You can see it in action on my website, which uses the Lobster font in the headers.

Traditionally, a designer putting together a website has been limited in font choices to what is installed  natively on end users’ machines. I could tell a browser to display a headline in any font I want, but if the person viewing it doesn’t have that font on their computer, they’ll see a common font like Times or Arial. So that’s not a lot of variety in the fonts chosen for site design.

I could choose to let users load the font from my server, but that gets into legal issues with licensing. Plus, it can be complicated and confusing to get a system like that set up.

Google has made embedding pretty font super easy. It’s literally a two-step process.

To get started, visit the Google Font API website. Then click on “Font Directory” to see a list of all the fonts available. There’s not a lot to choose from right now, but everything there is open source and can be used freely in your projects. Just find a font you like, and click “embed font.”

Google will give you a short snippet of code to insert into your site’s header,and then you just use the font name in your CSS as you would any other font. The API generates the necessary CSS to display the font on the user’s browser.

AJC – The Atlanta Journal Constitution may be laying off staffers left and right, but it is a newspaper that knows how to do Twitter right. It’s not just an RSS feed that automatically posts headlines and links. The writers in charge of this feed often have an irreverent attitude, adding commentary to their headlines. Sample post: “Isn’t the NASCAR race tomorrow? Two drivers apparently racing on I-285, cause a wreck early Saturday.”

Neil Gaiman – A geek god, Neil Gaiman is co-author (with Terry Pratchett) of my favorite book, “Good Omens.” A prolific Twitterer, he posts pictures and links to interesting articles, as well as updates about what he’s up to. He tweets like your friends do, candidly sharing details of his life (though it’s probably a more interesting life than most people I know). Sample post: “Just figured out that the thing that was making me sneeze at Maddy’s violin lesson was the box of scented tissues. Bitter irony, that.”

Neil Patrick Harris – How great is it that the once and future Doogie Howser is once again at the forefront of pop culture? His Barney Stinson on the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” is the VIP of the show, and he did an amazing job as Emmy’s host. Harris’ Twitter feed is often very funny, and he also likes to post behind-the-scenes photos from HIMYM. Sample post: “I friggin’ love the Olympics. I never thought I could care so much for people or sports that I just learned about six minutes beforehand.”

Fake AP stylebook – If you work in a newsroom, you’re familiar with the AP stylebook, a guide that’s full of information about how to present information in your news pieces (AP style, in other words). Of course, it always seems to have all the information you could possibly need – except the one piece of information you need. The Fake AP Stylebook is often hilarious satire of the real AP guide. Sample post: “The correct phrase is “I couldn’t give a damn” but frankly we could care less.”

Shit My Dad says – Justin, a 29-year-old who lives at home, tweets the awesome stuff that his 74-year-old father says. It sounds like it wouldn’t work at all, but SMDS has over a million followers, and a TV deal featuring William Shatner. Strangely, Justin follows just one person on Twitter: Levar Burton. Sample post: “A parent’s only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize but the other gets robbed by a hooker, you failed.”

Digg 2000 – This is a different kind of Twitter feed. Actually, it’s the kind I was decrying in the AJC section: an automatically generated feed of headlines and links. BUT, it’s worth following, because this is where you’ll find all of the stories, videos and photos that receive at least 2000 votes on the social bookmarking site Digg.com. Sample headlines: “Erm…Yes, It’s a Woman.” “Pilot shot between the eyes keeps flying to save 20 soldiers.” “Comcast: ‘Unlimited Usage’ Doesn’t Mean ‘Unlimited Usage’”

Nathan Fillion – He’s handsome, he’s funny, he’s a geek hero. Nathan Fillion currently plays Richard Castle on the ABC crime drama “Castle,” but geeks love him for his roles as Capt. Mal Reynolds on “Firefly” and as Capt. Hammer on “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog.” His tweets are a mixture of jokes, updates and images from his days on set. Sample post: “I like falling asleep in the make up chair because I wake up better looking.”

