Stupid Internet Trick #313: Track a Package
I don’t know about you, but I find tracking packages through the major carrier websites cumbersome. Tracking a package should be a simple, fast thing, yanno? Well, many thanks to Google for making it so. All you need to do is search for your tracking number, and you’ll get a link that says “track $carrier package $number”:
Click that link, and poof! You know where your package is.
I’ve been using this trick for years – probably read about it on Lifehacker or something – but I find that it’s something a lot of people don’t have in their database-o-internet-tricks. Enjoy!
Announcing the release of my first album, Hyphen!
In the next 2 weeks or so, I, your humble web geek, will be releasing my first album, Hyphen. It’s experimental dark ambient music, and it’s coming out on the Magnatune label.
How freakin’ cool is that?
The short version of the story goes something like this: I started 4 years ago, noodling around with sound software and publishing it on a podcast, and then one day listened to a new Magnatune dark ambient album and thought “hell, I make music like this, and better”. I sent off some tracks to the label, they came back with a yes, and here we are.
The album cover is Dani’s work, and it’s a confirmed awesome.
As I get to it, there will be more information on the podcast site, braindouche.net, but here’s what we know now: the release won’t be for a little while yet, but I’ll let you know when it’s live. It’ll be available for purchase on iTunes, Amazon MP3, and a few other places too, you can choose to get a subscription to Magnatune and get my album and a boatload of other great music for not a whole lot a month, and in the not-too-distant-future I will get some physical CDs printed up and let everyone know ahead of time, so we can have fun with preorders and whatnot.
Featured Project: Rancho Puma
Late last year, we were contacted by a fellow Pennsylvanian (well, we were still Pennsylvanians at the time) via our Etsy shop with a new-to-us logo request: design a retro, lounge-style logo for a home that didn’t yet exist.
Brief
The client and her family were searching for the perfect vacation home in sunny California. Daydreams and plans led to a name and a decorating scheme, and they wanted to surprise a family member with notepads, towels, etc. personalized with the vacation home’s signature feel. The client’s initial concept was for a highly detailed, illustrated logo with multiple elements. To keep costs down, and to maximize suitability for embroidery and screenprinting, we worked with the client to create a simplified logo that maintained the relaxing-with-a-martini, retro lounge feel that they desired.
Design
After a few preliminary sketches, I headed straight for our font library. I played with a wide variety of retro fonts (boy howdy, do I love Font Diner) to create a number of electrodoodles inspired by drive-in movie signs, refrigerator emblems, hotels in Wildwood, NJ, retro geometry, and the shows I watched on TV Land as a kid (back when TV Land was still Nick at Nite. Hell, back when Nick at Nite was just, yanno, nighttime programming on Nickelodeon.) In the end, I presented three concepts:
The bottom “bracketed” logo breaks all the damn rules. It’s hard to read. It wouldn’t embroider well. It’s hard to read. (Yes, that’s worth mentioning twice.) It’s still my favorite of the three, maybe because it looks like it should be the sign for a smoky underground lounge.
The center logo is sweet and saucy retro with a bit of slinky feline impact. Donna Reed meets Julie Newmar, if you will.
A variation of the top logo concept, with a splash of color, became the final logo, shown at the beginning of this post.
Embedding Flash in a WordPress Post
There’s a thread on the WordPress forum over at LinkedIn about embedding SWF files in WordPress. We’ve used Kimili Flash Embed quite successfully in the past on several occasions (for example, it’s what we used to embed the SimpleViewer galleries here), with the following code:
[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://URLOFSWFFILE.swf" width="800" bgcolor="000000" height="600" targetclass="flashmovie" fvars="xmlDataPath = http://URLOFXMLFILE.xml" ]
<a href="http://adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"><img src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif" alt="Get Adobe Flash player" /></a>
[/kml_flashembed]That’s copied from the HTML tab – I don’t generally use the Visual Editor, so I can’t speak to the output of the Kimili button.
But once I thought about it for a while, I realized that I’ve embedded SWF files in other places as well, with nothing more than some basic embed codes in the HTML editor, like so:
It’s a basic SWF slideshow with associated XML file, but it’s embedded with the help of no plugins at all using the following code:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://hotgluemedia.com/blog/slideshow.swf?file=http://hotgluemedia.com/blog/slideshows/main/slideshow.xml" width="260" height="179"> <param name="movie" value="http://hotgluemedia.com/blog/slideshow.swf?file=http://hotgluemedia.com/blog/slideshows/main/slideshow.xml" /><img src="banner.gif" width="260" height="179" alt="banner" /></object>The code must be pasted into the HTML editor (HTML tab, as opposed to the Visual tab). This blog is running WP3.0, so I don’t know if this will work on previous versions (although I may check that later if I have a moment.)
