I always seem to hit these moments of clarity. Where I’m currently at in life, and usually know where I will take my life from that point. The odd part is I’m at a point of clarity and don’t know where I should go. I live my life largely by logic, and the direction I feel myself wanting to go doesn’t match the logic. Two plus two makes five right? This is another one of those things that even though I’ll probably keep my thoughts to myself, I feel like I need to write about it. Odd isn’t it? In a way the whole purpose of webninja was for me to have a place to be a mental dump. Somewhere I could write about anything I wanted, be it music, code, design, my personal life, cars, etc.

This is a problem because I feel as though I’ve lost focus with the site. In a way I’ve decided I wanted to keep webninja to code oriented things but the personal life bleeds through. The thing of it is, if I write about cars, I know the majority of the people reading this wont care. If I write about code, the car audience won’t care. Music? Well I enjoy both hip hop and electronic and those genres don’t generally cross.

The funny thing is, I took a look at my stats and really I don’t have an audience. A few tech friends visit, but I don’t really advertise the site either. So I’ve decided I’m going to take a new approach and just write about whatever is on my mind. If I think something is cool, I want to try to write about it.

Although to get back to the original point, I still can’t write about everything I’d want to. If I’m frustrated about something with friends, I can’t exactly write about it here. Eventually I’d like to think most of my friends find this site at one point or another, it’s just a matter of if they come back. I’m guess the latter is true due to lack of updates. So I guess I should change that.

I was on a training session last week with a company for data cleansing software we purchased from the company he works for. I love the chance to have a discussion with other tech people, specifically ones that have their head on their shoulders. With Brandon’s departure, I find myself having less of these conversations at work. Over the years, I’ve come across few but usually have excellent discussions about other programs. Vincent from Spillman introduced me to Beryl (now Compiz Fusion), and just recently, Rick from matchIT suggested a program that will probably change this website specifically.

In my last post, i made mention of wanting a utility that does it all for me. lets me take a screenshot, crop it, add a border, then upload it to my ftp. The Jing Project has completely met all of my expectations when it comes to this solution. Jing comes from TechSmith, the company that created the popular screen capture program SnagIt. It’s a great application but comes with a $49.95 price tag that makes it not worth it to me, let alone the average consumer. Instead, Jing is totally free. I assumed there had to be a catch somewhere, but my up front assumption is TechSmith is considering ways to make an application free for the home user, and get away with something such as advertising when images are linked to. At the moment, there’s none of that either.

I’m getting ahead of myself though so I’ll start first my explaining how it works. You have 2 options, an annoying (to me at least) sun orbital at the top of your primary screen, or you can set a hot key. Personally, I’m using Control-PrintScreen. Upon hitting the key combination, the screen is grayed out and you draw a box over the area. I would have loved to show a screen shot of this, but print screen wouldn’t dump this to clipboard. After you pick the area, you decide image or video (which creates an swf file). Next you get this screen:

Now you may have noticed the FTP highlighted. With Jing you have the option to create a free account at Screencast.com with 2 gigs of storage, or dump it to your flickr account, ftp, or straight file. Since I’ll be using it for ftp I predefined my login info, where I wanted my screenshots to go, etc. Then you have multiple choices. The first icon uploads the file and copies the direct link to your clipboard. The second copies an embed link (think <img> tag, which you can also change for example if you wanted to us bbcode [img] tags) The third saves to disk, and the last option puts it in your clipboard. Along with this you can perform small changes such as creating a text label, highlighting areas of the screen shot, or even creating a frame (like the above screen shot)

So in other words, I’ve not simplified posting screenshots tenfold. I wish I could find applications like this every day.

I go from not posting at all, to posting a ton.  Then drop off again consistantly.  I suppose my stats would spike more if I continually updated.  I think part of the problem is I want to take the time to effectively write whatever I post here, but sometimes that holds me back.  You know, life gets busy, etc.  I’d be interested to look at my past history of the last 5 years of webninja and see what my posting frequency is based on month.  Perhaps I post more in the winter?  This seems like a common theme for people I know.  We’ll post every now and then in spurts.  Maybe I’ll change that eventually, who knows.

I think part of the issue is ease of use.  I’d love to post images more but that requires opening up photoshop, tweaking any images I want, saving it, then uploading it to an ftp.  It’d be nice to have a screen capture application that has borders, does cropping, resizing, and saves directly to ftp.

I’ve been experimenting with better ways to organize my digital life and get things done faster.  For example one application, Launchy.  It’s much like QuickSilver but on PC.  Thus far it’s pretty useful.  In short it indexes certain things like applications, and directories you configure it to, then those are accessible by pulling up it’s search screen with the windows key and space (also definable).

Then once you find what you’re looking for, hit enter and its loading.  You can also add certain triggers, for example you could create one that would allow you to type yt dramatic squirrel and having it automatically search youtube for a dramatic squirrel.

Anyways, beyond that, I have a bunch of really exciting coding projects I’ve been working on which I’ll be sharing here soon hopefully and with Brandon leaving, I’ll need someone to share them with.