Kevin Smith – Caution, do not follow director Kevin Smith if you 1. have a problem with obscenities and 2. get annoyed by people who post large numbers of tweets. Here’s a man who has fully embraced using Twitter to communicate with his fans. Several times a day, Smith posts a dozen more responses to their tweets. But be careful: if you offend him, he won’t hesitate to block you (sometimes publicly). Sample post: “True Confession: Thanks to a high school girlfriend, I have every Amy Grant Christian music album from self titled debut to Heart in Motion.”

Joel McHale – “Community” and “The Soup” star Joel McHale is a very funny man. Whether he’s talking about shooting his shows or making fun of Ryan Seacrest, he always makes me giggle. The man just oozes sarcasm and wit. Sample post (after an episode that included a scene where he was playing pool in the buff): “Thank you to all who watched the show tonight. Lifting my leg and showing 30 extras and the cast all I have was liberating and scary.”

Veronica Belmont – Veronica is the girl that all the geek guys love. She’s a techie, co-host of the “Tekzilla” show on Revision 3, and host of “Qore” on the Playstation Network. She’s also very into gaming and often links to some very interesting articles online. Sample post: “If you say ‘keep abreast of the situation’ to me, I’m going to giggle. Don’t look so surprised.”

I bake a lot, especially cookies. My specialty is butterscotch chip. So how did I make it 30 years into my life without knowing about cake mix cookies?

For anyone else who may not know, the cookies use cake mix as a base, then you mix in whatever you want – nuts, chips, candies, etc. My sister Rebecca recently told me about them so I decided to try them out for myself.

Holy moly were they easy!

I’ve been craving a chocolate cookie, so I chose a chocolate fudge cake mix and peanut butter chips. It took less than five minutes to mix up the batter and get the first dozen in the oven.

The cake mix cookies came out with a great texture: crispy on the edges but soft and chewy in the middle. And they tasted like Reese’s peanut butter cups, always a win. I’m thinking next time I’ll do a red velvet cake mix with white chocolate chips.

The recipe I used came from Cooks.com and is super simple. It yields 48 cookies, but I made mine gigantic so only ended up with about 25. I also used slightly more chips than the recipe calls for, but not quite the whole bag.

Cake Mix Cookies

• 1 package of cake mix (any flavor)
• 1 large egg
• 1/4 cup of oil
• 1/4 cup of water
• 1 cup of chopped nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, etc.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Beat together the cake mix, egg, oil and water, then stir in your “goodies.” Drop by teaspoons about 1 inch apart onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 15 minutes.

While the task was not complicated or difficult, it did surprise me how much there is to think about when you’re making a theme from scratch (before, I’ve always started with at least a basic framework). You have to style the comments, make a search results page, decide what regions to “widgetize,” label those regions, style the search box, decide how to display metadata, the list goes on. And several times I broke the whole dang thing by forgetting to close a <div>.

However, it was totally worth it, because now I have a WordPress-powered Web site that acts exactly as I want it to. If you’ve seen my designs, you know I like simple, easy to navigate design. And I’m in love with the “cute critters” icons from Tutorial 9, which I used on my old site and definitely had to include here. Plus, I prefer the “excerpt” function for the index page, rather than using a manual “more” tag, so I could do that too.

Since I’m using WordPress 2.9, I also made use of the new thumbnail feature. It eliminates the need for a custom field to display a thumbnail on your index, search results, etc. pages. Once you activate the feature in your function file, you can set the thumbnail from your media library, or upload an image specifically for that use.

As usual, I figured all of this out as I went along, with the help from some great Web sites, including:

• Web Designer Wall
• WordPress Codex
• WPCandy
• CSS Newbie

Of course, now that my blog is also my home page, I’ll have to blog more often. (Damn you Twitter!) Can’t have months-old content pop up when a potential client finds my site.

Hope you enjoy the new site, and if you find anything broken, please let me know!

