Pimp My Safari: As ready as it will ever be / journal / hicksdesign

22/03/05

Pimp My Safari: As ready as it will ever be

“As ready as it’ll ever be”, is an apt description of a little side-project of mine just launched, Pimp My Safari.com. Its been a pet project for many months, and was started as a reaction to all the sites cataloguing Firefox extensions. Many excellent plugins for Safari have been developed, but because Safari doesn’t have an official ‘extension architecture’, many are unaware of these extensions. This is where PimpMySafari comes in – a resource for the pimping of your copy of Safari no less!

Its just intended to be a simple, functional, information-based site. I’m not giving it a whole lot of time design-wise, its not the purpose. I just wanted a central place to promote these add-ons. I haven’t even bothered testing in IE, but I have given it a scant look in Mozilla.

So here’s my plan. All the Safari related browser talk will now go to Pimp My Safari, leaving this blog returning to matters of design, css, music and family. Those few who are interested in such things can now read them there. When meeting people at SXSW, I often found myself apologising for running a dull browser-based blog. I shouldn’t have to, but I did feel a little embarrassed.

I’m still rather wary of blogging about my family, I’d like to do it more than I do, but I just don’t feel comfortable doing it. I wish it weren’t the case, but the internet isn’t an appropriate/safe place for such things – there are nutters out there. Anyway, I digress…

A quick word about the CMS

When I started this, many months ago, I was using WordPress 1.5 nightlies (I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing out on anything). While I was very impressed with how far it had come since the last time I’d evaluated it (1.1), it was a relief to get back to Textpattern, and thats what I’ve used for the final site. I don’t think its just a case of being familiar with it. It just worked the way I wanted it to, and enabled me to easily run the entire site.

So there we go, I hope someone finds it useful. I’d love it if people felt like contributing, so let me know if you feel the urge!

Technorati Tags Tags: browsers, safari, sites

Comments | RSS

Sam said 1151 days ago:

I now have somewhere to go to for this kind of information. Great work Jon.

Saft being the only thing I use with Safari, you have yet again opened my doors to a whole arena of plugins. Thanks! :)

Oscar said 1151 days ago:

It looks really good. Maybe ill start using safari more often now.

Jason Santa Maria said 1151 days ago:

Very nice work Jon. As for blogging about your family, just change their names when you write about them. It will be seamless. You know, your little girl, uh, Brandy, and the boy, er, Son. Yeah, that works. And your loving wife, Betty Paige. You could even throw in a couple of crazy American neighbors, one whose short with a really long, often confused name, and the other with an absurd red beard. Main, this just writes itself. I smell sitcom!

John Oxton said 1151 days ago:

Great stuff Jon, maybe you can convince me that Safari is the Mac equivalent of IE!!

Raven said 1151 days ago:

Thanks, Jon! Now I have somewhere to point my friends who recently switched to Mac and have no idea where to find all these extensions, and nice list for myself… ;)

Good job!

By the way, there is small mistake in your code, in the right sidebar the parts of text are outside the P tag and the P tag follows them, but it is empty. ;)

John Oxton said 1151 days ago:

That should read: Safari ISN’T the Mac equivalent of IE!!

Ian Spence said 1151 days ago:

Hello.

I’ve visited here a lot, but never had anything to say. First, I love your designs.

Second, just wanted to tell you that on high resolutions (1600×1200) on a Windows Firefox install, the ”*e*” in “contribute” shows on the far left of the screen. I assume this is because you used text-indent: -1000px; Maybe -3000px; would fix it.

Excellent site you have here :-)

Jeff Smith said 1151 days ago:

Great work on this site Jon. I didn’t realize that there were so many great plugins available for Safari.

chris rhee said 1151 days ago:

To continue on what Ian Spence wrote, on a 1920×1200 resolution, you can see the blue text links for “Blog” and “Contribute” on the far left.

#10

Scott said 1151 days ago:

It looks different than I expected, but it has a certain dignified simplicity to it, and the safari logo looks great, so that picks it up a notch. You’ve taken a step toward building a network of your very own, ala 9rules.

