It turns out Readability works great on the iPhone too!

Take this Ars Technica article for example:

And turn it into this with Readability:

Now, whether or not this is a favored improvement is debatable. Most sites nowadays offer an mobile version of their content, which is often good enough for reading in your hands. However, I’m a big fan of Readability’s style and I’m pretty surprised to find out how well it works on my iPod Touch.

To use Readability on your iPhone / iPod Touch, you’ll have to install the bookmarklet on the device. Follow the same steps I described on installing the Tumblr bookmarklet on your iPhone, except apply it on the Readability bookmarklet.

If you run into any trouble, feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment… otherwise happy reading!

Related posts:

1. 5 must-have iphone/ipod touch apps
2. Readability Makes Websites Readable
3. how to add the tumblr bookmarklet on iphone

1. Figuring out HTML / RGB color codes when developing and styling pages.
2. Finding out the proper sizes to scale images to, depending on the nature and content of the page.

Granted, there are workarounds: for #1, you can simply hit PrintScrn to take a screenshot of the page (Command-Shift 3 or 4 on a Mac), and load it into any image edit application for analysis. #2, you’ll have to do a bit of guesstimate work and hope you’ll get it in a couple of tries.

There must be a better way of doing things – and there are. Being an avid Firefox user, I discovered two awesome extensions that made life good again – ColorZilla and MeasureIt.

ColorZilla is essentially your familar eye-dropper tool that gives you the color code of the item on-screen that you click on. It returns the color code in RGB as well as Hex, with the added bonus of auto-copying the color code onto the clipboard for pasting. There’s also a pretty cool Webpage DOM Color Analyzer, which shows you a palette containing a range of color used on the current webpage.

MeasureIt lets you draw a box overlay on any webpage and tells you the the width and height – perfect for any kind of layout work.

So there you go – two simple extensions that makes life a lot easier!

Just a note – you can find both extensions through the Firefox Add-on Browser, however at the time of writing MeasureIt is not supported by Firefox 3.6. You can still install it through the author’s website though.

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However, since Tumblr makes is so easy for anyone to add and reblog content, most the blogs are chock full of stuff (like that’s a bad thing, right?) and pretty hard to fully explore. In particular, look at the photoblogs – there are Tumblr users out there that easily posts 30 – 50 photos on a daily basis, and your typical photoblog enthusiast can easily racks up thousands of posts. With Tumblr’s default navigation, you’ll be forever just skimming the top of the iceberg, since only the most recent posts are always comes first.

Here’s where the idea of a Tumblr gallerizer will come in handy. These are typically sites built by Tumblr users, free to use for all. All you need to do it give it a Tumblr ID, and the site will crawl that Tumblog for photos, come back and organize it in a neat and often creative gallery. This way, you’ll get an at-a-glance view of all the photos and pictures, and won’t have to worry about potentially missing anything great!

Here are the 5 great Tumblr Gallerizers I’ve come across:

Tumblr Mosaic Viewer

link

This one is my favorite – it takes the photos and pictures from the Tumblog and assembles them into an impressive mosaic layout. It claims to be able to show up to 10,000 images on a single page (I haven’t been able to verify this yet). Clicking on each image will bring up the larger version for your viewing pleasure, as well as give you access to the image source, permalink page and the reblog option. A very creative and attractive Tumblr gallery maker!

Tumb.la

link

Tumb.la is a fast, clean Tumblr gallery maker. It loads about 50 images at a time and lays them out in the form of small, clean thumbnails. Clicking on a photo will bring up a larger version of it, lets you navigate to the previous and next photo, and also brings up features like play photos in a slideshow, permalink and reblog.

One thing I enjoy about Tumb.la is that all the thumbnails load on the same page – no pages to sift and navigate through, although it will still only load additional 50 thumbnails at a time. Another very cool feature is the ability to move and open up more than one photo, creating sort of a stacked polaroids effect that’s pretty fun to play with.

Tumblr Gallery

link

The Tumblr Gallery is a no-frills gallery maker, with a fairly simple, straight-forward interface. The gallery is divided up into pages for navigation, and when you click the photo for the expanded view, there are also simple navigation options and a link to the permalink page of the post (unfortunately there is no reblog function here). A nice added bonus is the ability to let you enter in how large you want the thumbnails and the expanded image view to be, and the page you’d like the gallery to start on.

