Soapbox Rants and Raves

I’m sure that everyone has seen this little icon on some web page or blog. Probably, like me, you never bothered to really check it out. How many tools or services do we need to save our bookmarks? I never worried about bookmark synchronization in the past. I would just re-Google my search, nine chances out of ten, I would find the page I was looking for.  I generally don’t have time at work to read most (any) of the interesting articles I run across. To solve this problem, I started emailing the URLs to my home email and would read them in my spare time. This worked fine, but was kind of painful.  I decided to gave http://delicious.com a try. I know this is nothing new; many of my friends have been using Xmarks (Foxmarks) for many years, but I wanted something that was more social. I created an account, http://delicious.com/philbeiler  and use it pretty regularly. I have not gotten into the whole tagging thing yet, I use it mainly to save myself time.  The Firefox plug-in works great. It only takes a second to create new bookmarks or find one that I recently created.

The sad part is, that I have no one in my bookmark network! I think it would be really cool to see what my friends and co-workers were bookmarking. It my opinion, Web 2.0 is about sharing and learning; social bookmarking is just another method for enabling this information exchange. It is so easy for me to send someone to my bookmarks, to share what I have been reading or found interesting. It is also valuable to visit the home link on delicious, just to checkout the most popular bookmarks and tags. I guarantee, you will find something of interest!

I also in the process of migrating my RSS aggregator from NewsGator to Bloglines. Bloglines makes it easier to share what I’m reading as well, creating a public presence on their site, http://www.bloglines.com/public/PhilBeiler.  I have not moved over all of my feeds yet, but it has worked well thus far. More on the reason behind the move later! I have to save that for another blog post!  So, if anyone is using delicious, please add me to your network!

As a developer, I prefer the Ubuntu experience over the Windows experience. However, when I’m updating the checkbook and paying bills, I don’t see many good, non-Windows options. I have been blogging with ScribeFire for quite some time and have been very happy with it . A read a blog on Live Writer some time ago and installed it; for some reason I never used it,

I decided to give it a try this weekend and have to say, it is pretty nice. Functionally they are pretty much the same, both integrating nicely with WordPress. Subtle differences include:

• ScribeFire saves the drafts on the server, where as Live Writer saves them locally on your computer.
• Not that it is a big deal, but Live Writer seems to have better preview support, at least with my current theme.
• Live Writer also integrates nicely with Live’s maps and photo albums. Images are actually easier to integrate with in Live Writer too, more directly editable properties.
• Live Writer also support HTML tables, which you have to create by hand with ScribeFire.
• The spelling checker seems better in Live Writer too. Unfortunately, neither one has an integrated thesaurus.

So, if you are blogging on Windows and want to use a nice little editor, give it a try. I think you will be generally surprised by this Microsoft product.

I thought I would be fancy in my previous post and tried to use a WordPress plug-in to make my code look pretty. I downloaded WP-Syntax and gave it a try. Seemed simple enough <pre lang=”java”>…</pre>. Don’t know what the problem was, but it just toasted my code!  I think it might have to do with remote publishing,  using the XML API. I must have messed with it for about 30 minutes, before I finally gave up and resorted back to simple HTML. I thought I would try one more plug-in tonight; it was called Syntax Hilighter Evolved. The usage is similar to the WP-Syntax, but I finally got this one to work using the built-in WordPress editor.

My next post will be about creating your own Java 1.5 Annotations and adding new behavior to your unit test suite. I thought it was actually a pretty cool exercise… but that is just me!

import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
public @interface TestUserAuthorization {

String principal();

String testUserManager();
}

I found a cool little plug-in for Firefox last week called Ghostery. It alerts you about the web bugs, ad networks and widgets on every page that you visit. It is really eye opening, to see how many hidden scripts are embedded in web pages. I am kind of addicted to it now, I feel like I am missing something when switching back to Internet Explorer! The little window to the right is displayed when you visit my blog.

Another amazing observation is how many sites have Google Analytics embedded in them. I have been using WordPress Stats to monitor my blog for the last couple of years. When I switched to Bluehost, I decided to enable Google Analytics for my site, as well as my wifes. If you have not checked out Google Analytics, you should seriously check it out… It is very well done, generates volumes of metrics, and extremely easy to add to your blog or website.

I have already blogged about ScribeFire in the past, I use ScribeFire to do all of my blogging; it is a really nice little tool to create new and edit content on your site. A co-worked hipped me to another interesting plug-in a few weeks ago called YSlow, which is integrated with Firebug.  If you are developing web pages and are concerned about the rendering speed, these two plug-ins look to be the answer. YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance. Pretty cool idea! I seem to spend more time on the backend plumbing, but hope to look into these tools more in the the near future.

