“In a letter dated July 22, and also posted online by the Times, the FBI told Wikipedia it must remove the bureau’s seal because the FBI had not approved use of the image.

“The FBI has not authorized use of the FBI seal on Wikipedia,” the letter says. “The inclusion of a high quality graphic of the FBI seal on Wikipedia is particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting” copying and reprinting of the seal’s image.

The FBI’s deputy general counsel, David Larson, cities a particular law that says duplicating an official “insignia” is illegal without permission.

But Wikipedia strikes back on that point, saying the FBI redacted the most important part of that U.S. code, which defines an insignia as “any badge, identification card, or other insignia.”

So , in a show of solidarity, here’s the seal in question:

Maybe we’ll get our own cease and desist. From the FBI.

I have Leap. It’s a great app- a musthave for anyone who works with images and graphics. (read Wendy’s review called Getting Organized: Deep. Yep. and Leap. by Ironic) But right now, I  just want to scan some EPS files in this #$@%^& folder!  I know the thing I want is  in that folder.
It is and  I don’t want to launch another app to find it.
Why, oh why, can’t .eps files have a thumbnail, #$@%*&$&?

I can’t be the only one with this problem…

I googled “eps thumbnail mac” and found a few interesting things:

• the EPS QuickLook Plugin.
• I found out that Mac OsX has something called Quicklook.
• AND now I understand why Apple didn’t bother to add a slideshow function to Preview.

Yeah, ok, I admit. I’m an id10t.

It is pretty cool.

SO, first-  Quicklook.
To quote Apple-

Opening files is so last year.

(Why does Apple insist like sounding like pre-teen Valley Girl? Might explain their continuing mean-girl fight with Adobe)
Sneak peek entire files without opening them. Just select the files and press the spacebar.

Alternatively, if you want to skim through a folder just click on the funny looking icon, the one that looks like a screen hemmed in by double bars.

or use the dropdown menu as illustrated

EPSQL Plugin by Eternal Storms Software

Oh jeez, how could I have missed out on this? Its a wonderful thing, solves a lot of issues for me. Turns out I can even Quicklook email attachments. This is what I get for protecting my workflow at all costs which must be so completely out of date.

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Wordpress Beta Plugin

I first installed the Wordpress Beta Plugin on one of madbadcat.org’s test sites and upgraded to the latest build of 3.0.

Click to see larger image

The upgrade was really easy. I do, however,  suggest that you run the upgrade on a parallel site before upgrading your live site. And backup your database.

Wordpress 3.0 Dashboard

The 3.0 dashboard has a nice platinum color scheme and each admin screen now has a little button that reads “screen options”.

Click to enlarge

Clicking on this expands a list of check boxes that allows you to customize the information displayed. You can choose, for example, to display (or not) the category descriptions. There are similar options in the other admin screens.

Click on any of these images for examples of these new options:

Posts Admin Option

Category Admin Options

Creating A Multi-site Network

I couldn’t find an area for multi-site management so after some research I came to think I had to do a fresh install to set it up correctly. (To be fair I only skimmed the article. Blame it on my ADHD)

So I made a special install (Madbadcat.org/go) and imported all the filler content I used to set-up sites. (Pilfered from Studiopress.com and WP-Candy’s most excellent workflow suggestions for wordpress designers.)

Before I could continue I had to decide on a theme- preferably a magazine theme- that:

1. …wouldn’t make me do extra work to create thumbnails. I love the Studiopress themes but I hate the tim-thumb deployment and as someone who runs very image-heavy site, the idea of having extra steps involved with creating a post thumbnail just sets me teeth on edge. Its ok for some of my clients who post one or two articles a week but I post 1 or 2 articles a day (or more) on various sites before I start my day as a freelance graphic designer.
2. …didn’t require I read a manual to install. Thesis and WooThemes are gorgeous- all of them. I have installed them for very happy clients. I ahven’t used them enough to be super-familiar with tehm and, well, blame it on teh ADHD again, but I just didn’t want the distraction of having to awaken some dormant knowledge somewhere in my lizard brain. I wanted something simple but not too simple. Tall order, right?

Magazine Basic Theme By Bavotasan.Com

Then I ran across this Magazine Basic Theme by Bavotasan.com. Check it out in action here- great layout, clean design and very VERY user-friendly. The best part? It’s free. (This theme requires its own review- coming soon)Digitalapplejuice.com may be swapping themes over next holiday weekend.

Click on any of these thumbnails for screenshots of the Magazine Basic Theme’s backend:

Creating a Network

Step 1: You have to edit the wp-config.php. (For more info about how and why, go here)

Step 2: Update the .htaccess as directed by Dashboard > Network .

Click to Enlarge

The database set-up for the additional Wordpress install looks like this:

Click to enlarge

I was very excited at the prospect of managing multiple installs. For many projects, and Digitalapplejuice in particular, it would be great to set up the content in sections instead of categories- sort of like meta-categories. I got even more excited when i peaked in the database to see how the additional blog was identified. Notice that the creation of additional sites gets a BlogID number.

