very soon, so I had to find a solution. In my old PC I had a few bigger sized disk. One 200 Gb with two partitions, an installed XP with lot of installed games on the first, and films and softwares on the second partition. Another one with 300 Gb SATA and two partitions; an installed Vista on the first, and films and softwares on the second. And at last one 120 Gb, old backups of my works and music library on it. The first two disk was almost full, but I didn’t use the Vista, and the old backups could go to the trash.

It wasn’t easy to allocate the data to the other disks and free up the 300 Gb disk for the time machine. It took me two nights and a lot of thinking . So I plugged in both, this and the time machine backup disk into my MacBook.

The problem:

First I tried to simply copy the backups.backupsdb time machine folder to the new, bigger drive, but it didn’t work. It prepared for a while (2,5 million files :S ) and ended up with an error code -50. I also tried to copy the folders manually (one-by-one) but it also failed. (ok, just started to try… )

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Recently on the official Google Webmaster blog, they wrote an intriguing post about url rewriting and how it affects the Google crawler.

If you read the post, you would be also upset about the fact that they prefer dynamic urls because it contains additional informations about the generated page. Like “language=it” obviusly means that the page has italian content and the parameters like “sid=123456789” could be ignored by the crawler. However clean URLs like “/it/pages/3” for example, or something that contain many keywords doesn’t help the crawler to clearly identify the content and it even hard to maintain if some new parameter comes in.

I think that clean URLs are not just for SEO. Clean URLs are for people who use the web and want to navigate easily, bookmark esily, or remember the link they’ve visited.

I think internet is for us, not for bots. If they crawler is so smart to “clean up” dynamic urls, then they should go for a more smarter one which can read clean URLs and compare with the content on the page.

I won’t use dynamic URLs just beacuse the Google maybe(!) has a hard time with crawling them. I use their search engine, their web analyzer, their instant messenger, and their new browser. Now I should make content like they want to? Beceause URLs are part of the content.

Maybe the whole post is a bad presentation of a good advice, and Google wanted to say: don’t overuse URL rewriting, don’t stuff it with fucking keywords because it’s worse than a dynamic one with the clear meaning of the parameters. From now on there’s only clean URLs and no search engine friendly URLs you SEO expert bastards!

I’m very proud of myself. I bought my first legal mp3 on Beatport. Ok, Beatport wasn’t the first step to get that song, but after I failed finding it on other resource sites I was very happy to buy that music. And it’s 320kbps. I don’t know what kind of DRMs are in it, but for now, I really don’t care.

Volume up, it’s Quick & Brite – Predator. It’s totally different from their previous album’s music.

One small step for us, but one giant leap from Apple. iTunes Store Hungary is ready (only) for iPhone.

I think Youtube is testing some higher quality video rendering, or something like that. Some folks noticed that if you add a query to the url, after the video id, you get a higher quality. It’s like a better DVD.

Just add “&fmt=18” (or 6) whitout the qoutes behind the video’s url and notice the different. Of course it works only if the original source had a bigger resolution too.

Spot the difference:
Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MjTb5A68VA
High Quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MjTb5A68VA&fmt=18

(And remember: don’t watch this alone )

SCADshorts: Pencil Face
Oh, I hate and love these surreal freak short films at the same time. Pencil face scares the shit out of me.

Japan’s got the winner vendor. It’s the Softbank and the iPhone will be ¥23,040. (via Szaku Magazin)

Today i needed to show an email that i’ve recently viewed in one of my mailboxes. I was completely unable to find it, and it was really annoying. I hoped there is a smart mailbox rule for this situation. And the good news is, there is one! How could i live without this before?

So here it is, how can you create a mailbox for the recently viewed emails:

It’s pretty easy. Just create a new Smart Mailbox from the “Mailbox” menu, give a name like Recently Viewed, and choose the condition “Date Last Viewed”. The rest is up to you. I chose “is in the last 3 Days”, it should  be enough for me, but of course you can select whatever you want, or add some plus condition like specifing a mailbox or something.

That’s why we love the mac.