This week the How-To Geek has done a great series of tutorials on implementing the new Gmail support for IMAP with individual articles on how to configure it with Outlook, Thunderbird and Windows Vista Mail. Yet another example of why I think the How-To Geek is, day-in, day-out and pound-for-pound, the best site out there right now for practical help and short-form tutorials useful to tech-savvy average joes and janes. Sure, the more serious geekers salivate daily over the latest, ever voluminous but all-too-often-irrelevant-to-real-life posts at Lifehacker. For my money, the How-To Geek is the go-to guy. He relates.

Talk is cheap. Last June with Pika 3.06: Reloaded I talked up about Project Grace: The Pika Love Project, followed it up with a few initial experiments with Pika 3.06 table sorting, but then work on our next in-house iteration of Pika got stalled some. But Pika Software has given us a good kick in the butt to move forward again, with its recent release of the 2008 LSC CSR Module and the updated public demo of its latest Pika iteration that includes the new CSR module. (Want to try the demo? Login using “guest20″ for both the username and password. Enjoy!)

As we move ahead there may be more “stages” to LSNC’s next round of work on Pika but I can describe at least two of them here and now. Stage One of Project Grace should unfold fairly quickly over the next few months. It will be a modest series of lab tests to see how far we can push the default Pika 3.06 page layouts, page-element positionings and other presentational characteristics by working Pika’s newly implemented cascading style sheet (CSS) controls. Stage Two will go way deeper as we build a revamped and updated in-house version that incorporates all our customizations while exploiting the functional changes made by Pika Software in its latest version.

But back to Stage One and the new Pika cascading style sheets: What? You didn’t know that Pika Software had quietly changed how cascading styles operate in version 3.06? Neither did we until we started tinkering with them. Not to worry, the earlier-version danio.css style sheet and others are all still there in the default /css subdirectory and available for legacy Pika installations that need to fall back on the earlier presentation of page elements (as opposed to their structural markup) generated by the old CSS files and other styles embedded in earlier versions of HTML page templates and PHP code. You’re still covered, people! What Pika Software has done, and correctly in our view, is move more and more of the presentational characteristics of the application to external style sheets. In this latest iteration that translates into PHP coding that relies on the _screen.css.php file to handle all the basic style elements in this newest version. Where is the _screen.css.php file? It’s right there in the /css subdirectory with all the legacy CSS files.

With that clarification in hand, as we move through Stage One of Project Grace I will for the most part refer to the CSS-specific code lines in the _screen.css.php file to demonstrate how changes made there in the CSS coding can be used to add, remove, toggle and modify various presentational characteristics of Pika 3.06. The goal of Stage One is simply to learn where and how the current Pika 3.06 style characteristics reside and can be changed. I will not be changing any of the structural markup or page templates at this stage. I do reserve the creative prerogative to tweak a few lines of PHP code elsewhere within Pika should I discover it must be done to control the presentation where Pika Software has embedded a particular element’s style inline. Other than that, I will make every effort to avoid it.

Also, I will use this Stage One exercise to demonstrate a handful of Firefox-centric web development tools that may be helpful to others who are game to tool around and tweak their Pika styles, if not other things. One of my favorite sites, the How-to Geek has a post describing a slew of worthwhile Firefox web development tools. Here is a smaller, more limited collection of Firefox add-ons (including a few not mentioned in the How-to Geek article) and a few web development bookmarklets I will likely refer to or demonstrate in this series of articles:

• Firebug
• Web Developer Toolbar
• MeasureIt
• View Source Chart
• FireFTP
• MRI bookmarklet
• XRAY bookmarklet

You can do what we’ve done: Set up a test-bed default installation of Pika 3.06 that you can live with blowing up if it comes to that. Make sure you know where the Pika CSS subdirectory is and have FTP access so you can download and upload your file changes. Load up all the Firefox add-ons you need. Keep your favorite HMTL and CSS resource at hand for ready reference. And then keep your mouse up and your head down and let’s see how this all turns out.

“Project Grace: The Pika Love Project … A post a week. It’s all we ask.”

See you next week for the first chapter.