I finally am back in the the blogging business. Moving the actual domain from my local machine to Bluehost was pretty simple, most of the problems I encountered were self induced!! It was a little more tricky to move my WordPress site from one domain (home.beilers.com) to another (beilers.com), but not really very hard.  Things to be aware of:

1. Kind of funny, the support staff knew exactly how to answer my question, just like a script! After you export your data from your old database and import into the new database, you need to change two (2) rows in the wp_options table,  ids #1 and #39 need to be updated to the new domain URL. Nice magic numbers!
2. All of my images were missing in the old posts after the migration, good thing I don’t use a lot of them! Unfortunately after I imported the data, I realized that the full (old) URL was specified in all the <img src=””> tag attributes . I had to go through each post and change it to the new URL and path. Kind of a drag; I probably could have written a database query to do the update, but it just seemed easier to update them by hand! If I would have been more aware, I could have done a global search and replace in the exported text file; that would have been too easy!
3. There was another small import/export problem. Anywhere I used “quotes” around words, the quote (“) character was displayed in some encoded format, about 5 or 6 characters in length. I don’t remember the exact sequence, but it was pretty visible on the page, especially if you had them in a title. I might have been able to chose an alternative export format to better handle this situation, but by this time, it was too late and I really did not want to start over!
4. Don’t copy over you plug-ins, it is better to just reinstall them. I simply copied over all my plug-ins and content; which mostly seemed to work.  However when I hit the clean cache button on my wp-super-cache plug-in, it toasted my site (no longer accessible!). I was on the phone with the support team for about 30 minutes. They gave me a little scolding, but are generlly very nice people!  I can’t say enough about how helpful they are…
5. If you do move your site over, your image upload directory will probably be wrong too. Just go into your WordPress admin panel and update the upload directory to the appropriate location on the server, under your new WordPress installation. I only discovered this after ScribeFire refused to upload new images.
6. There was one other weird thing, my WordPress account for wp-stats (as well as my Linked.com blog linkage) seemed to take a couple of days to synchronize with the new domain name, the old home.beilers.com reference was there for several days after the switch. It finally switched over to beilers.com this week. All I can say, is ignorance is bliss!

I’m very happy with Bluehost and my decision to migrate over to their servers. I’m set for at least 3 years now, I hopefully won’t have to go through this exercise for quite some time!

I can’t believe that I just outsourced myself! After my recent Ubuntu upgrade experience, I finally pulled the plug and signed up with bluehost.com. For the money, it is really not a bad deal; especially if you are crazy enough to have multiple domains. Now I just have to figure out the logistics of changing the name servers and track down where the email goes. Not too big a deal, I’m just not looking forward to explaining to my family, just where to find their email!

I was really impressed with the cPanel application, just a couple of mouse clicks and you have a WordPress installation, another couple clicks sets up your email, and a few more sets up the FTP space. Pretty slick! This was not near as much fun as spending multiple evenings learning how to set this up on my own box; now I can really appreciate everything that cPanel actually does.

As a test, I transfered one domain, windyknolldesignstudio.com. Hopefully, in the next two days, all of the name servers will be synced up and I can see what I actually did! When I decide to move beilers.com, there is even a way to transfer my blog to the bluehost server; that will be an interesting test!

I was joking with my friends that President Obama had visited my blog twice last month and actually left some comments. I was so excited, but I could not understand why he was pushing Viagra…. those liberals are just too funny! My blog gets its fair share of spam, fortunately the Akismet plug-in does a really good job at flagging the spam comments; I just have to go into the dashboard every so often and clean them out.

I happened to hit a website today that had a nifty little captcha enabled for all of the comment fields, it was a WordPress plug-in called WP-reCaptcha. All you need to do is create an account at reCaptcha.net, generate some keys for your website and plug them into the admin screen. Can’t be much easier than that. It will be interesting to see of I get any more comments on by postings, my real readers never leave them. Good bye spammers, I will miss you!

There is another interesting feature that reCaptcha offers, the hiding of email addresses. You can generate an email url or an obsured email address format (p…@beilers.com). Not exactly sure where I would use this feature, but sometimes it is just good to know about these little things!

I found a link today for some new and updated WordPress plug-ins and figured that I should try some out. I found one that would support my New Year’s Resolution; I am trying to read more books this year. I recently finished the Blink book, and am now moving on to the Think! book. The “I am reading” plug-in is kind of cool. It hooks up to the Amazon Web Services and pulls back information based on the ISBN number. Additionally, you can enter what page you are currently reading and the plug-in creates a progress bar under the image of the book cover. Probably more pain than it is worth, but I’m looking at it as a motivator…. I need to keep reading or the progress bar will never move!

On a side note, if you have not read either of the these books, I highly recommend them. Blink was very easy to read and thought provoking. It really makes you think about how people are conditioned to think and make decisions; sometimes, not the best ones!