BlogmyQuery – BMQ

“Dream big, implement small.�

- twitter.com/simplebits

CSS3 Generator:

Handy tool that spits out the syntax and associated vendor-prefixed CSS3 for properties like border-radius, box-shadow, multi-column layout and more. Especially helpful are the supported browsers icons with pop-up version numbers for each property.

“Web design is not merely building. It’s not just designing. It’s not only the rest of the myriad disciplines and titles we all align ourselves with, but the culmination of all these things.�

- Jason Santa Maria, A Real Web Design Application

Bobby McKenna:

One of the most consistent and admired illustrators on Dribbble, Mr. McKenna just graduated from Notre Dame and is apparently looking for a job. Something tells me finding one won’t be a problem.

A month into using Tumblr for the blog and portfolio here, and I’m still happy I made the move. Something that had been bothering me was the redirect that was required for the homepage. I couldn’t point simplebits.com at Tumblr completely. If I had, over 10 years of files and old archives would’ve vanished. Setting up a subdomain avoids that, but I wanted the blog to be the main index of the site. So redirecting simplebits.com to stream.simplebits.com was the best I could do. A ProxyPass redirect might’ve solved the problem for “masking� the index—but Tumblr doesn’t support that.

I came up with a rather low-tech and sloppy solution for getting rid of the redirect that I thought I’d share in case any of you are in a similar boat. It’s sloppy, but it works well. Many thanks @frogandcode for helping with the scripty-ness.

Here’s how it works: I’m now running a crontab every five minutes that curl’s stream.simplebits.com and saves the HTML source to a temporary file on simplebits.com. The script then copies the temporary file to simplebits.com/index.html (the copy was necessary as if the curl hangs for any reason, visitors won’t get a blank file). And that’s it. The HTML source from my index on Tumblr works like a charm so long as I ensure all the paths to images and other files are absolute.

The other benefit here is that the homepage is now a flat .html file. It’s pretty damn snappy. The downside is that there’s a possibility of a post not appearing for 5 minutes after it’s published (unless you’re viewing stream.simplebits.com). But I can live with that until I’m posting breaking news.