An inspiring quote, an attractive blonde pianist, a killer soundtrack, and stunning cinematography. Whether you’re an automotive junkie or not I am sure you can appreciate these things. Throw in a Formula One Champion tuned chassis, a symphonic V6, Ayrton Senna sound samples, and hot laps around the Nordschliefe and you get a petrolhead’s vision of heaven.

FORMAT67 via StanceWorks.

If you haven’t heard, AppSumo.com is like woot! for WebApps. The brainchild of Noah Kagan, AppSumo features limited-time sales on Software-as-a-Service products and more.

Today they’re promoting what they call the “Designer Awesomeness Bundle”. First up is a one-year TypeKit Personal subscription, worth $24.99 all by itself. TypeKit is an Open Type web font provider which you lets you easily spruce up the typography of your website, without worrying whether or not your viewers have your fonts installed. Toss in online scrapbooking tool Ember, design feedback software Notable, and a half-off coupon to site mockup software Balsamiq and you’ve got yourself a heck of a deal. w00t!

If you’re running WordPress on Media Temple’s Grid Service, there’s a good chance your blog has been compromised. I at first figured that my virus scanner was going haywire, but after looking at source code on a couple of sites I have hosted over on the Grid, I realized my database had been plagued with some script injection attacks.

http://ae.awaue.com/7

http://ie.eracou.com/3

If you’re finding the above references in an injected script in your source at the end of every post you have the exact same problem. The script has been appended to every post you have in your MySQL database. Luckily the fix is quick and easy. Here’s how to get rid of the WordPress hack:

1. Log In to your Media Temple Account Center

2. In the domain Admin Panel click ‘Manage Databases’

3. Log In To Admin which will take you to phpMyAdmin

4. Select the database of your WordPress installation from the left sidebar

5. Choose the SQL tab on the top

Copy in the following:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘<script src=”http://ae.awaue.com/7″></script>’, ”);

The command there basically replaces the script with nothing, but it assumes that your database tables have the default suffix wp_. You may need to edit the command or malicious script accordingly. Now hit go and phpMyAdmin should tell you the number of instances of the script it removed. You can also check by viewing any previously posts in phpMyAdmin.

The next steps are to figure out what to do if you’ve been hacked. There’s a great post on the WordPress Codex for that here. @mediatemple also sent me this link on twitter. (thanks for the quick reply mt support).

I only host a site or two, none of them client sites, on the Grid Server. These recent security issues are one of the reasons why I have moved away from the (mt) Grid. Unfortunately, the affected blogs were my Dad’s so I really do have to notify the “client” in this case. Good luck with your own site!

Cha-ching! You can hear it now. Your customer’s final payment is almost coming and you can actually pay for that iPad you bought on credit before you started this project. You know, the one you said would change your entire design process. (It did. You now spend way too much time playing tower defense games).

Whether we’re refugees from the paper-pushing world, digital purists, or tree-hugging environmentalists, we web designers seem to have an unreasonably strong dislike for “hard copies”. But maybe printing your final revisions is just what you need.

Are you REALLY done? Something about putting pages to ink gives you a mental signal that you better have dotted all your t’s and crossed all your i’s. (eh?) Printing out that final version helps you to pause with a subliminal gut check that you’re DONE done.

Whether you’re a designer or not, in this day and age chances are good you spend the better part of your day staring at a computer screen. Sometimes it helps to look at a design off-screen to catch inconsistencies and to re-do odd designs you dreamed up at 3am.

Lay all your pages out on the floor or pin them up on a wall. The spread helps you take a look at your entire site at once. Wow! You really did all that. Take a step back and look to see if your site wraps itself in to one coherent design. Is there a page that now just looks terribly out of place? Better open that text editor back up.

You’re done! Don’t forget to recycle.

I stumbled upon Padmapper a few months ago just in time for my fiance to receive her rent renewal notice, accompanied with an 8% bump. BOOOO!

Padmapper is mostly a Craigslist and Google Maps mashup, with a few other online services added in for good measure. Every apartment hunter I’ve introduced Padmapper to has been unreasonably grateful. All I did was send a link! Enjoy.