Invoicing with Blinksale

If you haven't heard of it yet, Blinksale is a new web-app from Firewheel Design designed to help freelancers and contractors like myself deal with the hassle that is invoicing in an easy, efficient, and well-designed fashion. It features several templates to choose from for invoice design, and for those who have shelled out for the paying accounts, they can customise their own designs via CSS/XHTML. Maybe in the future I shall move up to a more expensive account to try these features. Currently, I don't have enough clients to justify the cost.]]> Blinksale launched several weeks ago, I had been waiting for the addition of New Zealand Dollars as a currency before I could begin using this to invoice my clients. I am happy to say I just sent my very first Blinksale invoice and it couldn't have been easier. I had previously set up my clients (well, the 3 that I could enter due to the limitations of the free account) so all I had to do was select *New Service Invoice*, enter the details, choose my payment terms, and save it. After reviewing the saved invoice on the next screen, I sent it off to the client, with a copy to myself, and within a few minutes had a beautifully designed invoice sitting in my mailbox. To all freelancers out there struggling with invoicing, I suggest you go and give Blinksale a try. I did, and I can see myself using this for many years to come. Well done Firewheel Design!

Apple's Mighty Mouse

Well its about time. After many years of complaints and wishes from the mac-faithful, Apple has answered our cries with a fantastic multi-button scroll mouse implementation. With 360° Scrolling, 4 buttons and the same beautiful clean design, I reckon they've got a winner here. If only it wasn't too late for me. I purchased a Kensington Studio Mouse late last year after my Apple Pro Mouse died and I've been very happy with it since. I would love to buy the new Mighty Mouse, but I guess I'll have to wait till my next Mac purchase.]]>

IE 7 beta

Now anyone involved in the web development industry would be aware of the many problems caused by Internet Explorer's substandard support for CSS standards. The best way I've found to deal with these problems is to design for more standards-aware browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari and then add in small "adjustments" to make it work in Internet Explorer. As you can imagine, this is not a task I enjoy.]]> Microsoft has already fixed a couple of CSS bugs, and its been announced that in the second beta, the following additional bug fixes will be included.

In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well. Though you won’t see (most of) these until Beta 2, we have already fixed the following bugs from PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode:

Peekaboo bug

Guillotine bug

Duplicate Character bug

Border Chaos

No Scroll bug

3 Pixel Text Jog

Magic Creeping Text bug

Bottom Margin bug on Hover

Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border

IE/Win Line-height bug

Double Float Margin Bug

Quirky Percentages in IE

Duplicate indent

Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders

1 px border style

Disappearing List-background

Fix width:auto

In addition we’ve added support for the following

HTML 4.01 ABBR tag

Improved (though not yet perfect) fallback

CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)

CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning

Alpha channel in PNG images

Fix :hover on all elements

Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

IEBlog : Standards and CSS in IE

moon.google.com

For a bit of Google humour, go to Google Moon and try zooming right in.

New features in MT 3.2b

I was considering writing up about the new features of MT 3.2, but it seems someone else has beaten me to it. Judi from Mom at Home Design has set up A View From MovableType 3.2 to chronicle her experiences with the new version.

.DS_Store

Finally there is a solution to prevent OS X from scattering .DS_Store files all over network volumes. Apple has posted a Knowledge Base article explaining how. To prevent it, just open Terminal and type: **defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true** You may need to restart or log out and back in to see the effects. Now you can navigate the network without leaving a trace. via macosxhints

$9 Hosting

**UPDATE**: It looks like the special ended in July. Keegan has been nice enough to offer a discount of his own for anyone signing up via his affiliate link. Details over at The Big Noob. Thanks to Keegan at The Big Noob, I've been lucky enough to sign up for a whole years hosting on DreamHost for only $9.24 US. Now thats a real bargin!]]> DreamHost is giving a discount of nearly $95 US on the 1 year plan. If you want to take advantage of this huuge discount, just choose the **"Crazy Domain Insane!"** plan and enter the promo code "777" at step 5 in the registration process. What makes it even better is that they have just recently included Ruby on Rails in all their hosting plans. Happy Anniversary DreamHost!

Version 4.0

static reality is almost complete. The previous edition had an unusual placement for the main banner and logo. It was along the left hand side which caused a bit of head twisting to read it. As you can imagine, this was not ideal. After some valuable advice from my wonderful girlfriend, I set about revising the layout. Luckily, the separation of content from design using CSS enabled me to make the major layout changes with ease.]]> In the coming days I will find time to tidy up the styles relating to the journal section of the site. Comments and Trackbacks haven't been styled yet, so bear with me for the time being. **update:** I have implemented links direct from the home page into individual blog entries now and begun styling the comment section.

MovableType 3.2 Public Beta

**update:** Six Apart has released the 3.2 Beta for download. I just read some very welcome news via Movalog. It appears that Six Apart will be releasing a public beta tomorrow afternoon of the next big release of MovableType, 3.2. They have been posting teasers of the new features it includes, and I must say I am looking forward to its release. I'll see if I can post more about it once I've tried out the beta.

Boredom

How do you deal with boredom? I'm here at work on a quiet Sunday and I have helped at most two people since 9am. In case you are wondering what sort of work I do, the department I work for provides a support service for students in the computer lab at the local University to answer any queries/problems that they have with the system and the software running on it. The problem is that it is now holidays so there is not much need for my help. I work here half time, 20 hours a week. This includes 9-5 shifts on Saturday and Sunday, the quietest days of the week. Does anyone have ideas on how to relieve my boredom?

journal | static reality

iTunes 5