Great article about Twitter from Snapps’ Rob Novak, a high-profile Lotus consultant/developer and good friend to my colleague Carol Dobies. Over at his Lotus Rock Star blog, he makes the case for Twitter, and likens it to a cocktail party. Money quote:

Just something to consider if you’re squarely in the “why would I care” camp…Twitter and other social media are like going to a cocktail party, like one I went to Thursday at the Mentor Summit in Vegas. I expect to talk to lots of people, care about what some of them have to say, filter a lot of personal stuff that doesn’t affect me while looking interested (how rude!), and come away – if not inebriated – with a few nuggets of great information, some great new contacts, and an idea or two out of the social interaction we have in a group that size. This dynamic – and EVERY networking event you’ve ever attended – is very similar to consistent use of social media in a targeted fashion.

Ars Technica is running a great primer on GREP by Ryan Paul. Covers basic usage and then introduces the user to regular expressions. Check it out here.

Don’t Make Me Think is suggested reading for darn near everyone in the field of web design and deployment. Susana Bruhn got me thinking about this book again recently when she was asking for good user interface source material and I recommended it. Along these lines, she also passed along 8 Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces, a great blog entry over at Usability Post.

Q) Can you deep link inside a PDF?
A) Yes, but only by specifying PDF page numbers. Can’t link to Bookmarks. Link would look like this:

http://www.domain.com/test/test.pdf#page=3

Q) Can you specify a link in a PDF to open it’s target in a new window?
A) No, not for URL links. They will open in the same window the PDF was in, thereby replacing the PDF.

Q) Can links in PDFs be specified as relative?
A) Yes, for URL links.

Here’s an oddity that I don’t quite understand, but am happy to simply note the solution for. =)

Installed Phoco Gallery on two sites recently. On the first site everything works fine. On the second site clicking a thumbnail generates a 404 error. Hmm. Everything is configured the same, but I found this post on their support forums that offered a solution. It wasn’t the exact same problem I was having, though. I was using the Random Image component instead of the Tree component, so it wasn’t clear if it would be the same problem or not. In the end, simply creating a menu item (on any menu) that is a Phoca Gallery page will alleviate the problem. I checked, and on the older site I did indeed have a test menu item for Phoca. On the new site I did not. Adding a menu item for Phoca (even though unused) was enough. How strange, but at this point I’m just happy it worked! =)

Update: It appears the menu item has to be published and not in the Menu Trash. Heh. =) I stuck it on an unused menu.

Found a great WordPress plugin for automatically generating/updating a Google sitemap file for a blog. It’s called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress and it’s pretty slick. Had some nice debugging features to help out developers with odd environments, too. The one problem, and I saw this coming, was that the entire blog directory must be writable by the script, which in some environments means it must be 777. Groan.

Great chart over at Campaign Monitor showing what CSS properties various email readers (both desktop and web-based) support. Handy for those of us who craft HTML-based emails for clients. =)

Here’s a couple of links worth reading that pertainto Facebook and SEO/SEM…

• How to Make a Fan Page in Facebook
• Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page for Your Website NOW!

I so rarely use server side includes (SSI) on Linux systems that today I ran into the same problem this guy had. I use them all the time in our Windows environments, but in our Linux-based PHP-world, I use the PHP-based versions (include or require). It’s basically just a matter where you can’t include something from above the directory you’re in with Linux SSI. Boooo! I’m sure there’s some perfectly reasonably security reason for this somewhere. Anyone?

More permissions issues. After installed WordPress 2.71, make sure /wp-content/ is writable by WordPress, or you will have to manually add the /wp-content/uploads/ directory and make it writable by WordPress. This could very likely take the form of 777 permissions (groan).