Sam Soffes

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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So it turns out that iPhone app sales are growing twice the rate of iTunes music. That rocks for us programmers. I have always enjoyed music (and making my own music), but spent more time on computers because I was never the best. I was always an average player and people were more impressed with stuff I would make on the computer.

Especially as I got older, I could make money doing a website, but playing drums in my room for hours on end just left me sweaty. I still love music, but I'm glad I chose the more monetary of the two for a profession.

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So I put up one of the songs I had been working on because people on Twitter kept asking to hear what I was working on. I finally put it up on my site and got a huge response on Twitter.

I think it's pretty good. It's relaxing at least. I was looking through my old recordings and found some more ideas I had started. I think I'll try to get together a few of my more developed ideas and put out a CD (called The Experiment). Sounds fun to me. Besides, I like making stuff people enjoy using/listening to.

I'll be posting all of my music on my blog and over here. You can subscribe to my RSS feed if you want. Send me some email and let me know what you think.

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