For me the Kindle has two killer features. The first is that it helps me decrease the amount of physical stuff taking up space in my house. If it’s a book by a favorite author or a Jewish book that I know I’m going to reference later on then I will buy the physical book. If it’s a novel or a non-fiction book that I get interested on a whim then having it in Kindle form is just fine.

The second killer feature is the Kindle iPhone app. My Kindle and my iPhone stay synced so if I’m standing in line at the post office or waiting for B at a restaurant and don’t have anything with me but my iPhone I can still be reading. The problem is that I find I enjoy reading on my iPhone more than I enjoy reading on the Kindle. Obviously the Kindle’s screen is larger but I find the bright LCD screen and digital text of the iPhone easier to read than the Kindle’s darker screen and e-ink. And the touch screen of the iPhone has become second nature so flicking a finger to turn the page is more intuitive than pushing a button to do so. Also, the Kindle interface has never seemed quite right. It’s fine, but it’s not great. I guess the best way to describe it is that it’s just not smooth. Whatever task you need to do (make a note, go to a previous section, etc) is simple enough to do but it doesn’t feel simple. Does that make sense?

That brings me to the iPad. At first I thought this was device that would have absolutely no place in my life. Then I noticed how much B sits on the couch playing Tetris on her iPhone while I’m reading. Then I paid attention to how much I really don’t look forward to reading on my Kindle anymore because I feel like my eyes are straining with the screen. Let me pause here to note that I know people have said e-ink is easier on the eyes and perhaps long term it is but for me personally it’s much easier to read on an LCD screen.

I have been having fantasies of reading on essentially a much larger version on my iPhone and it excites me. I imagine B enjoying her games of Tetris infinitely more than she currently does. I imagine how beautiful and intuitive the experience of navigating and performing tasks will be on the iPad. Apple might be locked down, they might do weird pricing things but lets face it, they know how to develop an incredible complete package of hardware and software.

So am I going to go out and drop $500 on an iPad? Probably not, we’re spending way too much money renovating the house but I will definitely want to. See the difference? I never wanted to spend money on a Kindle but when I got one for free I loved it. I want an iPad. I see its potential in both my life and B’s life. I don’t think B has ever touched my Kindle except to hand it to me. In other words I cannot fathom someone spending $259 for a Kindle 2 or $489 for a Kindle DX instead of an iPad. Kindle is a great e-book reader, full stop. But I’m a fan of Alton Brown’s philosophy of only going with unitasking tools when you absolutely have to.

My one frustration with iWork though has been that I couldn’t figure out how to access the master list of all the available graphics and clipart that come with the various templates. Yeah I guess you could open up every single template and then drag whatever graphics you want into the document you’re working on but no one in their right mind is going to do that.

There isn’t an obvious folder where these files are stored, nor do the individual image files have logical names that you can search for and last but not least Google failed me when I queried about finding these files. So today I spent some time monkeying around my hard drive and finally found the goldmine. Now I have access to all the template images that come with Pages & Keynote so I can easily find and use them in whatever template I choose, instead of just the one that they are natively associated with.

Since I couldn’t easily find the info to do this on the interwebs I thought I’d post the instructions to possibly help other people who would perhaps like to do the same.

1. Open your Applications folder
2. Open iWork folder (I have both iWork 08 and iWork 09 on my system but for this process iWork 09 is what I was using).
3. Right click on Pages and choose “Show Package Contents” (note that you will have to repeat this procedure for Keynote. The image files for the two sets of templates are not in the same location).

Users of the Internet take for granted their ability to access all Web
sites on an equal basis. That could change, however, if Internet
service providers started discriminating among content, to make more
money or to suppress ideas they do not like. A new “net neutrality”
bill has been introduced in the House, which would prohibit this sort
of content discrimination. Congress has delayed on this important issue
too long and should pass net neutrality legislation now.

The Internet, at least in this country, is a remarkably unfettered
medium. If you type in the domain name of a large corporation or a
small blog, a government Web site or a radical political party, the
pages are sent to your computer with equal speed. Like a telephone
line, an Internet connection does not play favorites — it simply
transmits the words and images.

