Matt McInerney

I’ve answered this question before on my blog: My theme is not available. I guess this person decided to use most of my theme anyway though… If you’d like to use a theme I’ve designed, I’ve made a couple freely available. I’d prefer if you’d use those than rather than use the code and images from my own blog.

Not much to answer so I’ll just say thanks. It’s always nice to get a message like this one.

I haven’t had a ton of time to post much recently, but I did want to take a moment to post a custom wordmark and website I designed for photographer Alison Weick. The wordmark features a custom slab-serif, and accompanying sans for the stacked version, both based on my typeface Raleway.

I built clipping.us using a very simple LAMP setup. Every time you visit a clipping url (i.e. clipping.us/test) a new row is created in a MySQL table. Anytime you hit save, the text you entered is saved into that same row. Anyone has the ability to modify or delete any row in that table unless someone has temporarily locked that url. Locking a url binds that url to the users IP address (meaning no one can modify or delete it) for the period of time they’ve selected. Once the lock time expires, anyone can again modify or delete that row/url.

There’s a little bit of javascript for pieces of the interface or the ‘select all’ button, but for the most part, it’s a super lightweight php app.

U.S. Soccer’s Next Goal. This is a project I got a chance to work on last summer at Pentagram, mostly designing the custom typeface ‘Game’ along with some other pieces for the campaign. I finally got a chance to see the bid book when I came back to Pentagram this summer and was really excited to see the final product. Click through to see the book, and other pieces designed for the campaign. Here’s to hoping the World Cup ends up in the US in 2018 or 2022.

I just updated clipping.us with two new features. The site will now save all of your clipping urls so that you can access them at the bottom right of any clipping page by clicking on ‘My Clippings.’ It saves them based on your IP, so no need for a username. I’ve also allowed the ability to lock a clipping url for a 5 minute period of time, so that it can only be viewed or edited by your own IP address. I thought this might be useful for information you’d only like to copy/paste and be seen within your own network.

Nope

I just launched a super simple web app called clipping.us. It is an easy way to paste snippets of text from one computer to another without any login information or registration. Just type anything after clipping.us/ like clipping.us/test, paste your snippet, hit save. Then access it from any other computer using the same url. Afterwards you can delete it, change, or leave it.

Any page can be edited by anyone because all clippings are intended to be temporary. The idea is to pick a somewhat unique url for yourself.

The site also has a bookmarklet that will automatically save the highlighted text in your browser to your clipping page.

The big question is why would I use this? or what is the point?

I see this being useful for transferring information between two computers in a lab setting, where you don’t constantly have an email app or im app open to message yourself or a friend. I’ve been in this situation working in college labs with a friend coding and wanting to share a piece of code very quickly. Rather than logging in to anything, you just paste the info into a clipping page with a url that you can easily remember or convey to a friend verbally.

Feel free to leave replies with feedback or any issues you encounter.

I found this old image I made on my computer today. It made me laugh again so I thought I’d post it. There’s just something about beard related humor…

I started learning HTML when I was about 12, so it’s been 10 years of practice. My not-so-secret little trick: View Source. I just looked at a lot of source code and tried to figure out how everything on a page functioned. The truth is, there is no real trick to any of it, it’s just a lot of work and practice before you’re able to code it fluently.

Edit: A good point was brought up in the replies to this post. I wouldn’t recommend using any programs like Dreamweaver. In my experience, they act as crutches that prevent you from fully learning the language. Instead trying using text editors apps like TextMate or Espresso.

Finally, as a side note: one of my favorite recent articles about learning to code comes from John Nunemaker. He willingly admits that he has no talent and I find that very refreshing. I’m not sure that anyone has talent. I think most skills are the result of a lot of hard work instead.