Show Recent Posts, revisited

You might remember last week when I announced a RapidWeaver snippet, Show Recent Posts, I had been working on was released to the greater public. After some extensive feedback I thought I would dig my heels in and add a function that I certainly know I would want in the snippet, the ability to truncate posts to a predetermined length. I wasn't easy though but with some help from some friends I was finally able to pull it off. Just yesterday I let loose the second version of this RapidWeaver snippet, Show Recent Posts 2, which incorporates the new post shortening function. Enjoy!

New poem at Wiggly Wumble

A new poem showed up on Wiggly Wumble a few weeks back called Alphabet for Bedtime. It is a silly little peek into the bedtime routines of many children worldwide, as the poem makes it's way from A to Z. See if any of it rings true for you and your little ones.

Marten Claridge, seyDesign site of the week

Marten Claridge, crime writer and author of such titles as Nobodys Fool and Slow Burn, uses RapidWeaver and a well known seyDesign theme, Tuo for RapidWeaver. Marten's site was listed today as the seyDesign site of the week.

Merrifield is feeling Alpha

And finally, some really good news for all you Minolta hold-outs... well that's me and about 5 other people I'm sure. But anyhow, Merrifield Photography brings us some excellent news.

"Touching" opinions

So... I said there were a few things to get off my chest... we'll my curmudgeonly side shone through on our Mac productivity blog, nutMac.com in a post venting about the new iPods. Have a read here.

Getting the word out, one post at a time

You know it's nice to be busy, but from time to time you have to get a few things off your chest. I had been sitting on a few such things over the last few days. For starters, every one with an online store struggles to get the news out to their clients that something is new or updated. Blogs have been a real godsend in that department. The trouble is though, if your blog isn't the first thing that your clients see when they come to your site, they don't always get the information you want to convey. I used to have my blog as my home page on seyDesign a while back, which worked well but looked like crap. A blog does not make for a sexy landing page. So what I did was make a nice new landing page and buried the blog deeper in the site. This was sexy, but far fewer people were getting the news the needed about my products. My solution was to make a cute little implementation of SimplePie and put it in the sidebar of seyDesign's home page so that recent posts would always show up on the home page, off to the side where they won't dirty things up. Since I went to all the effort of coding this up to work in RapidWeaver, I decided to make it into a RapidWeaver snippet and share it with the rest of the RapidWeaver users out there. If you're interested in knowing more about it, check out this article.

Loghound releases FAQ Maker

My favorite client, John McLaughlin of Loghound.com released his latest RapidWeaver plugin, FAQ Maker. I am a huge fan of all of Loghound's plugins (this blog is made with RapidBlog), but what makes each and everyone of his releases special to me is that they use my icons. I am particularly proud of the icon I made for FAQ Maker, second only to the icon I made for RapidBlog.

If you are wondering exactly what FAQ Maker does, it's a RapidWeaver plugin page type that allows users to easily generate FAQ pages, kind of blog style. I have made a lot FAQ pages in the past, and building headers and anchors and so on is a tedious job. FAQ Maker does away with all of that and frees you up to just enter the question, then the answer and FAQ Maker takes care of all the rest. It can even mark new entries so visitors always know what's new on the FAQ.