Those of you tired of having plain text boxes on your website, but don’t want a monolith text editor like CKeditor and TinyMCE, I may have the perfect solution for you. I give you the first PHP Txt2Tags parser. Txt2Tags is a very simple and intuitive document markup language that makes writing formatted documents easy and quick. If your curious and want to see what I’m rambling about then you’ll want to run over to my Github repo and read the README just below the directory listing. It will go over the syntax, and how to parse Txt2Tags markup in your own PHP application using the library.
Go Get the Source
Mailing lists are a very important tool. They allow a business to stay in contact with they’re customers and clients. Running a mailing list is a challenge for small business today. There are solutions out there, but there hard to come by, and in some cases, outrageously expensive. At the best of times they’re cheep, but suffer from bad design or excessive complexity. At the worst, they are uselessly complex, constrained to run directly on the operating system of a dedicated server, requiring a specialist to support and run the application. These are not solutions, in fact I find them harmful to the businesses that use them. The lack of good mailing list software leaves a gaping hole in this part of the software market. Being the liberal mind I am, I’d like to see if filled with good, open source software.
For the last 6 months I’ve been working on a solution to fill the gap; Automailer is a server-side php5 application designed to allow small businesses to easily setup and support mailing lists without having to deal with ugly, complex, or expensive programs. Modeling the deployment model of WordPress, Automailer is installed by uploading it to a server and running the installer presented first use. Once the install is complete Automailer and a Cron job is set up to curl Automailer’s Cron script, it’s ready to go. With Automailer users can create any number of mailing lists, recipients, and messages. Once a mailing list is set up, recipients can sign up or be added, messages can created and dated to be sent at anytime. Automailer is configured completely within the application, and does not need a specialist or dedicated server.
To find out more about Automailer checkout the git hub repo.
You can download the source at git hub too.
The Message List
The Message Editor
I’m working on a side project for a friend. I’ll be hosting it here at blaze.thinktankdesign.ca in till he gets his own domain. I’m still working on the html css concept but I’ll update this post when I’ve activated the new theme. For now here’s a pic that is to scale; 1:1.
HTML5 and CSS3 look very exciting, and is defiantly a game changer for us web designers. I felt like a spoiled child on Christmas morning when I read the spec for the first time; getting all the toys I wanted. Things like round corners and shadows are nice and make designing a lot faster. But I that’s all peanuts compared to HTML5 video, offline storage, and drag and drop functionality baked right into the browser. Sounds all really awesome, and it isn’t even half the stuff that’s included in the two new specs. But wait, where’s the support?
Mozilla, Opera, Apple, (and others) are all working with the new specs, tinkering with their browser engines to support the new additions, in a fact a handful of CSS3 functions are already in release browsers. But then there’s Microsoft.
Continue reading →
I was thinking about a logo for a small film company. Here’s where that idea took me…
If you happen to be in the design industry you need to head of to Tutorial9.net before November 16th. You you do the good guys over there are handing out an awesome design goodies bag for us all. It contains around 400 premium icons, 4 pretty snazzy WordPress themes, there are also some Tumblr themes for those who have a blog with them. That is cool, but they’ve done better even still. Among other stuff in the pack there is also a free subscription to Tutorial9 Essentials. Anyway grab it while you can or you may miss it.
Head over there now…
Its been a bit since my last post; Ive been very busy lately with Clients. Today I’ve got a new wire frame to show off.
It’s called Mox and I like is so much I might rebuild ThinkTank’s home on this layout.
Comments are appreciated 
Firefox (Minefield) 3.7a1pre Build 20091006044117 now features what everyone was waiting for; Now when you open multiple tabs in Firefox, they show up in the taskbar exactly like Internet Explorer Tabs.
Firefox and Superbar Integration
My also starting to notice GUI changes here and there. For example the tab’s Icon now displays a circle that fills in as the page loads.
Loading status on tabs
You can try it out yuor self if you have windows 7.
Heres a link to the download the latest nightly from Mozilla -> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-3.7a1pre.en-US.win32.installer.exe
