Great WordPress Templates
Just a quick note that this guy is doing some really fun work with WordPress templates, creating some exciting magazine and “conversation” driven templates. One of his templates, Arthemia, I intend to use for BOOM Jackson magazine; another is Platformate, which is a really interesting layout for a site that offers lots of comment and conversation (not unlike the JFP). I might need to borrow some of these ideas for the JFP; that’s a very “2.0″ design, particularly for a personal blog like this one. (In fact…hmmm. If you’re reading this and you notice I’m using that theme, then, well, I’ve changed to it.)
Numbers…Cool Little App
I just got a copy of iWork 08 in the office today and decided to install it during some downtime this afternoon. I had to write a short piece for the paper and thought it’d be fun to do it in Pages.
So, I did. Worked fine, although I was a bit dismayed to find the Word Count (a vital feature for newspaper writing) in the Inspector window instead of in the Status Bar at the bottom of the window.
Otherwise, no complaints.
Then I played with Numbers. I’ve never been much of a spreadsheet guy, although I do use them when I can’t avoid them. (That seems to be more often than not with the Film Society, not with the JFP where most of the financials are done in MYOB AccountEdge. But, I digress.)
What impressed me immediately was the graphical nature of Numbers, which made working with the spreadsheets I needed to create (a very small budget and then a list of our film society’s board members — I was filling out a grant application) fun to do. I got through those two sheets and decided to play with the templates.
While they’re cute and fun, I tired of the built-in Numbers templates quickly. So, I decided that I yearned (yearned!) for others. I found my way to Numbers Templates, a fun little site where people are posting a variety of different templates for Numbers. The programming for these things can get pretty sophisticated and, even more to the point, the sheets created tend to be attractive and fun to work with.
Like FileMaker, Final Cut, and Keynote before it, Numbers may be the “killer implementation” of an app for creative Mac users because it focused on both the mundane and the aesthetic. Suffice to say that I’m going to continue surfing for spreadsheet templates to play with — and that’s not the sort of thing I would have said, er, yesterday.
Apple Quality - Outsourcing = AppleCare
So, one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much in recent weeks has been my lack of a laptop. All through the spring I was using an HP Pavillion that is now a paperweight on my desk in the office…it just failed to turn on one day. I suspect it’s the video card, as that seems to be a common problem with that model (zt3000), either unseated or in need of a replacement. I’ve downloaded the take-apart guide but haven’t yet had the wherewithall to get in there and check.
In the meantime, I took that failure as a sign and an omen — I needed to get a Mac laptop again. Indeed, there are more reasons than my simple desire for a portable, including the need to give presentations in Keynote instead of Powerpoint, work from home with the same tools I use at work, and the fact that a new laptop for me would free up an InDesign-capable Mac for someone else in our weekly newspaper office.
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Radio JFP Podcast: 4.6.07
I’m actually just testing podcasting from within WordPress as I’m writing the chapter for HTDE Web 2.0 Blog, but, for kicks and grins, if you happen to want to listen to me, Donna Ladd and Brian Johnson talk about local Jackson and Mississippi issues (plus, we play songs for local artists and talk about events happening each week) then you can access the file below or subscribe to the iTodd Central feed in a podcatcher.
Here’s the JFP on WLEZ podcast link.
What I’m testing, incidentally, is WordPress’ ability to automatically take a link to an MP3 file and turn it into an RSS 2.0 enclosure, which is what makes podcast feeds possible.
Newspapers Should Go Non-Profit?
After a weekend at the AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) conference in Washington D.C., I’m surprised and interested to have been forwarded this piece from a reader of the JFP. How dire is the market for newspapers these days? According to this OpinionJournal piece, they might want to think about going non-profit.
Not-for-profit status might be one possibility. Instead of having billionaire moguls as proprietors, we could try to turn them into philanthropists who found nonprofit organizations to buy and operate their local papers. At least one such example exists: the St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Foundation as a result of a bequest by Nelson Poynter.
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