if you get to the two-minute marker, you’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking.

I bumped into Ping.FM a few days ago and I thought that was pretty awesome.  Ping.FM is a syndication system for your blog that you can distribute your posts across multiple social networking systems.  The problem is that there’s no easy way to create that bridge between your WordPress blog and your Ping.FM account.

PingPress FM is a bit of a lame joke on the stupid like me.  It has bragging rights saying that it has “custom triggers” without going into much detail on why you can’t create a trigger!

PingFM by Matt Jacob is a a bit wonky because it looks like the world is solved for me.  But after a half dozen attempts, it doesn’t feed the Ping.FM either.

If you look through the forums, you’ll see others scratching their heads with the same problem.  The authors of these plug-ins have abandoned their code and the new version of WordPress don’t work.

Then some smarty-pants suggested Shorten2Ping and guess what..?

It’s alive!!!!

My cell phone has been a piece of crap for months now.  It was one of those clam shells that you flipped open and the lid had a micro-sized screen and the base had a micro-sized keypad.  I’d take a picture with the crappy-cam and the pixels were bigger than the image.

My contract had expired with Verizon back in December sometime and I spent months driving to their retail store in Maple Grove scratching my balding head wondering what I should do about replacing it.

Visiting Verizon guaranteed 19 year old girls, (all of them blonds) would gather around me giggling and pointing out the features of future candidates of what product will sure to be flopping around in my pants pockets for the next two years.  I hate Verizon.  I only use them because they’re not as bad as AT&T, Sprint, Virgin and T-Mobile.

One of my favorite things to do on a lazy afternoon: Visit Costco!

You gotta get there between 12:00PM and 3:00PM!!  Don’t forget! You see; that’s when all of the food tasters are out in full-force hawking fatty foods dripping in salty sauces.  It’s one of my favorite things to do, aside from taking naps, and mowing the lawn with nail clippers.  It’s just plain fun!

Monday, I opted out of a nap and “lawn mowing w/clippers” and headed on over to Costco: “It’s time to graze”.

Only this time: I detoured my path towards the cell-phone kiosk.  A good looking guy named Sean was hawking for a handful of cell phone carriers including Verizon.

I found my new pocket-pal: The Samsung Intensity-2.

In the end, I signed a two-year contract with Verison with the Samsung Intensity II for a whopping total of $13.600, including Minnesota sales tax. That’s right- I bought this boat-anchor for thirteen-bucks.

Make no mistake. This phone weighs more than my crappy old clamshell.

The Costco package included a Bluetooth ear-bug, a carry-sock, a clipped hand-strap, a battery-charger for both the phone and the ear-bug, user manuals and a USB cable for both charging and networking with your laptop.

I’ve opted out of the “social connectivity” that Verizon is offering for now. I’m not going to expense the idea that I want my cell phone to track my every move of my waking-life. I have enough time in front of the social networking sites and my pocket-rock doesn’t need to be included.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

Took me about sixteen hours, but I did it!

The Wedding Chapel Bridals owner took me aside last Wednesday after loving my “rotating header” idea.  She publishes her own magazine, complete with ads and everything!  She has a ton of vendors she works with and wanted all of them to be on the website.

We kanoodled out heads and came up with a button that would simply say WCB Prefers.That’s easy enough.  But she pulled out her papers and says; “Have you ever heard of Kleinfeld’s?”  Of course I haven’t – I’m not in the wedding business!  She pulls out her paper work and shuffles over to her computer and pulls up Kleinfield and says; “Look at this page here!  Can you do something like that?”

Well, ya!  But  I’m thinking – this is a TON of work!  I can’t copy their stuff.  So everything has to be original!

So, I’m about 99% finished.  The end product?!  I blow doors on Kleinfeld’s.  Those losers need some EnK in their life…

You can check out the actual size of this for the details – the file is flipping huge!

Originally, the gray band at the bottom was for a single word.  But, she called and added another eight or nine categories and insisting on adding more words to various categories.  I had to start over.

I combed through the Internet looking for images that would be best to represent the category, did a lot of cropping and shaping and completed the set.  Next was to wade through each of the subcategories.  For example, she only has one videographer listed, so that lucky guy gets a full page.  She has six or seven vendors for the category of “Rehearsal Dinner”, so they only get an icon.

I have to finish Honeymoons, Gown Preservation and Jewelry and finally install an advertising manager into the site to manage all of it automatically.

I’m rather impressed.  The end look came out nicely!

