Airfrost

These new Moleskine planners look very cool—in the set, there are 12 volant-style notebooks, one for every month! About $40. There’s a great review/giveaway over at the wonderful Notebook Stories.

Here’s a quick and simple Ruby method I wrote that turns an array into a nice, formatted list.

def list(array, options={})
  options[:conjunction] ||= "and"

  list = ""
  array.each_with_index do |string, index|
    list += " " if array.size == 2
    list += options[:conjunction] += " " if array.size == (index + 1)
    list += string.to_s
    list += ", " unless array.size == (index + 1) or array.size == 2
  end

  list = "nothing" if list.empty?
  return list
end

Because I make stuff for the web, I care a lot about my browsers. I use them all the time for what I do, and I tend to change my default browser just as often. In fact, only a few days ago have I switched from the Firefox beta to the WebKit beta (again) — mainly because Firefox was being way too laggy.

Anyone coming from Firefox can tell you though that plugins, (especially an ad-blocker), are necessities if you ever plan on making the most of your web browser. Seeing as a lot of people either aren’t aware of a lot of the great Safari plugins out there, or haven’t yet discovered that there are plugins for Safari in the first place, I thought I’d share with you my four favourite Safari plugins that I couldn’t browse the web without.

Instapaper is a cool little web app that does one thing, and one thing only: it lets you bookmark pages for reading later. This is very useful for people like me who like to surf the web, but is usually either too bored or too tired to actually read every interesting thing that comes along¹. And being the kind of person who tries to avoid work whenever possible, forcing myself to do stuff is just not logical. That’s why Instapaper is perfect for me. Anyways, enough reading what I have to say; check it out for yourself!

¹ Yes, I just stated that “[sometimes I’m] too bored to read every interesting thing that comes along.” Yeah, I know I’m weird.

GUM is a neat site analytics package (currently in Beta) that is very different from the other statistics packages out there right now, such as Google Analytics, Clicky, or Mint. Instead of basing the tracking system around page views, GUM instead tracks what they call useful visitors. To quote their website/email,

[Useful visitors] are buying your products, adding comments, visiting every day, browsing around the site and reading your content. Enjoying themselves. They love your site. They love your content and your products.

Instead of conventional information such as page views or page hits, GUM shows you how many of these useful visitors you have visiting your site, and what they are doing (what they call behavioral statistics). Through that data you can then infer what they like and what they don’t. GUM even suggests how to shape and improve your website and your content to please these visitors.

You can find out more (or apply for their beta program!) at their website. Check it out!