Mom's fried zucchini cakes

I live in the South, land of the fried okra, and apparently even my Chicago-born mother isn’t immune to the siren song of sizzling oil. She recently gave me some zucchini grown by her friend Dina, and suggested I prepare them with her recipe for Fried Zucchini Cakes.

Normally, I like my vegetables pretty plain, with some salt and pepper and maybe some butter — simple and fast. But I was feeling especially Betty Crocker-y, so I thought I’d give them a shot.

I hadn’t eaten them since I was a kid, and back then I didn’t like them that much. But I’ve learned it’s worth it to give foods another chance now that I’ve grown up.

These cakes are definitely best right after you make them. They’re crunchy on the outside, warm and gooey on the inside. Honestly, you wouldn’t even know they started out healthy.

Below is my mom’s recipe. You may want to try them with a little more seasoning, or possibly some spices to add some heat.

FRIED ZUCCHINI CAKES

• 3 cups shredded zucchini (for me this was about 3 large)
• 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 3 tsp. parsley
• 1/8 tsp. garlic powder
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. salt
• dash pepper
• 1 cup flour
• 1 Tbs. minced onion

Mix the ingredients together. Drop by spoonfuls into hot oil. Fry until golden brown. For me, this recipe made about a dozen portions.

What’s great about the Webbys is that everyone is limited to five words in their acceptance speeches. No exceptions. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s event:

“Wait, we didn’t charge anything?” – Trent Reznor, Webby Artist of the Year

“Thank God Conan got promoted.” – Jimmy Fallon, Webby Person of the Year

“Can everyone get closer together.” – Flickr, community award

“Shinehart Wig Company thanks you.” – NBC.com Full Episode Player, broadband award

“Dude we got an A.” – Edutopia, education award

“I didn’t kill newspapers, ok?” – The Huffington Post, politics & blog award

“Robot sharks with lasers in space.” – Wired.com, science award

“Airna, will you marry me?” – Volkswagen Innovations, banner ad campaign award

“Read a freakin newspaper please.” – Detroit Free Press, sports video award

She’s already blogging on WordPress.com, so I suggested she use a self-hosted WordPress installation as her portfolio site. It will be easy for her to update, she can add functionality as her site grows and it’s much, much more search-engine friendly than her old Flash site.

One of the easiest ways to get started with WordPress is to customize a pre-made theme or template. I pointed Tricia to ThemeForest, which I’ve used before, because the themes there are inexpensive and high quality. She chose one called PhotographerDream.

It features a nifty rollover effect on the home page, where it automatically displays the most recent images added to the portfolio. The top navigation displays a lits of categories, as well as pages and a link to Tricia’s blog.

The theme as purchased was purple and pink, but Tricia preferred a more understated black and grey scheme. I showed where to edit the stylesheet to make the changes, but being tech-savvy, she did all the customization herself.

The whole thing was completed in a weekend.

This map shows recreational activites available in Rome and Northwest Georgia

Some of the winners were announced recently in the Georgia Press Association Better Newspaper Contest, and yours truly was involved in a couple winning entries. The Rome News-Tribune, where I am Web editor, competes in division B, for papers with daily circulation of 15,000 – 40,000.

I won an individual award, placing third for best online news project. They haven’t announced yet which project won, but I’m thinking it’s either a page of local candidate information from the November general election, an interactive map of attractions and recreation in Northwest Georgia, or a special site I made to house all our coverage of the 2008 Coosa Valley Fair.

Obviously, I’m really proud of this individual award, but I’m prouder of the first place award for a project I was in charge of. Our paper’s staff came in first in the Best Photo Gallery on a Newspaper Web site category.

The gallery was a collection of pictures from the first day of school here – every single school was represented. I was in charge of planning and implementing the gallery.

I had myself, two interns and three photographers available to hit every school. Before the day, I divided the county up into zones, and planned routes for everyone to get the schools in their zones. Most of us had 4-5 schools to photograph.