I’m in between projects.  Consequently, I’m on cleanup duty.  These are all of those tiny tidbits that should be taken care of and haven’t.

When I first started working on the Wedding Chapel Bridals site, they had this really convoluted mess of a webface.  I downloaded the entire site and I had hundreds, if not thousands of pathnames, littered with photo images all over the place.  It was just a nightmare to manage.

Cleaning it up, I original decided to go with a “chocolate” themed.  Chocolate colored weddings are “the rave” as a simple revolt from the traditional white.  When the tablecloths and the cake is all chocolate, the bride wearing white really stands out. 

Then the client showed up with her new wallpaper.  Her request was that the exact same wallpaper being used inside of her boutique be used on the website as well.  That’s not a problem, but then she has this paper ruffle she wants to use as a wallpaper trim.  Still, no problem.

I rewrote the entire site, used the paper ruffle to serve as buttons and decided that pink would better compliment her wallpaper.  All of that worked just fine.  Today, I finally got the rotating header image plugged in and working.  I’ve tried a few other javascripts, even a few of my own – none of them worked.  Last night, I found nivolider, a javascript package that looked fairly easy to install.

I called  the client, all excited.  She spent ten minutes saying nothing much beyond: “Ooooo!!  OOOOO!! I like…OOOooo!”

Another happy customer.

For years now, I’ve stored all of my passwords in my head.   I never write ‘em down and I rarely forget them.  I typically went on the idea of using passwords as thematic: a.) All passwords for my personal accounts on all of my servers are the same, b.) Passwords for my home use were the same, c.) Passwords for my email accounts were the same and d.) Passwords for miscellaneous were the same.  If you cracked one of my passwords, doesn’t give you carte blanc to everything related to me.

I also did a heady job of password design.  Years ago, when PGP was all of the rage, my password was over sixteen characters long, a combination of upper and lower characters, numbers, spaces and punctuation.  This sounds elaborate and it’s only cosmetic.  A password that long only applies to complexity beyond my grandmother’s postal address:

3452 Main St. North, Deep Haven, Minnesota 55256

PGP allowed me to use a password like that – and while it took me a couple of seconds, to write – it was highly effective as my personal PGP key.

Now, in website design, I’m offering services to the client that only compels me to introduce more passwords in my feeble brain, and it drives me crazy – err “crazier”.  One client, and I’m generating a couple dozen passwords, including utilitarian mailboxes, Facebook and Twitter accounts and those are the ones created just for myself!

I have one emailbox that I’ve been using, purely for passwords.  If I create a password for myself, I email the credentials to that mailbox.  If I forget – I simply open the emailbox in question, clean out the spam that it has collected and retrieve it by doing a search:

Search: Facebook, “Client Exhibit D”

But that made me lazier (and crazier).  I simply stored the passwords for each client on a flash drive and looked them up locally. Until one day, I lost the flash drive.

To manage the password fiasco, I had to do something new.  I’ve introduced two new ideas: a.) I created a master password list on Google’s Gmail account and b.) I incorporated My Last Pass into my Mozilla.  LastPass is pretty good because it will generate passwords far more complex that idiocy that I’ve been creating in my head.  My brain says;

Hrmm… Facebook password…Ummm…  “ILoveLucy3More”  LastPass will generate a password of pure gobbley-gook: “CIn4s2DjEa”.

However, once you’ve invested your time with LastPass, you’re almost guaranteed to be stuck with it for all time.  Nobody else plays well with each other.

Hear me now and hear me roar:

Password Managers should play well with other Password Managers!

They don’t, and LastPass is no exception.

If you get tired of LastPass, you can’t simply dump an XML or a *.CSV file to be imported into Password Gorilla (piece of crap) or “Passwords and Encryption Keys” (another piece of crap), KeePass (a marginal piece of crap) or “Password Manager” (another piece of crap).

Password Gorilla will allow to to import another Password Gorilla generated XML file, and likewise with the others.  Last Pass will allow you to export a proprietary CSV file that only it can read or you can do the worst thing the world and export it to Mozilla Firefox.

There is plenty of information on Snadboy’s “Revelation” password manager, but it’s clunky too.  If you export your password file from Last Pass to a CSV file, you can convert it (allegedly) using Onyxbit’s converters called “stencil tools“.  I managed to use Onyxbit’s more crudely designed tool called “cvs2lif“, but it creates an output caled “sdtout” with no further instructions on what do to with that.

I think the lesson learned was to decide on a password manager of your choice, and decide to stick with it.   You’re knowing full well that it isn’t something you can change down the road.   Otherwise, you’ll have to begin from scratch until something new comes along.

