One of the reasons I have a Referral Details and a Comments field on my DesignGeek subscription form is because people often regale me of the circuitous route they took to find the newsletter.  Here’s a good one that just came in:

This is fascinating. Anyone use Hyphenator.js  … apparently from Google?

Here’s the page describing the Hyphenator javascript and how to use it.

And check out this example of a web page that uses it … resize the page to see the hyphenation in action.

So Publishing Secrets is now signed up as an eBook provider — a publisher, really — to Apple's iBook store. We use a later version of the same iTunes Producer application that music producers use to upload songs to iTunes.

There are tons of screens of metadata info they want you fill out, like this one:

One of my Google Alerts (like an old school clipping service … do those still exist?) is for “designgeek,” and it’s kinda fun to see how many forum users and bloggers call themselves a designgeek or sometimes give themselves that login name. (There are no other blogs named designgeek, though … otherwise my trademark lawyer would have to stomp on them. And she’s a triathlete or something. Watchale.)

Oh gosh, while reading the often hysterically funny web comic xkcd I became inrigued by something he was making fun of, "TVTropes," so I looked up TVTropes in Google, went to the site, and emerged 45 minutes later.

 In other words I became the subject of the guy's comic. He wasn't kidding!

 Check out this trope, "Writer on Board." You'll soon see what I mean.

I have a love/hate relationship with PDF portfolios, the Acrobat 9 PDF format that turns a PDF into a handy ZIP container with a slick front end. I love the interface for customizing it, because it makes me feel like I'm a programmer. "Hmmm, the interface should present thumbnails of the enclosed files on the bottom that you can flick left and right; and a Flash movie should be on the "home" page, with a "Fall leaves" color theme. Or wait … let me arrange them in list order like the Finder."

Probably not the biggest pet peeve I have, but the most recently encountered: I cringe at the sound my Morton's salt container makes when I need to pull up its metal tab embedded at the top of the cylinder. I pulls open with such a rough, high-pitched squeak sound that the hair raises on my arms and my back teeth ache.  Why can't they make just a normal, embedded plastic tab opener?

Fingernails on a chalkboard are only slightly worse. 

Hi people …

Pardon my dust, I'm making this site go live even though it's not quite ready for prime time!

We'll be working on this site during the month of August. For now, all that's here are the articles from the past issues of DesignGeek, my e-zine.  Click the categories on the left to see the articles.

Thanks, more to come soon!