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If This Then That: ifttt Is The Easiest Way To Automate Your Online Activities

ifttt
When the first time I heard about the strange name ifttt (If This Then That) and the concept, I just thought it was an automated backup service with simple UI. But after a while, I signed up and played with it then loved it very much.

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How NFC devices change ads around us?

NFC
Here is an obvious thing. Foursquare and its clones including Japan made clones have to be happy with the Facebook’s decision about their location service.

Anyway, they must have ideal strategies to beat their enemies. There’re a lot of clones here in Japan now. A big difference between Foursquare and Japan made clones is mobile clients. Most of Japan made clones support typical Japanese mobile phones unlike iOS/Android devices. It means they’re based on Japanese mobile phone culture. This difference is making some innovative movement right now. They get some ideas from typical Japanese mobile phones.

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How I Focus On Single Task And Why It's Important To Improve Productivity


As you may know, it’s obviously important to focus on single task at a time if you try the GTD way. But it’s not easy to implement the concept in our real life. We now have too many projects, tasks, things need to consider. How can we handle it?

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Updated my WordPress theme, inspired by the Space theme

Minimalist WordPress Theme — Space
The Space theme is stunning. I can’t stop thinking about better themes for blog sites since I met with the theme. I’m considering to drop sidebars from all sites, and realized how typography is important to improve user experiences.
It’s difficult to make perfect themes like the Space but I updated my own theme a bit. Here are what I did this morning.

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Sole Aim Is Strong

Foursquare
I was surprised when I heard a news that Facebook decided to shutdown its check-in feature. But at a same time, I thought it was a good news for me. Why?

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WordPress 3.2 Fullscreen 'Zen' mode is great!

WordPress
WordPress is getting into a true publishing platform. It’s not just a content management system. They finally started to improve writing experience on the platform with the new awesome feature called Fullscreen mode. The feature was known as Distraction-Free mode or Zen mode.
Once you got into the fullscreen mode by clicking a fullscreen button on a toolbar of ‘Add New Post’ page, you can see what it is and how the mode improve your writing experience.
Here are some screen photos of my admin pages.
wordpress-fullscreen01
 
wordpress-fullscreen02
Of course not only the feature. According to Matt the author of WordPress, WordPress 3.2 is faster and lighter than before. And I can feel it since I updated.
If you own WordPress sites on your server, it’s a good time to update.

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messa Open Space and Open Coffee Osaka

messaliberty Office
We’re going to have two events tomorrow at messaliberty in Juso Osaka. First one is messa Open Space for co-working, and second one is Open Coffee Osaka for networking or exchanging ideas. You can see more information at messa Open Space and at Open Coffee Osaka.
Start from 1pm tomorrow. And it’s free. Hope to see you there!
Update
You can get more info here:

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Which is the best way?

Tumblr
I’m trying to take notes to track what I’m going to do to help myself and my team in some way.
Personally, I always took notes by myself since a few years ago in some emacs based notes or Google docs. Then I thought I should try the same kind of thing in public space if I wanna get more productive feedbacks or good effects especially in the social media era.
The problem is here. Which is the best way to do it? Just start an another blog? Or do it on some my sub/experimental blogs like Posterous etc? To use Facebook status or Twitter are also an option.
I’m still thinking about it but I just started to use Tumblr as the logging place. I may choose another one in near future but will share what I thought if I change the way.
If I have choices to start something, I’d choose an open option.

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Best Tutorials To Step Into HTML5 And CSS3

Old
New
Here are links which I read to make my WordPress theme which based on HTML5/CSS3. The images are my old theme and new HTML5 based flexible theme.

Let me quote some important part.

Facts

Need to know these facts before dive into it.

There’s also the fact that by using HTML5 code right now your website gets stuck in some kind of “limbo” since even though your browser will render HTML5, it does not understand it as of yet. This may also apply to other software such as screenreaders and search engines.

Lastly you must consider that HTML5 is still under heavy development, and it’s probably the “most open” project the W3C has ever done.

Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation

These concepts made the HTML5 more attractive.

Graceful Degradation is a widely used term which ideology is basically using the latest technologies first, and then fix anything that needs fixing for older browsers. We do this on a daily basis: most of us code for Firefox first, then fix Internet Explorer.

Progressive Enhancement refers to the habit of building first for the less capable, outdated browser and then enhance for the latest technologies. We, too, use this on a daily basis. For example, most of the times we code a website we start with the markup and then apply an external CSS file where we add all the styling.

Framework

To use framework is one option when you start to build a web site. I recommend to use a framework especially for beginners because it’s a faster way to launch and you can learn a lot from the framework. I choose Less Framework to build a flexible layout.

Grid System

This is not related to HTML5/CSS3 but if you wanna make a beautiful web site, 960 grid system may help you.

I made the image for Pixcel Perfect to figure out width etc.
992

More Resources

My friend Oli told me these links to learn HTML5. Thanks Oli!

Oli’s intro articles

HTML5 and Firefox

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How I Input/Output Content On The Web

Information Flow
I’d like to write down my information flow. The diagram above which I made at Cacoo says it all. But here are some additional explanation.

Source

‘Web’ means information which I can get from the Internet. ‘Life’ means things I get through my daily life. Nothing special in this part.

Filter/Input

Yahoo! Pipes is one of the most important tool. It’s the easies way to aggregate RSS feeds without wiring lines of code and ugly tricks.
My social content including Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Blog posts, etc are streamed into FriendFeed. And Yahoo! Pipes aggregates the FriendFeed content and stared articles on Instapaper. Then FeedBurner’s email subscription feature send the fetched content to my Evernote. Done.
As a feed reader, I’m using Google Reader and also using InstaReader to import my starred articles into Instapaper automatically. This combination helps me to read tons of articles. I just brown articles on Google Reader with keyboard shortcuts to find must read articles then I can read the articles on my iPad or iPhone with Instapaer app even if I’m offline.