The mega-popular CMS System is reporting a major security breach with their product.  From my “security alert” email box, the folks at Joomla! sent me this:

[20100501] – Core – XSS Vulnerabilities in Back End

Posted: 27 May 2010 05:00 PM PDT

• Project: Joomla!
• SubProject: All
• Severity: High
• Versions: 1.5.17 and all previous 1.5 releases
• Exploit type: XSS Injection
• Reported Date: 2010-May-13
• Fixed Date: 2010-May-28

Description

Back-end user can inject javascript in various administrator screens.

Affected Installs

All 1.5.x installs prior to and including 1.5.17 are affected.

Solution

Upgrade to the latest Joomla! version (1.5.18 or later)

Reported by Riyaz Ahemed

Contact

The JSST at the Joomla! Security Center.

That’s a pretty pathetic breach if you ask me.  You can download the “repaired” version of Joomla! here.  Or, you can ditch them altogether and simply install an unbreached WordPress here.

My first design for Wedding Chapel Bridals, I went for a “chocolate wedding” theme.  I used dark browns and heavy maroons that allows bright white wedding gowns to really pop on the screen.  The bridal boutique was bombed with customers gushing how much they loved the website.  “Chocolate Weddings” are very chic and they’re the “in thing”.

After a few months, the client approached me and asked if I could jump ahead and do something creative: Match her newly selected wallpaper patterns and create the same look on-line. This was the second challenge that I’ve done: My first was my designs for the popular piano/sports bar Tickles in downtown Minneapolis. In that project, I used the exact same deep greens and heavy woods that are everywhere throughout the bar. In fact, the lamp in the website is the exact same lamp that’s standing on a wall sconce in the performance auditorium of the bar.

The client gave me her wallpaper samples, cloth swatches and stuffed everything in an office tray and asked me to do the best I could.

I found the wallpaper company on-line, and the textured paper I simply scanned in digitally.

Then I did an overhaul of the buttons along the left-hand side by squeezing the textured material into a simple low-bar with an invisible background. For example:

This became the base of the buttons listed along the left-hand side to look like:

With the invisible background; the visual display of the wallpaper becomes an innocent presentation of exactly what the client will produce on her own walls within the boutique.  The casual laissez faire font presents a comfortable smug humor with a slight touch of panache. I extended that subtle sense of humor by using a whimsical graphic for the quotes.

The client emailed me a list of testimonials of her clientèle and wanted a dedicated page on the website.  Instead of using a rigid traditional approach, I banked on an artistic flair with humor:

Note the background opacity and the frame-design:

The rumor is that the client would like to see more pinks and Venetian Reds which should be easy to accommodate.   I want to add a flash imaging in the header area, but I’ll work on that as I progress on with other projects.

This project was done 100% with Gimp, which is fast becoming my favorite image design software.

The entire project can be seen at the Wedding Chapel Bridals and you can critique for yourself.

Be well!

Initially, Gerry Frascone wanted a simple shingle for his new plumbing business. I wrote the skin of the website in less than four hours with the agreement that he would simply pay me as a tip. The guy’s young and he and his wife are pregnant, I’m happy to just do the job pro-bono if I know they’ll sprout a nice check for the effort. However, the issue of content is problematic if the customer doesn’t have the technical skills to layout what they’d like to say on their website. The need to have a gallery of plumbing projects, an area to fill out a Contact Me form for customers – these become Content issues that a non-technical person could struggle with designing their website.

Gerry, and his older brother Mike, designed the first attempt on a GoDaddy Website Tonight, but immediately ran into problems. Layout, alignment and other issues riddled their efforts. And of course, the issue of technical savvy was a problem.

convinced them to go with a WordPress engine which eliminates the technical hurdles and the client could simply click and chose what media they want displayed. I ran through a whole brand new skin and then stripped out the “blog stuff” like Categories and Archives and then put it up on the site. I added Image Galleries and rotator SWF files and then put an “advertising bar” on the right sidebar that Gerry could use to let his website make a little chump change on its own.

Received from Michael Frascone today at 3:00PM:

Hi Mark – it looks perfect now, thank you so much! Do we access the server as we did before to edit content? I love it and I’m sure JJ will too.
Thank you!

He’s champing at the opportunity to get into the Admin side to begin teaching his little brother how to manage his own website’s content. I wish Gerry, his beautiful wife and their soon-to-be born papoose all of the happiness and the best of luck in the world. And, I have to thank them for their generous tip.

EnK