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Smart Mailbox Formula: Flagged Messages October 29, 2008

One very simple way to keep your email organized is by using flags in Apple’s Mail program. If you’re like me, you are pulling in most, if not all, of your messages from a GMail or a Google Apps account. This means that your “starred” items in your Google Mail will also be “flagged” once they get to your Mac.

Flagging messages in Mail.app can be done via the menu Message > Mark > As Flagged, or by simply pressing Command-Shift-L when you have selected the message(s) you would like to flag.

Creating a Smart Mailbox is very simple. Just choose the menu item Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox…

At this point, you be presented with a popup box asking you for a Smart Mailbox Name, and several options. The first line of options reads:
Contains messages that match all of the following conditions:
You can also match TODO items, or ANY of the following conditions. For this example, we will leave this line alone.

The first condition by default matches the “From” email address of any messages. This is what we want to change:

Click on the select box for “From”, and choose Message is Flagged from the list. The other options in this condition will disappear.

This Smart Mailbox is already pretty useful, but our Flagged messages from several months ago probably aren’t too useful any more, so we’ll add another rule. Click on the plus to the right of the popup box to add a new condition.

When you are finished creating this new rule, the second line should read:
Date Recieved is in the last 60 Days
Before you press OK, take a seecond to admire your work. You’re being smart with your email.

After you OK the creation of the new Smart Mailbox, a new “Flagged” item appears in the left sidebar of your Mail window with a little purple icon. If you don’t see it, click the words SMART MAILBOXES until the arrow to the left of the words is pointing down, and your Smart Mailbox should appear.

All of your flagged messages from the last 60 days are in this smart mailbox, but they have not been moved from their home in your other mailboxes either. If you remove the flag from a message with Command-Shift-L, the message will no longer appear here.

While this is all great, I did notice one annoying thing: Since all my mail is coming in from a GMail server, several of the messages in this folder were duplicates, because they also appear in GMail’s “Starred” folder. In order to fix this problem. I selected my Smart Mailbox, and then chose the menu item Mailbox > Edit Smart Mailbox…

Once you’re editing again, just add a rule that reads as follows:
Message is in Mailbox: Inbox
After you OK this change all your duplicate GMail messages should disappear.

If you’ve got a Smart Mailbox Formula that helps you wade through the ocean of information we all seem to be swimming in these days, please share it in the comments below. I’m sure we could all use a little bit of help.

Use Smart Mailboxes to Organize Your Email October 26, 2008

If you’re anything like me, you tend to hold on to your email for months, years, or pretty much all of eternity. Now that I have things like Google Apps for Your Domain and IMAP, I can literally keep as much of my email as I want, and always get access to my full message history. On top of this, I have 7 inboxes to check.

There are several advantages to this system as far as I can see – I never have to worry that someone has the wrong email address, or one I no longer use, because I always know the message will arrive on my desktop, but at the same time live somewhere on dark and dank hard drive deep in the Google infrastructure, wherever that may be.

Here is my big problem: I get dozens of messages a day. On the day I wrote this tutorial I had received 20 messages by noon! How on earth am I supposed to keep track of the messages I want to keep, without abandoning my pack rat nature?

My solution for now: Smart Mailboxes. You’ve at least seen Smart Playlists in iTunes – the program ships with a few of them baked in. The Finder also features a few pre-selected searches under “search for” on Leopard. Apple’s Mail.app has had Smart Mailboxes for some time now, and it’s about time you got a little more insight into what is going on with your mail.

The very simplest way to create a Smart Mailbox is to use the little search box in the top right of your Mail window and push the Save button. That’s really all there is to it. You can choose a few simple options from the popup box – the application has already chosen a sensible folder name for you, based on what you searched. You could try searching for something related to a big project you’re working on, or all the messages from a particular friend, or a group of friends. The possibilities are endless.

What are some of your favorite Smart Mailbox formulas? I’d love to see them in a comment.

Letting go the Strings of Servitude October 23, 2008

That’s right, folks, I quit my job at Bonnier. No more PopSci, no more corporate life.

Somehow I thought our friend Jonathan (above) working his VCRs and television sets helped get that message across. As Pandos, instead of fighting against modern technology, just letting a couple of simple magnetic tapes play serves as a more entertaining picture than a single curated stream.

My life working at Bonnier had become a lifestyle – long days (and nights), spending all day in the same place doing the same thing. I couldn’t even take 7 months of that.

