Sam Soffes

So I am a huge Quicksilver fan! I use it constantly. You can do so much with it. Since I love keyboard shortcuts so much, so it's probably one of my favorite apps. It is the first thing I download and install when I get a new Mac.

Anyway, there is this thing called Twitter that is pretty cool. I use it a lot. I was thinking about something and remembered seeing a little action someone had written to twitter from Quicksilver. I thought I'd download it and try it out.

I must say, it's pretty cool. I still enjoy using my favorite client, TweetDeck more, but for posting something quick, it's kinda cool to use Quicksilver. I found this script that enables Tweet as an action in Quicksilver. I thought It would be neat to add Growl support to it (as it takes several seconds for it to actually work).

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So @aadom on Twitter said it would be a good idea to podcast all of my music for The Experiment. I thought that sounded like a good plan, so I did. You can check out the podcast feed or the music area to subscribe.

I also put up a new song I've been working on for years up tonight called Years. This is the song that I play when I pick up a random guitar in a guitar store or I'm just bored sitting around my apartment picking away mindlessly. I think it's turning out nicely so far. I'm digging the piano a lot. Give it a listen.

Update: I no longer maintain this podcast. You still see all of the music on SoundCloud though.

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So someone just called me at 1:30am and woke me up. They were trying to order pizza from Pizza Shuttle in Norman, OK about 40 minutes from my apartment.

I get this all of the time. Whenever I get a call from a 405 number that I don't know I just assume they are trying to order pizza. I usually tell people you meant to dial 354-4440 instead of 365-4440 (my number). It's pretty annoying to say the least.

I've tried to mess with people and take orders before, but it never really works out. One time I tried it the girl said the driver locked her out of her house and she needed the phone number of his girlfriend or something like that. I just hung up.

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So I recent improved how my blog looks and works on iPhone in just a few lines of code. The iPhone web browser is awesome, but for large websites, it is really hard to read something without panning around vertically and then scrolling horizontally. Solving these issues will make your site way more useable on Mobile Safari.

• Add an iPhone specific stylesheet. Something you will probably want to do is make your site narrower. The wider your layout is, the smaller everything has to be. It is much easier to scroll just vertically than vertically and horizontally. Something else to watch out for is mixing font sizes between px and em. You'll probally get some weird scalling issues if you mix units. You might also watch out for positioning issues due to Mobile Safari's scaling.

  You might also want to adjust your font sizes a bit. I know I had to make my footer a tad smaller. In your case, you might want to make important things like navigation larger and easier to tap. Feel free to check out my iPhone specific stylesheet at http://samsoffes.com/css/iphone.css.

• Add a viewport meta tag. This will tell Mobile Safari how to intelligently scale to fit your page. It's super easy to do and it will help a lot. My iPhone stylesheet makes my site 320px wide so I set my viewport to 320 to give a new bit of padding around my main content area. Here's the code:

Remember if you have something that is wider than your viewport, it will automatically expand, so be sure to resize it in your iPhone specific stylesheet.

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I was playing with the new Twitter last night when I got the idea to redo my blog colors to match my my Twitter profile colors. I got kinda bored and and decided to add pagination to my blog.

I like how my pagination is simple. Unlike Digg and Google, I decided to just have two buttons and an indicator of where you currently are. In a blog sort of format, I doubt you'll be wanting to rapid advance through the pages, so I removed the feature to keep it simple and why build something if only 5% of your users use it? Keeping it simple.

What do you think? Like the new stuff? O wait no comments yet, ha. I guess once I add commenting, I will have somewhat of a full featured blog. We'll see how much free time I have this weekend to build it. I was thinking about using Disqus, but I want a simpler solution and looks really clean, which isn't easy to achieve with the Disqus API.

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