I.S.P.’s, the companies that
connect users to the Internet, want to change this. They have realized
that they could make a lot of money by charging some Web sites a
premium to have their content delivered faster than that of other
sites. Web sites relegated to Internet “slow lanes” would have trouble
competing.
- Democracy and the Web NY Times May 19, 2008

As someone who makes a good part of her living, communicates with her friends and consumes massive amounts of content via the internet net neutrality is an exceptionally important issue to me. I’m not a one issue voter but if I were net neutrality very well could be that issue. Barack Obama supports net neutrality as a concept and as concrete legislation. John McCain does not.

A couple quotes from a Reclaim the Media piece:

During a November appearance at Google’s Mountain View headquarters,
meanwhile, Obama pledged that “I will take a backseat to no one in my
commitment to Net neutrality, because once providers start to privilege
some applications or Web sites over others, then the smaller voices get
squeezed out and we all lose.”

“I think that Net neutrality is something that we have to look at
from time to time, but I don’t want to see the wealthiest and most
powerful [companies] crowd out the independents, which has really given
[the Internet] its strength and vitality,” McCain said in an interview with WNYC last year. “It’s a very tough issue.”

“When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment,” McCain said at the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital D5 conference.

“The road to overregulated markets is paved with [good] intentions but terribly misguided legislation,” McCain special counsel Chuck Fish said recently at the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in New Haven, Conn.

One more quote, this one from the Wired blog:

John McCain has been vague about network neutrality both in congressional debates and on the campaign trail. He simply says that the issue is one that can be addressed by market forces. 

Obama: Passionately supports net neutrality legislation.
McCain: Does not (passionately or otherwise) support net neutrality legislation.

Net Neutrality is One Reason I Support Obama.

That’s all well and good but it kind of sounds like pretty rhetoric doesn’t it? Why do I think these things about Obama? Why am I passionate about the potential he shows as a leader? Why have I given money to his campaign? Why do I believe he is a significantly better choice for president than John McCain? These are real and valid questions and I expect to get asked theme frequently both by people who aren’t traditional Democratic voters and people who were ardent and passionate Hillary supporters. My first inclination is to be frustrated with people who say “Since Hillary is not the nominee I’m not sure I’ll be voting for the Democratic ticket.” But that inclination is wrong. If I want to attempt to do some measure of good for this country the best way I can do that is to reach out to such people. I can acknowledge the disappointment they feel at their preferred candidate is not the nominee and I, and other Obama supporters, can share with them reasons why we think Obama will do significantly more good for this country than McCain will.

Soon I’ll post “One Reason I Support Obama: Net Neutrality.” My work, business and personal communication, cultural and intellectual consumption and a million other things rely heavily on the internet so this issue is a very, very important one to me.

I’d like to encourage other Obama supporters to write their own one “One Reason I Support Obama” pieces. Feel free to leave it as a comment, post it to your own blog and leave a link to it in the comments or, if you’d like to guest post let me know and I can post it here.

One more note: If folks genuinely believe that McCain will do a better job than Obama then they should vote with their conscience and their heart. However I think a lot of people will find that Obama is the right candidate for them if they know more about him and his positions. That’s why I think it’s really important to share our reasons for supporting him. I don’t ask people to participate in memes (and don’t really consider this a meme but whatever) but if you’re an Obama supporter I’m asking you to do this.

I’ve been thinking about this notion of a killer app (or killer feature) as I’ve started shopping for a smart phone. Really good Gmail integration is my killer feature.

As I mentioned I had no real need of such a device until about 5 months ago. It was then that I started leaving the home office more and more for meetings where I either didn’t want to take my MacBook along or where WiFi wouldn’t be readily available. As my work projects grew, almost all of which are web related in someway, being away from email and the web for 3 or 4 hours became an issue. Not a huge, end of the world issue, but enough of an issue that I started thinking about getting a smart phone.