So now what?

I’ve got a couple of freelance things lined up that should bring in the next month’s income alright, but I don’t want another hourly job. Here are some ways I plan on keeping myself distracted:

• Drupal Easy – this is the home for some (free) Drupal advice, and hopefully some (paid) screencasts, eBooks and tutorials. I will be doing a Drupal conference circuit in the next few months to connect with folks who are looking for training more than straight-up work. I hope I am a good provider.
• Orlando Scene TV – I still have yet to see a project emerge that achieves the goals of this videoblog. The more I think about it, the more it needs to be a one-on-one account of some fun stuff. We were trying to bring more of a TV correspondent feel to the show, but that takes work, and this is supposed to be about fun! Maintaining this channel gives a place for the Blogging Fringe videos and Orlando Puppet Festival content to go, and video is so engaging, measurable and portable — I really love doing this.
• Florida Creatives Podcast – I have been meeting some great people who need to get pulled in to this community, and one of the best ways to get them to care about you is by doing the completely selfless thing and asking them about themselves for half an hour, and sharing the conversation with the world on a well-trafficked web site. The happy hours will certainly continue.
• Florida Creative Summit – the idea here is to do something like BarCamp, but that covers more than just geekery – I am talking to some folks about how to pull this off right now, most of that goes down at Florida Creatives Happy Hour. This is the whole point of Florida Creatives coming to be in the first place.
• Coworking Orlando and our first coworking space in Orlando, CoLab – Coworking Teusdays are still going strong after some 8 months — also, I have already paid my $49 for use of a desk at CoLab in November — I’m not sure whether I will be full-time or part-time there in the future, but I know I want to be present for the birth of the formal coworking movement in Orlando. This is something I’ve been talking about for years, and now it’s downtown and affordable. Couple that with all the communities looking for useful consistent space, and the need for something like this is even greater. This probably deserves a separate blog post…
• Oh so many more things… like getting other Florida Creatives chapters going in other cities, like Brevard, Jacksonville, Lakeland, Tampa, South Florida — helping Petentials get to a happy place — doing a joint event with Doterati — creating a DIY community, a graphics hackers community, a podcasting community, a blogging community, an independent microblogging site, and lots of things I can’t think of just now.

To all my Bonnier peoples, I will keep in touch. Let’s do lunch! Blackwater BBQ?

To everyone else, it’s good to be back!

BarCamp Chaos 08: Monday October 7, 2008

See map: Google Maps

Register at the BarCamp Wiki

The best conversations happen in the hallway

On Oct 13, 2008 members of the BarCampOrlando community will be organizing an ad-hoc BarCamp session as a part of the Create Chaos conference. Create Chaos 2008 is a five-day creative industry destination event produced to inform, inspire, educate, and connect creative professionals across industries through an all-inclusive event. This ad-hoc session invites participants to control the programming by preparing a 20 minute talk on any creative topic and presenting it to other conference attendees (so, bring your laptop). The fun starts at 6pm.

BarCamp Chaos is free to attend, of course, and all registered Campers will receive free access to the Create Chaos Expo Hall on Oct 13, 2008. You can use the discount code: BARCAMP to get $200 off your tickets, if you’re interested in attending the whole conference.

More about Create Chaos

Create Chaos features several unique industry conferences under one roof, at one time, and takes place Oct 13-17, 2008 at the Orlando World Center Marriott Resort in Orlando, FL. Create Chaos serves as a spark to ignite a new renaissance by bringing together creative professionals across industry boundaries including: graphic design, advertising, film and video production, animation, photography, printing, Web, and publishing professionals. Produced by Brahn Awards & Events and partners, the Create Chaos experience features the following conferences and events: The Creative Suite Conference, Printing+Paper+Packaging Design Conference, The Vector Conference, Stash Theatre, CreativeHeads Job Fair, The Web Design Conference, MGFest, The Pixel Conference, and more.