#11

Chris McElligott said 1151 days ago:

Very cool Jon, I was getting antsy about the release of the site. It turned out very well indeed. I think maybe an all in one Mac browser site would have been better. Your opinion of the browser is fascinating and I wish you’d post even more about them :)

I know how you feel about posting about your family on the internet, instead of using their names just say son, daughter and wifey. I felt a bit worried when I posted a few pics of my family on Flickr but I learnt not to worry so much.

#12

Jordan said 1151 days ago:

Found another bug (Win/FF1.0.1):

Your list (or whatever you want to call it) for the top entry, Saft 7.6.0, isn’t displaying right on the main page. Instead of the list, I’m getting

h4. New in 7.6.0: * Improvement: Search set to group shortcuts and search multiple search engines at same time * Improvement: Make Growl sticky flag customizable * Bug fix: Crash in rare conditions related to many undoes and switching on/off undo support * Bug fix: Problem with Reset Safari button in kiosk mode

Perhaps it’s just a filter the software applies to things on the main page?

#13

Tony said 1151 days ago:

Jordan,
It looks like that on all browsers I’ve seen it with. Looks like Textile markup isn’t being parsed on the main page.

#14

Rob Scriva said 1151 days ago:

When should we expect pimpmyblog.com to become active? :)

#15

Kevin said 1151 days ago:

You should make the silver casing to the Safari logo all gold. You know, like its all pimped out. And maybe add a few diamonds to the face of the compass. Right now the site is feeling decidedly non-pimpish.

#16

Jordan said 1151 days ago:

Yeah, make it something like this: http://people.zeelandnet.nl/marco/pimpzilla/

(screenshot at http://people.zeelandnet.nl/marco/pimpzilla/images/pimpzilla.jpg)

#17

Jon Hicks said 1151 days ago:

I had thought about that style, but time is against me. Besides its about macs – so minimal is the order of the day, right?

#18

Kevin said 1151 days ago:

I thought pimping was the order of the day.

#19

Jon Hicks said 1151 days ago:

Nah, Information, and having a life is the order of the day. I prefer it this way.

#20

Garrett said 1151 days ago:

Nice work Jon. Now it’s going to be just a little tougher to decide which browser to click on each time I go to my dock. Safari? Omniweb? Camino? Firefox? IE 5.2? Kidding.

By the way, I love what you’ve done with your comments design.

#21

Scott Johnson said 1150 days ago:

Jon,

Aren’t you worried that Apple might come down on you for using the Safari icon?

#22

Ryan said 1150 days ago:

I’ve switched back to Safari as my default browser in order to give the site a try.

#23

Andreas Graulund said 1150 days ago:

Nice. As far as I can see, it works great here in FF 1.0.1/Win. Except for one thing. The textarea on the contact page seem to be wider than the page an go all out far to the right, which makes a horizontal scrollbar peek out and say hi.

#24

Chris J. Davis said 1150 days ago:

In the distance you can hear wailing and gnashing of teeth

Jon… why have you forsaken me!? I thought we had… something, you, me and WordPress?

I just don’t know if I can take this… I’m going to curl up in my sock drawer and sleep for a week.

Nice job on the pimpin site by the way. ;)

#25

Jon Hicks said 1150 days ago:

Sorry Chris – I just couldn’t do it all in Wordpress how I wanted to. It came very close though!

#26

Jan said 1149 days ago:

Love the site and design, love it. Thanks for the pointers on OS X goodies.

#27

Rutger said 1148 days ago:

I love it!
As usual with all your work Jon, it’s great.. And handy too. No more googling for Safari stuff. I might even start to use it again instead of Firefox

#28

Heiser Erwin said 1148 days ago:

That’s a great resource Jon, well done!
As far as Textpattern, I tried it but found it too frustrating to get certain things done. But it still has one of the best admin interfaces out there I’ll give them that.

#29

Tom said 1147 days ago:

Great site; informative, and it’s very easy to use. You the best Hicks!

[offtopic]hehe, thanks for inspiring me to implement Gravatar for my re-designed site. I’m loving it![/offtopic]