As a designer, Pantone’s annual announcement of their Color of the Year is usually just an interesting tidbit of information that, once digested, gets half heartedly tucked away in my brain. I’ve never used it as a basis for a design, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen it influence design trends in general. Until now.

← This is the fancy new ski shell from Flylow I’ve sported this year that, unbeknownst, has shot me into the Pantone trendosphere. While it may not be a perfect match to this year’s color (Pantone 17-1463 Tangerine Tango) it’s close enough that I see folks point and nod, marveling how a simple ski shell can be such a harbinger of the times. Oh Pantone, you know us so well.

Regardless of the color, this shell is far and away the best I’ve worn. It’s comfortable, durable, and dry. Flylow is sneaky good. Solid gear, and ON IT with color trends. Get sum: http://flylowgear.com/

PS: And no, I’m not pushing Flylow because I work with them. Yet.

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It was a short run, but Off the Grid is now kaputz. It was meant to be a place to write about life and adventure – kept separate from the design and web related posts I normally write about here on the Spigot blog. But it’s simply too much to keep up with both, plus our kids blog.

But while we’re bringing down the curtains on OTG, it’s not necessarily good night. I thought for a while of starting a Tumblr site for these posts because I’d like to get to know the software. But all I’d be doing is extending the same issues to a new learning curve. So instead I’ll be be posting them here, on the Spigot blog. Where they were really meant to be in the first place.

To keep up with these posts, let Life (category) be your guide. Or if your RSS savvy, get the Life feed.

Good night, OTG, and good luck.

Like many designers, I prefer my computer desktop to stay clean, organized, and clutter free. It’s not a place to hold files or applications, and it’s definitely not a place for a splashy, obnoxious image. Still, the desktop is a nice place to express creativity, so lets not be boring here.

Even though there are many places to get quality, free, minimalist desktop images (try Simple Desktops), I usually roll my own. If you’d like to roll the same way, feel free to download, use and abuse our Free Minimalst Desktops*.

Here’s an initial set to get started with. I’ll add more to spigotdesign.com/desktops/ as I feel moved.

Holiday 2011

The Spigot

Simple Blue Gradient

*Warning: Some of these may contain the Spigot Logo and/or attribution.

While most of the world is going wireless, I’ve recently switched back to my wired-up, fully extended keyboard. Here’s a rundown of the pros, cons, and why I did it.

Apple Wireless Keyboard

The wireless version is the default choice when purchasing a new desktop Mac. While I could have opted for the wired version, I kept the wireless expecting to reap all the benefits of joining the wireless world. What are those benefits?

Pros

• No wires
• Sleek, Shexshy, and responsive

Cons

• Missing a ton of features the full keyboard has

The supposed benefits are increased flexibility/mobility, and reducing clutter. Since I don’t move the iMac at all, and a sleek white wire hardly adds to my desktop clutter, neither can be considered a true benefit.

Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad

When I upgraded to the low profile, aluminium Apple keyboard (from the earlier Apple Pro Keyboard) I thought I’d found keyboard heaven. I did. Here’s why:

Pros

• Sleek, Shexshy, and responsive
• Dedicated numeric keypad with basic math operators
• Dedicated forward delete
• No need for a fn key
• f13 – f19 keys
• Control/Option/Command/Spacebar symmetry
• Two extra USB connections (unpowered)

Cons

• Unsightly wire
• Can’t type 25ft away from my desk

Conclusions

I honestly can’t see a scenario where a wireless keyboard is better when using a desktop computer. The limited functionality just can’t be compensated for. So I’m back to being a fully wired, happy typing camper.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get this wireless version to connect to this iPad…

There are a ton of email etiquette rules out there that are good to know and follow. One that’s rarely addressed is this See Below scenario:

You’ve been replying back and forth with a friend and decide you need to bring in another friend for their opinion. So on the 8th reply you CC this second friend and simply say “see below.”

Awesome, now I get to read through all your earlier emails and signatures and attached signature images to try to parse out what you’re asking of me.

Rather, do this

1. Quickly summarize what you and friend 1 have been discussing
2. Ask a direct question
3. Bask in email etiquette happiness

For more fun email don’ts, check out how to make The Oatmeal hate you.