Not much. And there are lessons learned from the experience. Several weeks of no email and no feed pulls has done a very good job of cleaning my e-palate. When I returned and opened up the three Gmail accounts I rely on and fired up my feed reader (I’m a long time devotee of FeedDemon), I was confronted with 5,000+ new email messages, 12,000+ additional messages efficiently tagged as spam by Gmail (one of things it does best) and 6,000+ unread feed items. Quantity does not equal quality. But you already knew that.

Faced with this daunting clinical record of what my message-content lifestyle is really like, I acted to tighten up how I integrate my three Gmail accounts and have pruned my feed list from a 250+ pig-feed-fest to a more lean, low-carb and scan-worthy list of about 60 sites. And of those, there are only seven that I “missed,” which is to say I was curious to read the content that arrived while I was gone. It felt good to read them again. Most of the others? Not so much.

Here are the details of my post-trip reload of my “connected” life, such as it is as of today:

Three becomes One

I had something like this in place already but I finally got around to tweaking my three Gmail account settings to give me both what I want and what I need:

• I use one regular Gmail account for all my tech lists. It is an easy, efficient way to remember which account, username and password I use for that particular content genre.
• I use a second regular Gmail account for all things personal, which is to say family, friends and personal consumer things like Amazon.com, Netflix, and so on. (Ditto on the ease and efficiency.)
• I then set up both of these accounts to auto-forward all messages to my “lsnc.net” domain-hosted Gmail account at work, which serves as my global “inbox.” It becomes the gateway through which all review-if-not-read-worthy messages from the other two accounts flow.
• In both the tech and personal Gmail accounts I also set up filters and labels to so that incoming messages that I know are likely to be ones I want to “archive” automatically skip the inbox and go to specific Gmail labels (which work both as folders and tags) for long-term storage. That way I know I have already archived all essential messages that come into these two accounts, regardless of what I do with the same messages forwarded to my work Gmail account. I can delete them in my work account with relative impunity. Works for me!
• Needless to say, I set up filters and labels in my domain-hosted Gmail account at work to manage the flow of incoming messages and for selective archiving by labeled category, but to somewhat different purposes. In my work Gmail account the two top-tier labels are set to catch messages filtered by my personal and tech list Gmail accounts, as illustrated here. That way, whenever viewing my work account, I get an immediate visual cue that new messages have arrived from the other two accounts.
• The final detail in my work account is that I set up the labels into logical (for me) clusters by using special characters to control the order of display. There are different ways one can do this sort of thing, for example by preceding label names with numbers. I opt for using special characters in this descending order:
  • …
  • ..
  • .
  • ~.
  • ~

Whatever.

The seven sites I missed reading

This is one of those de gustibus moments, people. When I got back and was feeling a touch tech parched, these are the magnificent seven that I looked forward to catching up with, whether by feed read, email or doing a quick browser drive-by. They are all good for the reasons stated:

• the How-to Geek – of all the tech emails I receive daily, this is the one I always read. Real tech for real people. The type of tech site Tony White at Bay Legal would run if he had time to do it.
• A List Apart – the New York Times of web design and the editorial brainchild of Jeffrey Zeldman (see the next item). The one site for web site developers that is a must-read, even if you don’t read everything published there.
• Jeffrey Zeldman Presents – the godfather of designing sites with web standards. Since he got a real life his postings are episodic, not daily. But it pays to pay attention to what he has to say.
• Google Operating System – while a huge fan of the creative movement and momentum of all things Google, I also know Google is not the cure for cancer. That said, the Google Operating System is my favorite way of staying clever and au courant with the Google industrial complex.
• SearchCap – the easiest and most efficient way to tune into the web search world about things that are likely to be of interest or matter to you. And they do.
• Occam’s Razor – let me put it to you this way: GIS is so 2006! Get over it. The new new in the legal services community is getting on board with search technology and how it will inform how you work and what you know. Avinash Kaushik’s site (and books) are an optimal way to begin to gear up for the next big thing.
• David Pogue – technology for the hoi polloi. I must admit I really missed reading the New York Times every day while traveling abroad. (Yes, the International Herald Tribune is a great read and includes a lot of NYT content, but it just isn’t the same thing.) And one of the things I missed most is reading Pogue’s musings whatever form they take. Not as useful on a daily basis as the How-to Geek but way more entertaining and consumer friendly. The moral of this story: One cannot live by the geek alone.