Being the Mac fangirl that I am it would make sense that I’d buy an iPhone. Two barriers to an iPhone purchase though: 1) I’m under contract with Sprint (and have some holdover ill will toward AT&T from when I used them before) 2) When I’ve tried the iPhone in stores I’ve found it very, very hard to type on the glass screen. A few weeks ago an associate at a meeting let me play with his beloved iPhone. He showed me what Gmail looks like on an iPhone and I fell in
love with it too. But those two barriers still exist. So I went to the Sprint store to try out Blackberries. I was, in a word, unimpressed.

I was unimpressed with the form factor of the Blackberries I looked at, unimpressed with the browsing experiences of the Blackberries and most assuredly unimpressed with the service, or lack thereof, I got at the Sprint store (both the actual person to person customer service and the larger corporate service in terms of contracts, rate plans, etc.).

Point by point on my state of being unimpressed:

1. Regarding the form factor of the Blackberry (I looked at both the Pearl and the Curve) I was just meh. It wasn’t ugly or clunky, it was just, there. Not bad but not exciting either. The Blackberries are significantly lighter than B’s Treo though so I guess that’s one positive.

2. I do the vast majority of my email work through Gmail. So when I talk of “doing email” (as my grandma would say) I’m talking about browser work. I did the Gmail/Imap thing for a little bit but using gmail.com works best for me. Why mess with it? If I used Outlook or Entourage or whatever it is that corporate IT departments love I might have been blown away by the Blackberry trial experience. Trying to read Gmail with it though was less than happy making in general but compared to reading Gmail on the iPhone doing it on the Blackberry was just bad.

3. Since I’m under contract with Sprint I can’t buy a Blackberry at the “discount” rate that new Sprint users would get. So if I wanted to buy the new Blackberry Curve I would get the “sort of discount” and have to pay $525 for it. After paying $525 for the Curve I’d have to pay $30 for a data plan. We pay $15 a month for the data plan for B’s Treo. The $15 data plan isn’t available for the Blackberry. Why? The employees at the store couldn’t really explain it but as far as they could tell it has something to do with GPS.

So where does that leave me?  It leaves me visiting the Sprint store again today, both in person and online. Le sigh kids, le sigh. I’m totally buying an iPhone. How’s that?

Let’s, just for kicks, compare plans. When you go to the iPhone store page at Apple.com you immediately get straightforward information about minutes, text messages and data.
 

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

When you go to Sprint.com to research data plans you first must give your zip code.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Then you can sort of get information.
 

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Like I said, sort of.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Those screenshots sum up my experience shopping for a smartphone in a nutshell. If I go to the Apple store I can pick up an iPhone that actually functions and play with it all I want. If I go to the Sprint store most of the smartphones on display don’t actually work. You can sometimes, maybe, get a store employee to show you a functioning model (normally it’s their personal phone that they’re showing off) but more often than not you’re just supposed to get over the fact that you can’t *really* try the device out. You can try one that’s almost like it, or you can try the old version of it, or you can try the phone the kid working there has strapped to his belt.

To be more succinct, shopping for a smartphone and smartphone plan at Sprint has been very unpleasant. Shopping for an iPhone and iPhone plan at Apple has been quite pleasant. That has made me decide to leap over the two barriers that have thus far precluded me from buying an iPhone.

I’ve run the numbers and if I just keep my current Sprint plan (as it’s a shared plan with B) + buy an iPhone + have an AT&T plan I will pay $235 more over the course of one year than if I buy the new Blackberry and have a Sprint data plan. $235. That’s roughly a $20 per month luxury tax I’d be paying to have an iPhone. I’m ok with that. So that’s barrier one down.

Barrier two I’m just going to have to take a leap of faith that I can get over typing on the glass screen. Friends and associates who have iPhones assure me that I’ll get the
hang of the glass screen typing. And I think that my typing on the glass screen
can’t be much worse than the typing in emails I get from people using Blackberries. So I’m getting an iPhone. Maybe.

