Alvaro Guzman has posted Part 1 of an excellent tutorial on designing a Wordpress theme.

Check it out here

Ive been busy tweaking some color schemes on a website today and found myself firing up Adobe Fireworks every five minutes to use the color palette, along with Colorzilla for Firefox

 After a while i was getting pretty bored and wondered if there might be a specific program that does the full job.

 Turns out there is, and its free...

 ColorPic from Iconico

This isn't made very obvious and took a bit of googling to work out, so here we are...

1.  Get the mp3 that you want to use as a ringtone, take a section of it (30 Seconds max) and save as a new mp3.

2.  Import or drag/drop this new mp3 into iTunes. 

3.  At this point it is wise to set the Artist and Title of the track to make step 5 easier.  I also put the mp3 in a new genre called 'ringtones', because I'm an over organised geek :)

4.  Right Click the new mp3 in iTunes and choose 'Convert to Apple Lossless Format'.

5.  Once the conversion is complete iTunes will have made a copy of the file in m4a format in the iTunes music subfolder of your music directory. 

For example...

If the track was Sunshine Underground by The Chemical Brothers, the track will be located in

my music\iTunes\iTunes Music\The Chemical Brothers\[Album Name]

6.  Once you have found the m4a file, rename it to m4r.

7.  Double click the m4r file and iTunes will magically switch to the ringtones category and voila, there it is.

8.  Now all you gotta do is sync it to your iPhone.

Ever since I've had a Laptop with a decent size hard drive it made sense to keep my main music library on it, as it sees more use than the home PC and I like to sync / update my iPhone while I'm on the move incase I come across some new mixes worth downloading.

This presents one issue..

What about my 'at home' music selection? 

• Do I let it go stale?
• Do I copy/paste everything from my laptop periodically? (No thanks)
• Do I use my laptop to listen to music at home? (not really very practical with kids running around the place)
  

After months of chin stroking and trying out different ideas I finally found the perfect solution (for me), maybe it can work for you too....

• STEP 1 - Download, install, configure and run Microsoft Sync Toy 2.0

This clever little tool allows you to specify a pair of folders that should be synced.  There are various flavors of sync, the one that I use is 'Echo'.  This means that any changes in my laptop music collection are 'Echoed' over to my home PC.  It works out what tracks have been changed/updated/added and ensures they are copied to the home PC.

When setting up the folder pair I had to share the folder in Vista  (Win XP Method) that contains the music on my home PC and then map a drive  (Win XP Method) to this on my laptop.  Obviously syncing only works when I'm on my home network, but this is fine for me.  If you wanted to sync from a remote location you could use something like Hamachi to create a virtual private network over the Internet.  It might take a while to sync if you have a lot of changes though.

You must ensure that before you perform your sync you add *.itl and *.XML to the excluded file section.  This stops synctoy from copying the iTunes library file over to the other PC.

See the figure below...

• STEP 2 - Download, install configure and run iTunes Library Updater

The name of this program speaks for itself - you point it at your music directory, it then automatically updates your iTunes library with any new / changed song files and track information.

Why is this necessary? iTunes has no 'refresh' option - if new files appear in your music directory they are not automatically added to the iTunes library until you play them.  I have no idea why it was designed like this.

There are other more rudimentary ways of updating the library file, but this piece of software makes it an absolute breeze.  My collection contains just over 3000 tracks and it took 20 minutes to update the library.  Subsequent updates will be a lot quicker.

 

Well, that's pretty much it.  If any part of each step seems a little vague, let me know.

If you develop websites using ASP.NET you may be interested in my article on developing a Search Engine Manager for ASP.NET

Hope you find it useful.