Grab and print (or link to) a BarCamp Chaos 08 Flyer

Blog Badge:

<a href=”http://barcamp.org/BarCampChaos”><img src=”http://floridacreatives.com/files/barcampchaos-logo_sm.png” width=”160″ height=”" alt=”Bar Camp Chaos 08″ title=”The best conversations happen in the hallway. Register for free!” /></a>

awk magic: renaming batch files August 13, 2008

Hmm, somehow, files that should be jpegs have the extension “.null”… ugly!

ls -1 | \
awk -F\. '/.null/ { print "mv " $0, $1".jpg" }' \
| bash

Let’s say you have a bunch of files named “image.jpg.jpg”… ugh!

rprice@server$ ls -1 | \
awk -F\. '/.jpg.jpg/ { print "mv " $0, $1"." $2 }' \
| bash

Now they are renamed to just “image.jpg”, that’s pretty simple

Next challenge: you have several images which are named “image(1).jpg”… what do you do?

rprice@server$ ls -1 *\(1\)* | \
awk -F '\(1\)' '{ print "mv "$0 "(" $1 "" $2 "" $3 "" $4}' | \
awk -F\( '{ print $1 "\\(" $2 ")" $3 "" $4 "" $5}' | \
awk -F\) '{ print $1 "\\)" $2 " " $3 "" $4 "" $5}' \
| bash

Now they are also renamed to just “image.jpg” – you are a winner!

…and if you had anything named “image.jpg(1).jpg”, you will have to run both of these scripts. Lucky you!

For more awk tutorials, check out Drupal Easy.

P.S. if you also have a database that has the same nasty file names like this in it, example:
34,135887,image with spaces,image_with_spaces.jpg(1).jpg,image/jpeg,1
export the thing as a CSV and then apply the following script to the file before you drop all the rows and put them back in:

awk -F, 'BEGIN { OFS = "," } {
sub(/\([0-9]\)/, "", $4)
sub(/\.jpg\.jpg/, ".jpg", $4)
split($4, arr, "/")
print $1, $2, arr[2], "files/legacy/" $4, $5, $6
}' files.csv

SXSW 2009? Turn Your Old Media Empire into a New Media Paradise August 12, 2008

Question mark is because we proposed the talk, but it’s up to the people to decide whether they’d like us to present…

The form we filled out had lots more info on it, but here’s what the site says:
Turn Your Old Media Empire into a New Media Paradise

Companies that have been at forefront of the publishing revolution, before the days of the internet, have recently found themselves behind the eight ball. While they struggle with their digital strategy, smaller leaner companies have been capturing their traditional audience on the web. However, many of these companies forget that the ability to create compelling engaging content is their greatest asset. Instead of placing their focus on pages views, they should be placing it on the pages themselves. This presentation will show how we used Drupal and other open source technologies to to transform a couple of 100 year old magazines into fresh and relevant web 2.0 destinations – from both a technical and philosophical perspective.

The whole deal is, Content is King, but media companies are withholding their content from their audience, because they don’t want to cannibalize their print business (or insert traditional medium here). Eric (@xentek) and myself (@liberatr) are proposing this topic, so vote, comment, or otherwise show us some love.

Other Drupal-Related Sessions
Another Local’s Session

Luck is where Preparation Meets Opportunity: CMU’s Randy Pausch July 12, 2008

So many great things in this video – it’s an hour and fifteen minutes, but you really should watch this.

Not only did Randy achieve his childhood dreams, but he has taken his process for doing so and boiled it down to this talk, which we can now pass on to others. This guy is dying, yet he is so positive. I love it and I love this talk. Thanks @supaben34 for bringing up my day (actually, my whole year).

Some key points:

• The Head Fake: we don’t send kids to sports to learn about football.
• To achieve your dreams, you have to get over the brick walls. The brick walls are there to weed out the people who don’t want to achieve their dreams.
• Even if you are denied at first, you can still reach your dreams through karma and more brick-wall-jumping.
• Carnegie Mellon’s ETC is freaking awesome. So awesome, they’re spreading their labs to other continents, and five companies have letters open guaranteeing to hire their students.
• There are some great examples of interdisciplinary stuff – putting left- and right-brained people on the same teams.
• It’s nice to have metrics telling you how well you work with others.
• Always put others before yourself.
• If you are patient, everyone will impress you. Just keep waiting.
• I am going to have to check out the Alice project, like a lot

Likemind.orl and Drupal June 19, 2008

In about 10 hours a group of likeminded folks will get together for good coffee and conversations with friends and strangers. We do this once a month at the Lake Eola Panera Bread.

Likemind Orlando is part of a larger group of events which started in New York with two guys who were having good conversations online, and decided to move them to the coffee shop. Their friends in other cities liked the idea, and now, Likemind groups meet in more than 50 cities around the world on the same day every month.