Our son Tory got to bring his preschool class’ pet Bearded Dragon, Shiny, home for the Christmas break. Surprisingly cute. Eats mealworms and crickets. Our cat Ollie was briefly interested in a protracted staring contest through the aquarium glass, but thankfully he’s moved on. Also thankful he lacks the dexterity to open the lid.

I woke up early this morning to find the moon looking a little funny. A quick search on the Google told me it was a lunar eclipse!

Overall, I really like Apple’s iCloud service. Moving back to Apple after dropping MobileMe back in late 2009 has been relatively painless; The setup was simple, the service is automatic, and it’s free.

The two items I dig the most are iCal and Address Book syncing, both of which have worked flawlessly. Safari Bookmark syncing comes in a pretty close third, but getting them to sync cleanly has been somewhat of a bumpy road. In the last week, bookmarks have come and gone, been duplicated, deleted, returned, and finally gone away all together.

I’m sure Apple will create an easy way to manually flush bookmarks, but until then here’s how I got everything back in order by forcing a reset of iCloud:

1. Turn off Xmarks

I’ve used Xmarks since dropping MobileMe, and while I don’t know for sure, it’s possible that Xmarks could be the root cause. While it would be nice to keep syncing between Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, it’s more important for me to sync to an iPad and iPhone, so bye bye Xmarks. If you don’t use Xmarks then you can skip this step, of course.

2. Turn off iCloud bookmark sync on all devices

On every Mac, iPhone, iPad, iWhatever – I opened up iCloud preferences and turned off Bookmark Syncing. On the iPad and iPhone, the device asked to keep or delete bookmarks; I clicked delete.

3. Find the best bookmark backup you have

Safari bookmarks are all stored in a file called Bookmarks.plist, which is located at User/Library/Safari/. If you don’t see the Library folder check out the article Revealing Lion’s Hidden Library Folder for a few different ways to show it.

Using Time Machine I went back a few weeks to when my bookmarks were in somewhat decent shape and replaced the current Bookmarks.plist file with the older (better) one. If you don’t use Time Machine or other backup system then you’re SOL and will have to fix you bookmarks without this head start.

4. Correct bookmarks on your Mac and make a backup

If you’re lucky, your backup version of Bookmarks.plist will have gotten you most of the way to bookmark bliss. Make what ever changes you’d like in Safari, then make a backup. I did this by dragging the Bookmarks.plist file to the desktop. This will force Safari to create a new Bookmarks.plist file upon restart.

5. Delete bookmarks on all devices

Delete all bookmarks on every computer. iPhone and iPad bookmarks should have been deleted in step 2. If this seems counterintuitive, just remember, you’ve got a backup. Right?

6. Turn on iCloud Bookmark Syncing on your Mac

Once you enable Bookmark Syncing on your Mac, you’ll be prompted to ‘merge’ bookmarks with iCloud. This should flush the iCloud system. Or that’s the hope.

7. Restore bookmark backup file

Shut down Safari, and drag the good Bookmarks.plist backup file from the desktop back into User/Library/Safari/ and restart Safari. In a minute or two iCloud should be updated with the latest bookmarks.

8. Turn on bookmark syncing on all devices

Restore syncing to each device, and wait for iCloud to update.

Issues you may run into

Going through these steps I ran into a few issues, and you may experience the same:

Deleting bookmarks would sometimes crash Safari

I had a ton of old bookmarks imported from systems past that seemed to hang Safari when I tried to delete them. I had to force quit and restart numerous times. All the old bookmark cruft is gone though!

Restoring bookmarks to all devices took some time and a little prodding

Once I turned syncing back on each device remained blank for quite some time. I’m not sure why but I was able to prod the system along by adding a fake bookmark on another device. This seemed to kick everything into gear and I was able to delete that fake bookmark on different device – which eventually deleted it across all devices.

References

I didn’t stumble across this info on my own, here’s a couple of articles that I used to pull my method together:

• http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/29090/how-can-i-reset-the-safari-bookmarks-in-icloud
• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3375297

Kari and I have been canyoneering for many years now, and it’s one of the main reasons we decided to move back to Utah. We were lucky to get a few days away recently and headed down to North Wash to help Tom Jones celebrate his birthday.