Apparently, multi-site  navigation is not something planned for Wp 3.0,  according to the Scribu of the WP-Testing Digest. I am sure that someone smarter than me will design a plugin to accomplish this.

Wordpress 3.0 is scheduled for release in May of 2010.

I cannot wait.

For more information about the options in the Dashboard > Network, visit this Codex page.

What others are saying:

How To Create A Better Meta Box In WordPress Post Editing Page

Quick tips: Enable menu support for your themes in WP 3.0

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I was also impressed with HP’s customer service. When my printer needed new print heads less than a week out of the box, HP overnighted me a new printer, requesting I send the old one back in the arriving box. They also offered 1 year product replacement insurance.

So, why would I get rid of such a great machine?

1. The ink has a shelf-life. No kidding. Like milk, hp vivera inks have an expiration date. If you try to use these inks past that specified date, you will get an ugly message that says that continuing to use said inks will void your warranty. I happened to buy inks last fall to have on hand, not realizing that they expired in January 2010. Until I installed them. Oh yeah, and by the way, the only way to know when the expiration date is? You have to open the sealed packaging. At least milk prints the date on the outside of the packaging.

2. Did I mention the ink is really expensive?

3. The Vivera inks are water and scratch resistant, fade resistant to over 100 years. The catch? Only when printed on HP products.

The Ultrachrome K3 Ink for my Epson 2400 also claims the same caveats- color permanence and stability on premium Epson products. The big surprise is that Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks are stable, water resistant, and produce true colors on just about any good quality paper and canvas stock I have tested.

Which leads me to my final and most important reason:

4. The Elegance Velvet Fine Art Paper and Lyve Canvas from BreathingColor.com. Order a trial quatity of any of their products and they will include a sample of their papers and canvas. The richness and depth of the colors are breathtaking.

So, I bid my HP 9180 a civil adieu. I can’t say I will miss it much because I haven’t used it much after having thrown out over $200 worth of inks in January  of this year.

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It seems that Google has responded to results of numerous studies over the years that concluded that even a half second delay in delivering content will result in shorter. For instance, as part of their own internal experiment, Google slowed down their own search results by 100 to 400 MILLISECONDS, resulting in a drop of follow-up searches. The number of searches per user of the slow search dropped by 0.2% – 0.6%

Doesn’t sound like much, right? In spite of my instant and visceral anti-big brother reflex, i have to acknowledge that all websites depend on google. 57% of our traffic comes from search engines and a whopping 73% of all search engine traffic comes from Google.

YSLow

Firefox has an extension called YSLow

As described on that add-onpage:

“YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint”

Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

I have always had this installed but it has been a while since I checked out own site. The last time I checked, I had a Studiopress-based theme installed. We passed with flying colors. This time, we failed. Miserably.

After analysing the webpage, the Yslow plugin offers specific suggestions for increasing performance.

Click for larger image

Click for larger image

Server-side Compression

One of the suggestions Yslow will make is to compress all the files before they leave your server. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this: this:

Through your cpanel. Go to cPanel > Advanced Tools > Optimize Website

Click for larger image

Click for larger image

For a better understanding what exactly gZip is and what it does to wordpress, read this great article (and read the comments that folow) GZip Compression and Wordpress by Raju of Techpp.com

How GZIP encoding saves bandwidth and improves performance?
The idea behind gzip encoding is to reduce the amount of data being transferred over the network. In the example above, the size of the data was reduced by over half. Not only does the data transmit more quickly, bandwidth consumed will be less as well.  - quote from GZip Compression and Wordpress by Raju

Wordpress plugins:

For a good overview of wordpress performance and caching plugin, read Codefusion’s 20 Essential Wordpress Caching And Performance Plugins. The post is well-illustrated with screenshots of each plugins admin and a fbrief but informative description of its function.

After reading the CodeFusion article, I have decided to take Hot Linked Image Cacher for a spin. This plugin can be found here.

Even though WP Super Cache has been my plugin steroid of choiceAfter some more research, I decided I would also investigate:

Scripts Gzip: Wordpress plugin that merges and compresses the CSS and JS links on the page. Fewer taps on the server, less data to transfer. That should make Google happy.
Plugin Homepage: http://mindreantre.se/program/scripts_gzip/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scripts-gzip/

W3 Total Cache Plugin: This plugin  seems to accomplish all of the above. I will have to try this as well.
Plugin Homepage: http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2009/08/26/w3-total-cache-plugin
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

I have no concrete “go to” answer to offer; every website will probably require a performance enhancing scheme tailored to its individual set-up, theme, plugin, server specs, etc.

In our case, we have 39 separate javascripts loading. Hmmm… A lot of them are associated with wordpress plugins and as such easy to pare down, but the Arthemia Premium theme itself has many scripts associated with it. SO that is something to consider..

I had been using WP Super Cache with no problems on a variety of wordpress sites.In this new set-up, with the Arthemia Premium Theme it just isn’t enough. I might start this time with the W3 Total Cache Plugin first and go from there…

The first thing to be deleted will be the Wybiya Plugin. Gawd, that plugin is slow…

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