As the photos were turned in, I worked on the gallery. To present the photos, I chose the Simpleviewer flash gallery program. It’s free, and allowed me to use XML to post captions with each picture. One of my colleagues, education reporter Elizabeth Cady, even contributed her handwriting to be the header of the page.

This thing took HOURS to complete, and I’m so proud it was not only recognized, it was recognized as the top gallery that was entered.

Convert videos to FLV
SoThink Flash Video Encoder
One of the few things the client had to purchase to make the site work, encoding software not only makes the video viewable online, it also drastically reduces file size. SoThink’s video encoder is $45 and is designed for Windows. But if you have a Mac, try iSkysoft Video Converter.

Upload the videos to the server
FileZilla
Each video file was at least 50 MB, so transferring files with FTP was the logical choice. There are any number of free FTP clients available. Though I use FireFTP on my own computer, it’s a FireFox extension and the client uses IE. So I recommended FileZilla, which is a great free FTP program.

Display the videos on WordPress
Wordtube plugin
I tried several different plugins for displaying the FLV files. I finally settled on this because it has an easy user interface that makes it simple to add videos to the backend, and places an “insert Flash video” button in the post creation window. It works in conjunction with the JW FLV player from Longtail Video, which is free for noncommercial sites.

Keeping it private
WordPress Password plugin
This plugin protects your entire WordPress site with a universal password. Just give it to anyone who you want to access the site. You still have to enter your own password to get into the admin pages. It’s also easy to change the password if you ever need to.

Stephen Fry — The fourth most popular account on Twitter (after Barack Obama, CNN and Twitter itself). Stephen Fry is a British actor, comedian, national treasure, etc. He’s done a lot of work with Hugh Laurie, including the classic “Jeeves and Wooster.” Sample tweet: “In the meantime I’m childishly amused by waiter who’s just told me about promotion: in his accent ‘two vodkas and you get a turd free’.”‘

Jimmy Fallon — After years on Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Fallon recently took over for Conan O’Brien (who got promoted to The Tonight Show) on NBC’s Late Night. Sample tweet: “Watching Conan’s last late night. Really funny. Really nice. I really enjoyed him on late night. He’s gonna be great on the Tonight Show.”

Leo LaPorte — In many ways, king of the geeks. He spent years on Tech TV and now runs a podcasting network called This Week in Tech (TWiT – not related to Twitter). Sample tweet: “I have to say I’ve never understood Olberman’s appeal. And I’m a flaming liberal. I can only imagine what conservatives think.”

John Cleese — British actor and comedian who’s been in everything from Monty Python to Harry Potter to A Fish Called Wanda. Hilarious and awesome. Sample tweet: “There’s an interesting 50%-50% split here – people who think pet hates = animals, and those who know it means what you love to hate.”

Levar Burton. How can you not love Levar Burton? He’s hosted Reading Rainbow for like 25 years, and was Geordi — the banana-clipped engineer — on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sample tweet: “WTF? My rating on IMDB has jumped by over 700% this week. Must’ve been the guy wearing the Reading Rainbow tee-shirt on The Price Is Right!”

Michael Ian Black — A comedian who instigated a “Twitter War” with LeVar Burton. He’s best known for doing VH1′s I Love The… series. Sample tweet: “If you thought Vermont maple syrup would be less expensive in Vermont than at Trader Joe’s, you were wrong. God, were you wrong.”

Jeff Cannata. An actor, Jeff Cannata is best known as one of the hosts of the video podcast Totally Rad Show, where he and two other guys review movies, games, TV and more. Sample tweet: “Just watched Man on Wire – so glad it won the oscar! Such a beautiful expression of the power of art.”

There are plenty of other celebrities and semi-celebrities on Twitter – these are just the ones I follow. The awesome Mike Rowe also recently started tweeting, but hasn’t used his account much, so I didn’t highlight it with the others. But if you like Dirty Jobs, check him out.