Beckism.com

I’ve been doing some writing exercises, and I’m finally back in the short story zone. So keep a weather eye out for the first piece of new short fiction on Beckism.com in quite a while.

Obviously, this post itself is largely pointless (”oooh, fiction is coming! Be excited or something!”), but I published it because I have a question: are people going to be totally weirded out if I publish short fiction full text, just like my non-fiction articles? I’ve got a system in place that will let me use an excerpt or teaser (Dirt Man is currently using it), but I want people to read this stuff, dammit. And I know when I’m a first-time visitor to a blog, I almost never click through a “read more” link.

Your thoughts are welcome and appreciated. And if no one speaks up, then I’ll just quietly start slipping bits of fiction onto the site, because I miss making stuff up and putting it online.

The Big Word Project was launched a couple days ago, and it’s an interesting idea. Basically, it’s just a list of a lot of English words. If you pay them $1 per letter for a word, that word will be a link to a website of your choosing henceforth (though pick wisely, because you can’t go back to change it later).

Possibly the most intriguing get-rich-quick scheme I’ve seen yet, and certainly a creative web venture. Will the site have any sort of longevity, or were the people who defined “spam” and “crap” to point straight to www.thebigwordproject.com correct? Regardless, the idea, though probably just a good way to convince people to spend money on nothing, is creative enough that I bought a word for Beckism.com. And to be honest, going through and seeing what words have been chosen for what websites is kind of fun. Props to the developers for thinking outside the box.

I’ve been eyeing the MediaTemple hosting plans for a while, and after a weekend of being unable to edit any of my sites because of intermittent downtime and crippled FTP, I’ve finally made the switch. I’ve read lots of good reviews and a few bad ones and I’m not too happy with the downsides of shared hosting but have no need for a virtual server, so we’ll see how it goes. Given my past experience positive experiences with MediaTemple support (my employer hosts with them), I suspect that I’ll be very happy even if they can’t deliver on perfect uptime. I’ve found that quality support is better than delivering on pie-in-the-sky promises every time. Plus now I can finally use PHP 5 (and be able to run PHP 4 side-by-side if necessary), which is pretty freaking cool.

The migration was super easy (although I haven’t moved beckism.net over just yet, so there’s more to do), and hopefully you’ll be seeing better uptime and speed from my sites in the future. Because they were down so often and so sluggish before. Oh well. I’m a nerd, and a terabyte of bandwidth impresses me, even if I’ll barely use a fraction of it in a given month. At least now I can host the Things screencast myself without fear of running out of bandwidth.

The only question that remains is how to gain enough readers (even temporarily) that I’ll actually be able to use MediaTemple’s vaunted performance burst technology.

I admit that it’s unlikely. But a man can dream, right?

I bought Acorn shortly after it came out because it gave me a really easy way to snag application icons for Tagamac. Sadly, it didn’t have any web export features, and when I upgraded to Leopard the resizing starting sucking hard core (lots of black artifacts).

Enter Acorn 1.1 which includes web export, resizing bugfixes, and much more. Now perhaps I won’t have to launch Photoshop every time I want to stick some stupid image online, which was really what I was looking for when I bought Acorn in the first place. W00t!

Changes, a beautiful application that allows you to easily compare directories and files, was released today. I got into the Changes beta late in the game, and I don’t know how I got anything done without it. It makes comparing text files ridiculously easy and, dare I say it, fun. The developer is extremely responsive, too, and has a great first name to boot.

Changes has a 15-day free trial, and is available for $39.95. Additionally, you can get $10 off the asking price if you act soon by using TUAW’s coupon. I strongly recommend that anyone who works with plain text files download Changes and give it a try. It’s a must-have utility.

Looks like there might be a new definitive answer to screencasts:

ScreenFlow, from Vara Software

A bit expensive compared to iShowU or even Snapz Pro X, but given that it’s an all-in-one package that has some majorly cool features like after-the-fact mouse and keystroke highlighting (!!!), it could well be worth the investment for anyone making screencasts much. I’m definitely going to download and try it out, that’s for sure. Leopard only, unfortunately for those running 10.4.

yFlicks 3.2 just came out. This is why you should care: supplemental library folders. Basically, you can stick videos in a supplemental library folder that’s stored on another volume. Then when the volume isn’t connected, the videos are hidden. Read more about it in the blog announcement.

Take that in the eye, iTunes. This is the feature that all the media organizing programs that I use have been missing out on. I’m kind of excited.

Freeverse is one of the software companies I love, if only for brilliant gems like Kill Monty, and they just released a new game called Neon Tango. I took a peek at it at MacWorld (couldn’t get close enough to play it) and it looks very entertaining. Downloading its surprisingly huge demo now.

ViewIt, a great little program for viewing large quantities of images, has been updated to version 2.24, bringing a number of Leopard improvements to the program. ViewIt doesn’t even compare with Aperture or Lightroom, but for people who don’t need the power (or expense) of such programs, it’s a great way to quickly browse through and manage large numbers of images without resorting to more bloated programs like Bridge or iPhoto.

Beckism.com has gone a long time without regular updates. Why? Because it was bloated and bored me. This needed to change. And now it has.

I thought I’d just remove the cruft from the navigation, but it wasn’t enough. Beckism.com needed a bit more attitude. A better layout. The word “gallimaufry” in the sidebar. In short, the design equivalent of a defibrillation.

I invite you to explore the newly revitalized Beckism.com, and keep an eye on this space for opinions, web design tips/tricks/rants, Mac software commentary, short fiction, Dirt Man, and all other things Ian Beck. Hey, you could even subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s good for the soul.

Enjoy the new design, and please let me know if you find anything that doesn’t quite work! This was a big update, so I may well have broken things without realizing it.