Chris Scott will now be officiating over Likemind with me, since Alex left and got himself a house and a life on the East Coast (of Florida). Congrats and best of luck to Alex and Kathryn.

***********

Also coming up in the next few days is the 3rd installment of he Florida Drupal User’s Group. Myself and Mike Anello will be teaching classes on CCK and Views, respectively. You are all certainly invited to check out this event and ask tons of questions – we have left ourselves 4 hours to cover these topics, as each of them is kind of a big deal on its own.

You can get information and directions about how to get to the MindComet offices on groups.drupal.org/florida – the office is in Maitland.

Florida Drupal Group
Saturday, June 21st
1pm – 4pm
MindComet – Maitland

New Drupal Tutorials June 17, 2008

Yes, I have yet another blog: this one is all about Drupal. Right now there are exactly 4 posts, but two of them came this week, so there may be an upturn in the posting over there. If anybody out there wants to write some tutorials, I’d be open to that.

The first howto was sort of “scratching an itch”. I got really tired of manually downloading, unzipping, uploading and activating modules when it was time to install a new Drupal site or update an existing one, so I came up with a workflow that gets it all done in record time: Using AWK to Download and Unpack Drupal Modules

The second one was a question delivered to me via chat: How to create a “related pages” block in Drupal 6, but we can’t find any useful modules and my personal recommendation, Panels, is not ported to version 6 yet. Therefore, with some Arguments magic, I bring you (now, new and improved, with 15 screenshots!): Using Views 2 and Drupal 6 to Create a Related Pages Block

In other Drupal news, the Florida Drupal User’s Group is having our 3rd meeting this weekend, June 21st, at the behest of MindComet in Maitland. I’ll be giving a talk about CCK (the Content Construction Kit), specifically using it with Drupal 6, and Mr. Mike Anello will be giving a talk on Views. The whole thing lasts about 4 hours – from 1 to 5 PM. The first two meetings were absolutely worth it, so I highly recommend coming down to check it out, if only for a shorter portion of the marathon.

The next stage for this Drupal Easy project is to build out some wiki pages that outline key Drupal concepts and relate them to each other, wiki-style. It’s something folks have been asking me for ever since the move to Bonnier and the “Drupal Expert” label, so I’m going to see if I can deliver. If that all goes well, there just might be a print version up for sale at LuLu.com as well. No promises, but that’s the plan.

P.S. Not that I want to brag, but Angie and Nate from Lullabot are coming to Orlando this week to train the staff at Bonnier in the use of Drupal. This is the only public mention I’ve made in quite some time, but I’m pretty damn excited to meet the gurus.

Orlando PHP Tonight: Drupal May 27, 2008

At DeVry University near the Mall of Millenia, tonight at 7PM, I will be presenting at the 2nd ever Orlando PHP user group meeting. David and Derek asked me to come talk about Drupal after my peanut-gallery comments during last month’s framework shootout event.

Topics for discussion:

• What is Drupal? (origins, community, open source)
• Everything is a node, except the things that aren’t.
• What’s in a name? Drupal Taxonomy and Categories
• “Go ask your mother”: Drupal’s Access Control system.
• Modules, data types, and hooks, oh my!
• What’s on the menu? Everything!
• Flexible sidebars with blocks, regions, and visibility.
• Content vs. Layout – Drupal Themes

I will also be showing off some of the features we used to construct the OrlandoFringe.org, FloridaCreatives.com and Petentials.com websites.

For those curious to learn more Drupal, we have a whole slew of lectures planned into the fall through the Florida Drupal group on groups.drupal.org – our meetings are second? Saturdays of the month at the MindComet offices in Maitland, just off of 434.

In other PHP UG news, the Meetup.com PHP group, hosted first Thursday of the month at the Bonnier Corporate HQ in Winter Park Village (above Brio) will be coming up June 5th. 4 programmers representing Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony will be building a blog in 10 hours using the same database tables, then taking another 10 hours to extend the blog platform. Hopefully this will serve as a fun and informative hands-on introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of these 4 popular PHP frameworks.

P.S. See Eric’s Blog for a description of the Shootout rules.

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  Disclaimer: My blogs are not a reflection of my employer's opinions, but are my own, and often unfiltered. Also, some links on this site may be part of an Amazon Associates program, so by clicking on them you help me pay for my independence. DrupalEasy at DrupalCon San Francisco 2010
  

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