Posts

I’d like to congratulate LowEndMac on moving into the era of modern web page code, using XHTML and CSS. I guess my old criticism about their website (in reference to them judging the state of web browsers in OS 9) will have to fade into the background, but considering that they recognized that iCab was deficient (putting it kindly): On the down side, pages may not work as well in older browsers once we fully implement our CSS design. And iCab really shows its noncompliance. But with 98-99% of our visitors using modern browsers, we figured it was time to make the switch. ...

I took a couple hours, learned PHP’s objects and redesigned Tag Central so that all the information for the sources could be stored in a big array object. Now it’s trivial for me to add a new source, so I can start adding all those sources that everyone submitted. I may started restricting the number of results per source to a smaller number (such as I have done with BlogMarks) to avoid unsightly white space and making the page utterly huge. ...

Peter Parkes reskinned Tag Central using PithHelmet and a custom CSS file. I think it looks simply Sensual as he put it. I like it so much in fact that I’m going to ask if it would be possible to make it the default and perhaps (if he’s interested) come up with some more skins (which was my plan for my blog here, but I never got around to it). I think some great things are ahead!

Spam is getting less annoying for me, mostly because of its comedic value. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. Here’s the latest supposedly from PayPal (har har har). You’re Billing Information! No, I’m not! The last time I pretended to be billing information, I got my hand stuck in someone’s mail slot.

When Safari 1.3 came out, several plugins broke and were quickly fixed again. That’s cool, but both the PithHelmet and AcidSearch plugin updates were a bit rushed (and with good reason because they were high in demand). For AcidSearch the bug was mostly harmless. When a channel was dragged around in the configuration window, it got turned into a folder. Oops. The author quickly issued an update. However, PithHelmet had a more serious problem. Attempting to set the display of a page element to none after probing the dimensions of that object caused Safari to crash. Mike Solomon has a much better writeup for those technically inclined. Basically what this meant for an end user was that Safari crashed… a lot. It bit me with one site in particular. He issued an update which no longer crashes Safari, but unfortunately doesn’t collapse a lot of blocked elements either (which was one of my main beefs with how OmniWeb handles ad-blocking). It doesn’t happen all the time though, so it’s not going to force me into using Camino or Firefox (for now), but it’s a silly bug that hopefully will get fixed.

Alexa, part of Amazon has linked Tag Central very prominently in a recent blog entry. That drew quite a few visits. I vow that this weekend I will at least get the supporting pages up so the site isn’t quite as mysterious as it is now.

I read a few blogs talking about the recent Flickr bonuses for their early Pro users. Current subscribers get two free years, their upload limit raised to 2 GB a month, and two free one year Pro subscriptions to give to friends. Well, thanks to the fast friendship I’ve developed to Stuart over at Blethers.com and the fact that I saw his post offering a membership first, I’ll soon have a Pro membership over at Flickr. ...

Over the past few days, I’ve the site has been in transition to a new webhost. There were lots of reasons I did this, but hopefully the process has been mostly transparent. Probably the most notable change is that Tag Central now has its own domain name, tagcentral.net. I used a bit of URL rewriting trickery to transparently forward all old style Tag Central URLs (http://godlikenerd.com/tagcentral/xxxxxxx) to the new domain. Moving it also gave me enough motivation to make a few changes that I’ve been meaning to make. First, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of MagpieRSS which seems to be a bit more tolerant of characters in feeds that don’t match the stated character encoding scheme. Right now, that’s the biggest pain in the ass for me because it means that I can’t easily test that the site still validates because those characters make the validator choke. This isn’t a problem in my site, nor is it a problem in MagpieRSS. No, it’s a problem within specific sources of the site. I’m not going to name names, but if one is putting out an RSS feed and calling it UTF-8, it should be UTF-8, damnit. ...

Using Xbench, I compared the three disks attached to my Powermac. First, I have the stock drive, a Deskstar 120GXP (80 GB). Disk Test 100.77 Sequential 103.00 Uncached Write 90.65 37.79 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 90.87 37.21 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 170.74 27.03 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 91.39 36.93 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 98.64 Uncached Write 101.96 1.53 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 100.45 22.66 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 95.93 0.63 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 96.47 19.85 MB/sec [256K blocks] The next drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (200GB) in an OWC Firewire enclosure. ...

I got a chance to go to a Red Sox game last night with my Sox buddy, Dana. We even spanked the Devilrays 10-0. I wasn’t expecting to get to go this year, so it was great to go so early in the season. If Raytheon has another group Red Sox trip like they did last year, I may go again.