SquidWho, a people-powered Who’s Who on the web, launched this week. Twice really.

The first was an accident. The always watchful and very resourceful lensmasters spotted a test lens and started making their own before we were done. No surprise, they took the starter lenses SquidWho creates and turned them into detailed pages on their favorite people (and themselves).

A few favorites so far…

• the incomparable Kimberly Dawn Wells, and her clever “If Wikipedia would admit I AM special” introduction
• a lens about a certain Assistant (to the) Regional Manager
• a “bet you didn’t know that” about Walt Disney
• and a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Douglas Adams

Bonus (and I think this was a first): Seth mentioned Jaco on his blog. Maybe I’m rubbing off on him a little, or he’s been brainwashed by the hundred or two of my presentations with Jaco as the example subject matter :)

Who’s your favorite person?

Robert Greenwald has put together a short film to show some the continuing problems facing people in New Orleans:

Here’s a few more ways we can do something.

This week marks the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. No doubt, there will be plenty of editorials, politics and calls for help while the spotlight is once again on the Gulf Coast.

Here’s a few ways you can help today:

• Volunteer or donate to Habitat for Humanity
• Search for opportunities on Volunteer Match
• Common Ground Collective is shifting focus to rebuilding and seeking volunteers with expertise in project areas like cooking, construction, roofing, plumbing, electric work, legal aid, social work, media/PR, and computer technology.

My hope is to make a return trip in January ‘08, with the same group I traveled with this past January. Hopefully we’ll get involved in Habitat or some other group focused on rebuilding.

Much more on my lens.

Google has rolled out new paid plans for increasing Gmail storage (Picasa too, if you’re interested).

Upgrade to 6 gigs for $20/year, all the way up to 250 gigs (!) for $500/year.

Whew.

I had to build a page on a tight deadline recently. The comp called for several rows of square, 100 by 100 pixel thumbnail images. The problem is we have a bunch of consistent width, variable height images.

Our images:

Here’s the comp:

I started looking at Javascript- and PHP-based cropping tools and found them too complicated to figure out and build the page on time. I decided to use a little CSS instead.

Since our page is generated dynamically and pulls randomly from set of images, I had to break a rule and resort to using inline CSS in my HTML. If you don’t have the same requirement, you can replace my solution with unique classes for each item.

Each photo is set as a background image, inside a 100 pixel square box, with the position set to center.

I used a div for this layout, due to some other requirements for text and borders, but you can easily use a UL instead. There’s text inside the DIV, but I hide that with CSS since it is not required in the screen view.

Here’s the HTML:

<div class="thumb">
 <a style="background:url(images/image01.jpg) no-repeat center;" href="#">some title</a>
</div>


And the CSS:

.thumb { margin: 4px; display: block; float: left; background-color:#fff; padding: 10px; }
.thumb a { display: block; width: 100px; height: 100px; text-indent: -999em; text-decoration: none; }

That’s pretty much it. Download the example files, including HTML, CSS and example images.

I’d love to see alternative solutions!

Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani posted Ask The Readers: Sorting vacation email buildup? today. I love these posts, because you typically get a lot of good advice from some really smart Lifehacker readers.

I’m guessing vacation isn’t the only time your inbox gets out of control. I had the double whammy recently: falling out of some good habits and letting my inbox get out of control AND going on vacation before cleaning it up. Ouch.

Here’s my list for getting back on track, with lots of GTD inspiration:

1. Set up a holding tank system for mail. Get it out of your inbox, but not off your radar*
2. Search by priority. Using filters, search for emails from coworkers, clients or other important people first. Take care of the emails that only take a minute or two, and archive them. File the rest into your holding tank.
3. Find next priorities. You’ll probably find plenty of other mail you can search for using filters. Process that mail in the same way as #2.
4. Clean up. Once you’ve completed filtered searches, you’re left email newsletters, random notes, and spam. I go through the remaining mail from oldest to newest.
5. Extra credit: unsubscribe from those newsletters. I’ve subscribed to many since 1995, and I delete a lot of them when they hit my inbox without reading them. Take an extra few seconds at this step to unsubscribe to the emails you don’t read anymore. My inbox is much lighter since I took this step, making it even easier to manage.
6. Marvel at an empty inbox. Now, you’re ready to maintain it, with the goal to have an empty inbox all the time, or at least until your next vacation.

* More on the GTD-inspired labels:

In Gmail, I have three holding tank labels:

• !current
• !future
• !maybe

Incoming mail requiring more than two minutes to process gets one of these labels along with another, more permanent label (i.e. a client or work-related label). Once labeled, the email is archived so it is out of my inbox, but not out of reach.

• !current gets attention throughout the day
• !future gets a review and attention once every few days, as my !current list is under control
• !maybe gets attention once a week, mainly to clear things out that either won’t get done, or need to move up the priority list

As priorities change, so do the labels for the mail. Once I’ve completed a task, the GTD label gets removed from the mail, and it becomes archived by the second, permanent label I originally assigned to it, making it easy to find it later by a filtered search.