Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

Stephen Hallgren asked “[Does] anyone have any good links on how to organize gigantic font libraries (not applications, but methods)?” and then specifically asked me to share my categories for organizing fonts.

I use Linotype’s wonderful free app FontExplorer X as a font manager. It works much like iTunes, in that you can add sets (drop and drag) and “smart sets” (which update automatically based on the given criteria.) These sets keep things organized so I don’t have to scan through the entire massive list every time I need a monospaced font for something or a nice script for a wedding invite. They also help me organize in ways that make sense to me and how I look for the right font for the right use.

I keep a set called “Go To” that’s full of the 50 or 60 typefaces I use most often and then sets for specific clients/projects so I don’t forget what faces I used for what clients. For the most part, this organizational structure works for me and saves me tons of time that I used to spend scrolling through that massive list, one font at a time. I’ll also add that I spent a solid week whittling down my library to around ~1600 fonts total. That helps save time more than anything else because honestly, most of the other fonts I had were complete crap that I never used.

Hope this helps, Stephen (and anyone else who may benefit from nerdy ways to organize font folders and such.) Happy typesetting.

Where did all my RSS subscribers go?

Sad,
Joshua

Viewzi bills itself as “a new and highly visual way
to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.” It essentially gives users multiple visual and contextual ways to search the web and hopefully cuts down on the clutter and boringness so often associated with search engines. They have a 101 video to learn more.

When I was still in Dallas, I signed my first (and thus far only) NDA in the early days of Viewzi (only to choose another v-named opportunity at the time), so it’s awesome to see it come to fruition because it’s a great idea and it’s well-implemented. Huge props to Aaron Martin for a lot of the design details throughout, and to the rest of the team that’s pulled it all together.

Cameron Daigle takes us on a walk down (his) memory lane with a variety of old pictures and insightful commentary. Great editing and timing all around.

Regarding Flickr video: I’m curious to see how useful/cluttery it is after the first few weeks of new-toy-syndrome wear off and people start using it “normally” as a part of their Flickr uploading process. Also: the fact that I can’t comment without the video stopping and reloading is annoying.

Quote, “Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.”

Once you get an invite, they give you 500MB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth a day. And since it’s Google, it’s free. In other words, “Good morning, Amazon… Google is now potentially competing with your web services package.” Too bad Google’s programming language of choice for App Engine is Python, instead of something I want to actually use/learn.

More: one of the software engineer’s gives a nice video rundown on developing/deploying a Google Web App.