Maybe? Well you currently can’t buy iPhones from the Apple store. This has everyone and their brother speculating that a new version of the iPhone is just around the corner. So I’ll be waiting to see what shakes out in the next few weeks with a potential new iPhone. If it comes out and is relatively affordable (no more than $399) I’ll be purchasing one. Otherwise? I’ll just start packing my MacBook more often. After shopping with Sprint and giving Blackberries a look I’ve decided, that for my needs, it’s either an iPhone or nothing. Don’t cry for me geeks, I’ll be totally fine without handheld web access. Yes, a hand held web device would be a help to me but it’s not so much of a necessity for me right now that I’d pay for the privilege of a significantly broken experience. And that’s how I look at both going into a new relationship with Sprint and with the way Blackberries function compared to the way iPhones function.

So, hurry the frack up and come out next gen iPhone.

Instead of just breaking down templates line by line I thought it would be easier and more practical to look at templates in the context of actually doing something. You don’t really need to understand every single line of code if you know where and how to make the changes to accomplish what you want. For this first tutorial we’ll be making changes to the sidebar. Specifically we’re going to remove a widget we don’t want and add Google AdSense ads in the sidebar, after the archive content, on every page of a blog.

Before we get to actually editing any templates I can’t recommend highly enough that you download and install the Template Shelf plugin. If you’re going to spend any time at all editing your templates this plugin will make your life much easier. For this tutorial we’re only going to be editing one template. But it’s not unlikely that you’ll be needing to hop back and forth between multiple templates and modules in the future and this plugin makes that much, much simpler.

I’ve set up a brand new blog to serve as an example of the work done in this tutorial. I selected the minimalist light blue style and a two column (wide-thin) layout from Stylecatcher in Movable Type. Since we’ve got a two column layout the template we’re going to be modifying is the Sidebar – 2 Column Layout. This template is actually a template module. What’s a module? The best analogy I can think of is that a template module is like a backpack. You’ve got a whole bunch of stuff (all the code for the sidebar) you need to get somewhere (in the sidebar of all the pages on your blog) and it’s much easier to put all of that stuff in a backpack (a template module) and then unpack it when you get to where you’re going.

So instead of having to put all your sidebar code into every template (main index, individual archive pages, monthly archives, etc) you just reference the particular module that contains the code like so <$MTInclude module=”Sidebar – 2 Column Layout”$>.

Out of the gate this is what the sidebar looks like.

The first thing I want to do, is remove the text that says “Tag Cloud.”
Tag clouds can be fun but I’m not using tags on the tutorial example
blog so there is no reason to have it there.

To remove the Tag
Cloud we need to find the following section of code in the Sidebar – 2
Column Layout template module (line 169 if you’ve got syntax
highlighting turned on):
<MTIf name=”main_index”>
        <div class=”widget-cloud widget”>
            <h3 class=”widget-header”>Tag Cloud</h3>
            <div class=”widget-content”>
                <ul class=”widget-list”>
    <MTTags limit=”20″ sort_by=”rank”>
                   
<li class=”rank-<$MTTagRank max=”10″$>
widget-list-item”><a
href=”<$MTTagSearchLink$>”><$MTTagName$></a></li>
    </MTTags>
                </ul>
            </div>
        </div>
</MTIf>

Let’s look some of the important code in this section before we remove it.

<MTIf
name=”main_index”> and </MTIf> Everything that falls between
these two template tags is governed by a rule that basically says “if a template is the main index template then
this information will be displayed on that template’s published page.
If a template is not the main index template then this information will
not be displayed on that template’s published page(s).” In other words
“the information within these tags is only going to be displayed on the
main index page and not any of the archive pages.”

Wrap your head around the if/then idea here. It’s going to be really important later.

<div
class=”widget-cloud widget”> and </div> The first tag in this
pair says “we’re dealing with the tag cloud widget here.” Th second tag
(which comes just before </MTif> if you’re confused) says “we’re
done dealing with the tag cloud widget now.”

Combine those
four tags together with all the code included between them and you’ve
got a Tag Cloud that appears on your blog’s main index page and nowhere
else.

