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A few weeks ago, I was thinking to myself: "It's hard to tell what time certain tweets in my (already busy) timeline were posted... It'd be great if, instead of '18 minutes ago,' I could see that the post fell between 10 p.m. and 10:10 p.m. – it's much easier for me to remember tweets by time than by 'time ago.'

So, instead of trying to find some Twitter app that would let me insert my own timestamps or change the date format (I'm sure there are a few), I wrote a PHP script that would post a new tweet with the time in four time zones to the @currenttime Twitter account. Then, I followed @currenttime, and history was made ;-)

Here's the script I used (with help from Morethanseven's article, "Posting to Twitter using PHP"):

A couple days ago I was browsing the web viewing some coverage of the Inauguration of President Obama, when I noticed an amazing satellite photo from GeoEye (supposedly the company behind Google's latest Earth-imaging conquests):

 
(Satellite image by GeoEye)

Visit the photo's page, and then click on the link to download the high-resolution file—zoom in and be amazed!

I use an RSS news reader application to browse stories from blogs and websites that I am interested in following. To stay in my news reader for more than a few weeks, a website must do two things:

1. Consistently offer 'meaty' and well-written posts.
2. Not 'spam' me with posts (i.e. no more than 2 posts a day, unless the content is really good or really interesting).

If you'll notice, none of my criteria include "Have many, many posts a day." The reason for this is simple: My time is valuable, and I don't want to waste it browsing through mushy, meaningless content—even if that time is only a second or two. A lot of people think they should post early and post often, sometimes re-blogging what others have already said, but this is not a good strategy for retaining site subscribers and readers, even if it helps your search-engine rankings a little. Signal / Noise ratio is probably the single determining factor in whether a site will succeed in gaining loyal followers or not.

Whenever you're designing a website, one of your primary goals, besides communicating the mission of the organization for whom the website is being made, should be to make the website accessible to all visitors, no matter what kind of computer or browser they have, and no matter what kind of disabilities they have (whether it be blindness, deafness, or other problems).

Luckily for you, there's a free and easy-to-use tool on the web that lets you check how well your website conforms to coding standards:

The W3C generously provides this service to further their mission of having an open, accessible and free web. The tool is dead simple to use: just type in your website's URL, and click Validate. Errors will then show up, and you can go back to your source code and fix the little mistakes you've made. But there's a lot more about Validation that needs to be said!

Many a Mac user has never set foot into the realm of the "Universal Access" System Preference pane, and I believe that's a shame. There are so many useful, and, dare I say, awesome things you can do in that area of System Preferences:

And a quick guide to some of the coolest features:

Today I received the "Certificate of Organization" for Midwestern Mac, LLC, a Corporation that provides Mac support, web design and consultation, graphic design and photography to people in the Saint Louis area, but also on a broader scale through its website, www.midwesternmac.com.

The idea of forming an LLC came to me a few months ago, after leaving the Seminary, for two reasons: 1) so I could perform consulting services with some sort of legal protection (operating as a sole proprietorship = bad!), and 2) because I would like to build up a brand so I can possibly work more in the fields that I love most: web design and Mac support!