Allison and Bryan Godlewski (Park City friends) joined us on Friday for a hike down Boss Hog canyon. This was their first time technical canyoneering and proved to be skilled naturals. Boss Hog is a beautiful, tight slot that requires a bit of stemming high up off the ground – typical of what you’d find in the area. The high stemming isn’t hard, per se, but if you make a mistake a fall would be a big bummer to say the least. It was a slightly chilly day (in November, imagine that…) but we warmed up quick with all the scrambling and stemming.

We got in a couple more canyons over the weekend, but we’re still missing a point and shoot camera to take on trips like this. Thanks to Allison for bringing one on this day, it’s been a rare treat for us to get decent canyoneering pics.

It turns out my interior design sense is as clean and simple as my graphic design style. I prefer design that is modern and uncluttered; breathable yet punctuated with contrast.

I’m also a fan of the Macintosh. While I haven’t been using one since 1984, it’s been a big part of my life and career for over a decade.

So when I came across @kottke‘s article on Susan Kare’s sketchbook, and it led me to Susan’s Limited Edition Print site I immediately began making note of all the places in the office these prints would fit.

Here’s a few of my favorite:

Can’t wait to see some of these on the wall.

After adding a text-based Facebook link to the site, it’s seemed a sensible idea to add a similar text-only link for StumbleUpon.

For WordPress, add the following code in your templates:

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>"> Stumble</a>

For other CMS platforms replace the URL and title with the proper code variables. If you’re still rocking straight HTML, change these to the real URL and titles:

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://example.com/your-awesome-article&title=Your Awesome Article Title">Stumble</a>

I missed Mike Payne’s WordPress SEO, A Comprehensive Pre-Launch Checklist presentation at this years WordCamp Salt Lake City, but thankfully WordPressTV has posted this and a few other videos from the day for your posterity and mine.

The video may be titled WordPress SEO, but a lot of what Mike talks about is relevant to any site or CMS. Most of it actually.

Some of the topics covered:

• SERP
• SEO vs PPC
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Placement Factors
• On Page Optimization Factors
• SEO WordPress Plugins
• Social Media, Blogging, and Making a Plan

Here’s a quick tip on how to crop any sized image through CSS and an extra div. This technique comes in very handy when building websites for clients who don’t have Photoshop, or understand what 360px x 240px means. In an ideal world every image is edited and cropped before it’s uploaded to the site, so that it fits perfectly where it’s supposed to. Unfortunately that’s not how it works and many sites end up with squished, stretched, or highly pixellated images.

The key to this technique is to wrap the image you want to display in a container div, which we’ll give a specific height and width. We’ll then give the image a width of 100% just in case the user uses an image that’s too small. Here’s the code:

The html:

<div class=”container”>
<img src=”http://your-source.com” alt=”alt” />
</div>

And the CSS:

.container { width: 418px; height: 240px; overflow: hidden; }
.container img { width: 100%; }

The real key there is the overflow: hidden; part. It prevents any image that is larger than the crop area from being displayed. Adding width: 100%; is only helpful when the user uploads an image smaller than the are you want cropped. The image will be enlarged to fit the area – which may result in some pixellation – so if crisp images outweigh the need for them to fit correctly, just skip that part.

Happy cropping! And leave a comment.

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Dec 29, 2011 Update – Installing Widget Logic version 0.51 fixes the previous is_active_sidebar issue. Thanks to Alan Trewartha for continued development on this essential plugin. Carry on.

WordPress doesn’t currently have a built in feature for controlling which pages a sidebar widget displays. The Widget Logic plugin adds this feature quite nicely if you’re comfortable using WP‘s conditional tags.

It does have built in, however, the function is_active_sidebar to test (TRUE/FALSE) if a dynamic sidebar is in use. Using this function in your themes is probably considered best-practice these days; read more about it (and sidebars in general) here: Sidebars in WordPress (Justin Tadlock, Nov 2010).

With these two items you’re mostly good to go, except for one small issue. Widget Logic has a bug(?) that returns is_active_sidebar true, even when widgets have been hidden. So even though the widgets don’t show, any markup you’ve added to the entire widget area on the page will.