I don’t want a Tag Cloud to appear on the main page or
anywhere else so I’m totally deleting all of this code. If you think
you might want to implement the tag cloud later on you can just comment out this section instead.
Tag Cloud gone we can now move on to adding the code for AdSense
into the sidebar. To do this next step you’ll have of course needed to
setup an AdSense account and grabbed the code they give you to put ads
on your site. It will look something like this

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
google_ad_client = “pub-################”;
google_ad_width = 120;
google_ad_height = 600;
google_ad_format = “120x600_as”;
google_ad_type = “text”;
google_ad_channel = “”;
google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_link = “000000″;
google_color_text = “000000″;
google_color_url = “333333″;
google_ui_features = “rc:10″;
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
  src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

I
want the ads to appear, on every page of my tutorial blog, after the
monthly archives list and before “Subscribe to this blog’s feed.”

On
or about line 242 (depending on whether you deleted or commented out
the Tag Cloud code) you should find the code block that begins <div
class=”widget-syndicate widget”>. Like the previous code in this
format this is saying “hey we’re dealing with the syndicate widget now.”

Since
we want our ads to be directly about the syndication widget (the
syndication widget is where the phrase “Subscribe to this blog’s feed”
is coming from) we want to paste in the code Google gave of us here. 

Voila!
Now you’ve got ads on all the pages of your blog in the sidebar
between the list of monthly archives and “Subscribe to this blog’s
feed.”
Or
do you? You’ve got the ads on every page sure enough. Those ads always
appear above “Subscribe to this blog’s feed” just like we want but on
some pages, say an individual archive page for example, there is no
list of monthly archives. And this is where things get a wee bit
tricky.

By
default Movable Type thinks you probably want slightly different
content in the sidebars of each of the main sections of your blog. For
example on your main page
it thinks you want a search box, a list of recent entries, a list of
categories, a list of monthly archives, the syndication widget and
finally the powered by Movable Type graphic. On your individual archive pages
it thinks you want a search box, meta data about the individual entry,
a link to to the main index page, a link to the main archive page, the
syndication widget and finally the powered by Movable Type graphic. All
the other sections (monthly archives, main archives, etc) have, by
default, some variation of either of these two versions of sidebar
content.

Remember how I said if/then was going to be important later? Later is now.

Movable
Type is right, I want the search box at the top of the sidebar on every
page of my blog so I’m not going to touch the search box code at all.
Search box related code takes up the first 40 lines of the Sidebar – 2
Column Layout template so let’s skip to line 41.

Line 41 is
<MTIf name=”module_about_context”>. Just like when we saw MTIf
before this is signifying the beginning of an if/then statement. This
particular if/then statement is saying “the following content is a
module called about context. If a template calls for the module called
“about context” then display the following information. Simple enough
right? Wrong.

Wrong because the about context module has several
other if/then statements wrapped up in it and some if/then/else statements
as well.

An example:
<h3 class=”widget-header”>
<MTIf name=”entry_template”>
About this Entry
<MTElse>
<MTIf name=”archive_template”>
About this Archive
</MTIf>
</MTIf>
<MTIf name=”archive_index”>
About Archives
</MTIf>
</h3>

The
English translation: if a page is built from the entry template then
display “About this Entry” if the page is built from the archive
template then display “About this Archive” and if the page is built
from the archive index template then display “About Archives.” In this
case “About this Entry”, “About this Archive” and “About Archives” are
all headers for the section that immediately follow the search box in
the sidebars of pages built from the templates. On individual entry
pages the section is called “About this Entry” and so on.

As
my high school band director liked to ask “is that clear as mud?” That
part actually should be relatively easy to follow. It’s the next
section, starting at line 55 and going all the way through 116 that is
a bit more complex. This section contains another round of if/then/else
statements that determines what content to display in the about section
the sidebar depending on which template was used to build a page.

But
for our current project I don’t want to change the “About” section
content that Movable Type is creating by default. I want the about info
MT is spitting out by default for the various pages to stay the same.
All I’m concerned about right now is getting the Monthly Archives list
to appear on every page so I can have my ads between the Monthly
Archive list and “Subscribe to this blog’s feed.” There are two steps
to making the monthly archive list appear on every page.