TumView

link

Another very powerful gallery maker – this one is somewhat like the Filmstrip view you have in Windows XP, or CoverFlow on your Mac or iPhone. You have your thumbnail galleries on the left side, and clicking each thumbnail will bring up a large version of the picture on the right. What’s interesting is it keeps all the previously viewed image open, so you have a neat history view of the image you’ve checked out. Clicking on each large image will take you to the respective permalink page.

Tumblr Cascade

link

This is a more creative and artistic application than a true gallerizer. Think the Tumblr Wire, except for it’s for a particular Tumblog. The Tumblr Cascade display posts in tiled form, and automatically scrolls gently through each post in reverse chronological order. I can image this sort of thing will be pretty cool to have on display on a TV or a spare monitor, 24 x 7, like a personal Tumblr Wire.

Bonus: Tumblr Archive

So this one is by Tumblr – every Tumblog comes with an archive gallery. Most of the Tumblr theme should offer a link to it – if not, just add /archive to the end of your Tumblog URL (for example, http://laboomeria.tumblr.com/archive).
All the posts are organized by month and by year. Clicking on a single month will bring up all the posts for that month. All in all it’s a serviceable gallery maker – however, one thing that really irks me is the image captions that shows up on each respective thumbnails. The thumbnails themselves are already small enough, and the captions easily covers up half of that, making it difficult to tell what the image is. For me this is a dealbreaker, so I don’t use this very much and wouldn’t really recommend it as a gallery – but it’s capable and useful for what it is.

So here they are, 5 Awesome Tumblr Gallery Makers at your disposal. Any questions, comments, tips or suggestions are welcome!

Related posts:

1. how to add the tumblr bookmarklet on iphone
2. Official Tumblr backup app now available (beta)

if you have experience with tumblr, you know how awesome the “share on tumblr” bookmarklet is. you can reblog anything, anywhere on the web with one-click!

the true appeal of the bookmarklet is that it doesn’t interrupt your surfing flow – you explore the web, find something you like, share it, and go back to surfing. tumblr’s native iphone app doesn’t do this very well – you can’t browse in it, meaning you’ll have to exit iphone safari to blog anything.

so wouldn’t it be cool to be able to add the tumblr bookmarklet on the iphone? yes, it would be, and you can!

the easy way to do it is to add the tumblr bookmarket in safari on your computer, and sync it with you iphone. voila, your bookmarklet is now available on your iphone!

however, if you are like me and don’t use safari, here’s a more long-winded way of going about it:

on your computer:

1. go to your tumblr dashboard and go to “Goodies”.
2. right click on the “share on tumbler” link and select “properties”.
3. copy value the “address” of the field in the popped up properties box (it should be a big line of javascript mumble-jumble). make sure you copy the whole thing – it’s a long line and won’t show up entirely on the screen!
4. email this to yourself.

on your iphone:

1. find the email and copy the javascript from the email.
2. go to safari on your iphone. bookmark a random page and save it.
3. go to your bookmarks in mobile safari, tap edit and open up the bookmark you’ve just created.
4. change the name to “share on tumblr” and replace the address by pasting the javascript.
5. save, and you’re done!

now you can tumble like you do on your computer. see something you like, just open up your bookmark and tap “share on tumblr”. a familiar screen should open up and you can tumble away!

Related posts:

1. Readability – works for iPhone / iPod Touch
2. 5 Awesome Tumblr Gallery Makers
3. 5 must-have iphone/ipod touch apps

i love edamame. i order them often at japanese restaurants, and they make a delicious, refreshing combo with beer.

they make an extremely quick, healthy snack, and the very act of popping the beans out of their pods is strangely satisfying and addictive.

you can pick up a frozen case at your local Costco. for those who are uninitiated might be at loss as to how to cook them, but it’s super easy:

1. unpack them into a microwaveable container and cover with plastic wrap.
2. for about 2 handfuls, nuke it in the microwave for 3 minutes.
3. remove wrap, sprinkle with sea salt and serve.

you can add a little water in step 1 if you like a softer texture. an alternative way of preparation is to cook them in boiling water for about 5 minutes, but i find microwave-cooked edamame is just as tasty (and according to food network, probably more nutritious!)

enjoy!

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