Luckily there’s a workaround found on the WordPress.org forums that addresses this problem: [Plugin: Widget Logic] is_active_sidebar() doesn’t work. Vasya Pupkin modified the Widget Logic plugin to fix the issue, and posted the code here: http://pastebin.me/002f3ec3145f4e1896a9cf79e72aebb2

The fix is working great for this site, and hasn’t seemed to break anything. Be careful, however – The plugin author has concerns about the approach breaking sites, so use the modified version at your own discretion.

If you love sharing your posts on Facebook (and by gosh who doesn’t?) but don’t like the look of the standard share buttons, here’s a little script that will allow you to share with a simple Facebook text link.

See it in action right over there → and click it while you’re at it!

<script>function fbs_click() {u=location.href;t=document.title;window.open('http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(u)+'&t='+encodeURIComponent(t),'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436'); return false;}</script><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<;url>" onclick="return fbs_click()" target="_blank">Share on Facebook</a>

You may also be interested in a text-only link for StumbleUpon: Text Only StumbleUpon Stumble Link

We don’t get out on the town as much as we used to, but Grandpa and Grandma are here, so we must take advantage. We headed down to The State Room in Salt Lake with a bunch of friend and danced our butts off to March Fourth Marching Band.

20 plus musicians, acrobats on stilts, pumping and thumping – it was definitely a fun night. Maybe a little too much fun…

So you know when you’re at a club, and there’s one guy up near the stage dancing a little to much? Jumping a bit too high, throwing his body around and making somewhat of a fool of himself? There’s always that guy right?

Well, last night, that guy was me.

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If you’ve ever wanted a top-level navigation item to act as a trigger for a drop down menu, but not actually link anywhere, here’s how to do it in the WordPress 3.0 menu system:

1. Insert a custom link with a label and any link address
2. Click on Edit Menu Item link (triangle)
3. Delete link address in URL field
4. Add nested sub-menu items
5. Save

After suffering complete failure (due to climate and critters) with our 4×4 gardens last year (click here for a picture), we wentall out this year with a new system. It’s bigger, raised up a bit more, and most importantly, completely covered.

The cover is made of Solexx, a double walled corrugated plastic material that kicks some greenhouse butt. We put it on a hinge to be able to get in easily, and added windows on each side for venting and watering. It’s not too heavy to open, but it’s enough of a PITA that the windows make watering so much easier. Here’s why Solexx is so awesome:

• Diffused Light. The harsh Utah sun gets naturally diffused in a really soothing way . Plants don’t get burnt and the light gets spread out equally, without shadows.
• Insulation. We’re expecting to get an extra month on both sides of our pathetic 60 day growing season. For you mathophobes that’s doubling our season!
• Protection. Keeps out both the critters, and the dry wind that blows up East Canyon Creek.
• Durability. This will outlast plastic sheeting. At least I expect it to.

This was designed and built by Kari and I. Cost was around $400. Mostly for the Solexx – it’s not exactly cheap, but we’re hoping it will last for years and pay for itself. Heck, with the amount of kale we harvested this year it’s already paying for itself!

After years of nagging, my sister Sarah is allowing me to upgrade their flash-based website (that I built) to modern standards. They’ve got some great new photos and I just wanted to share this one with you. Check them out at:sassafrasgardens.com.

Update: Off the Grid is now Off the Air. All the stuff that was being posted there is now being posted here. No need to update two sites, friends. You can use the Off the Grid tag to grab all past and future OTG posts. Happy Camping!

I’d like to formally introduce Off the Grid, a new blog that I’ll be keeping updated with personal things, life things, and maybe even some family stuff.

The reasons for creating this are two-fold really:

1. Create a place for people and potential clients to get to know us
2. Create a place for us to write about all the awesome things in this world that aren’t design/web related.

Here are some examples of things you’ll find there:

• Natural Spider Killer
• My current favorite paper airplane

I’ve enjoyed writing about the web, design, and the other topics you can find here, but I’ve never truly had a place to write about the things that go on away from the screen. And now I do :)

To find Off the Grid again, look in the footer of this site, or in the ‘Click Tap About Spigot’ drawer under Life.