The first step is to address the if statement that line 188 contains. It says
<MTIf
name=”module_monthly_archives”>. From past experience we know this
is saying “if a template calls for the module called monthly archives
then display this information.” By understanding that I know I’ve got
two ways for making the monthly archives list appear on every page, an
easy way and a hard way. The hard way is to go through every single
index template and add in a call for the monthly archive modules. The
easy way is to remove the if statement. Meaning, there’s no if about
it, I want this content on every single page so I’m removing <MTIf
name=”module_monthly_archives”> and the accompanying </MTIf>
(line 205) from the template. Now the content that was surrounded by
those two lines will now appear everywhere, not just on pages calling
for the monthly archives module. 

On Correspondence Notes
I wanted the right sidebar content to just contain AdSense ads and not
the about content Movable Type puts there by default. Since I wanted
this on every page, like we wanted our monthly archive list on the
tutorial blog,  I put this technique of removing if statements to work
there as well. With all the if statements removed the code gets really
simple. So mentally bookmark the idea of removing if statements when
you don’t need to change the content depending on which template a page
is built from.

As an example here is what the code for the right sidebar of Correspondence Notes it looks like this:
<div class=”widget-welcome widget”>
<h3 class=”widget-header”>
Welcome
</h3>
<div class=”widget-content”>
Correspondence Notes is about communication.
<p>end
tips, suggestions or perhaps just a greeting to <a
href=”mailto:info@correspondencenotes.com”>info@correspondencenotes.com</a>
</div>
</div>

The
second part of getting our Monthly Archives list in order is editing
the header. If you leave the code as is (line 193: <h3
class=”widget-header”><$MTArchiveLabel$> <a
href=”<$MTBlogURL$>archives.html”>Archives</a></h3>)
your monthly archive list will be right in most places but not on your
individual entry pages. Instead of saying “Monthly Archives” and then
listing your monthly archives it will say “Entry Archives” and then
list your monthly archives. Everywhere else will look just peachy but
to make the individual entry pages come inline we need to replace
<$MTArchiveLabel$> with the actual word “Monthly. ” So the new
line 193 should look like this: 

<h3 class=”widget-header”>Monthly <a href=”<$MTBlogURL$>archives.html”>Archives</a></h3>

Whoo.
That wasn’t too bad was it? It’s a shame we aren’t quite done yet. Take
a look at the screenshot below from category archive page. It’s got the
Monthly Archives list alright but then it’s got the listing of the
monthly entries for the particular category we’re currently looking at.
Who needs that? Not us. Looking at the code directly beneath the
monthly archives list in the template (starting with line 206) we can
see that Movable Type thinks we might want to list not only a
category’s monthly archives but also monthly archives by author. Again
I say who needs that? And again I answer myself with not us.
To
get rid of these unwanted archive lists I’m cutting out everything in
the template that falls between the end of the monthly archive listing
code block and the beginning of my Google AdSense code. Again, you can
comment these out if you think you might want to use them later. I
never will so they’re getting cut.

Now we’re done. For real. Go ahead, look around all the pages of the tutorials blog.
AdSense ads on every page between the Monthly Archive listing and the
syndication widget and not a Tag Cloud to be found. Feel free to download the edited version
of the Sidebar – 2 Column Layout template from this tutorial. Remember
that I deleted whole sections of code instead of commenting them out.

If
you’re new to Movable Type templates and template tags editing them may
still seem a bit overwhelming but give it time and some practice,
you’ll get the hang of it. Hopefully this tutorial will help clear some
things up and make things a bit easier on you. I hope to write more of
these project based tutorials. To that end I’m asking for requests/taking suggestions on what projects to write tutorials for
next. PHP includes? Adding Flickr badges? CSS modifications? Etc.
Please leave a comment or write me at the address in this page’s footer.

Naturally if I’ve made any mistakes or if you have additional questions please let me know.