Over the past day or so, I’ve been tinkering with the blog’s design. Most notably, I shifted away from the gray header and footer to something blue. I then proceeded to work with the size of the body text, which is now one pixel greater, and also with the different states of the links (ie, before, post titles were all blue—now they only change color when you hover over them; but they aren’t underlined anymore, since that clashed with the design)
A smaller change, one that I’ve been idly wondering about for quite some time, is the addition of a post icon above the date indicator, for each post. While I initially had a wonderful amount of PHP doing the work to automatically choose an icon based on the post category, I soon discovered that I had increased my database queries almost two-fold. Though I had my doubts about whether this was a big concern, I figured I’d find a way to dial this back, eventually deciding on a solution based on custom fields. Whereas the prior system required PHP calls to the database for each successive possibility, for each post, now, theloop’s PHP does no extra work than it did before, since it has all the data it needs when it queries the DB to load post(s).
I’m still working with reorganizing the directory structure of the site, however. I’m hearing conflicting things about search engine optimization and how that relates/is effected by hosting a site within a subfolder when nothing exists at the root. More on that later, I guess.
Alright! Blog has been moved to the root of the domain, and some other things have been reorganized. Should make for cleaner links, eventually. Don’t think I need to add the “www”, though—I like it better without.
Below is a shot of what I’m currently seeing in Safari. After a few hiccups (My uneducated mind specified a body text size o “11.5″; Safari rendered it 0.5 pixels higher, IE rendered is 0.5 lower—neither liked the middle value; I eventually moved to 12 pixels, since that was what I liked), I believe its showing up more-or-less the same in IE, and I would assume Firefox. However, if you notice any differences between the below image and what you’re seeing on your particular browser, feel free to drop a note in the comments!
Edit: I’m still annoyed about the site’s presentation on Windows & IE7—I hadn’t realized how much I’d grown to like Apple’s font blending in comparison to how Microsoft does it. Anyways, font issues have always annoyed me and they’re not about to go away now.
For a long time now, I’ve been looking for a viable backup solution. True, I’ve got an external hard drive right by my laptop 90% of the time, and, from time to time, I find myself plugging in and telling Time Machine to do its thing—backing up my entire home directory; all 70 gigs or so. Still, this hasn’t been most convenient.
While Drobo’s creators announced today that they’re planning on expanded functionality for their widely-acclaimed backup box, beyond backup, I simply don’t have the cash to buy a Drobo, and then outfit it with multiple hard drives. Some might offer up Amazon S3. While that’s a fairly cheap solution for backing up to the cloud, still cost pennies. Others would say that Windows Live SkyDrive is a perfect solution. The issue there, quite frankly, is that, I’m on a Mac, so that’s no-no. Judging from Apple’s own admission that seamless backups really do need to be (see: Apple Time Capsule; the entire .Mac/MobileMe philosophy) wired and in the cloud, its clear that even Time Machine, on its own, is far from perfect. Never mind the fact that, at $100 yearly, the service isn’t free.
With that in mind, I was in the market for was a free online backup solution, that gave me a reasonable amount of space (a gigabyte or more), public and private access, and good integration into OS X for an easier time. With most of the online services I’ve thus far seen, they fit the bill only partially—especially regarding OS X integration (in the Finder would be ideal)
Lo-and-behold, a few months ago, DropBox popped up on Digg: Google Drive killer coming from MIT Startup
I’ll spare you the details, DropBox basically fulfills all of the above-mentioned criteria for me, and while I’ve only spent a few hours working with it, its definitely proving to be a winner. The Finder integration (above) and a reasonable, clean web interface (below), are polished, even for a beta.
Is this perfect? Hardly: If I’m not hooked up to the cloud, my backups aren’t accessible. Period. Also, there’s no automation as yet, in any form. Still, its still as enticing as it was a few months ago on Digg, and I’ll be taking a further look into it at some point in the future.
Today, at its annual World Wide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled an updated, 3G iPhone. With this addition comes an assisted GPS chip, and, perhaps the best “feature” people are stoked about: a price drop. 8GB starts at $199, and 16GB at $299. Considering the original had started at $599 for 8GB, this is a huge price drop!
True, the phone is still tied to an AT&T contract in the US, but with the addition of the AppStore and the final release of the SDK and firmware 2.0 (all announced previously; just revisited this time around), the phone is starting to really heat up its appeal as the best smartphone around. For corporate users, Apple has worked hard to line up Exchange compatibility, and various little features that have already been detailed previously, but are sure to garner another look from prospective IT departments.
Earlier in his keynote, Steve Jobs announced the successor to .Mac, MobileMe, which is essentially a revamp of the service that increases its web prescence, employing oodles of Ajax, push-email/contacts/calendars/etc to try and become your mobile hub as you move around from device to device. With Windows and Mac OS compatibility, the service is definitely increasing in scope. Pricing will stay the same, with current users getting a bump from 10GB of storage to 20GB.
For now, that’s about the gist of it. There were many, many demos of iPhone apps and games—a nifty social networking app, a news application by the Associated Press that hooks into the GPS API to do some nifty mapping of stories, and a few games that rival the Nintendo DS’ in graphics, and the Wii in motion control.
Neither of the two will be released until July the 11th, so there’s still some lead time. For now, here’s a few videos related to MobileMe.
[flv:mobileme.flv 448 280]
[flv:mobileme2.flv 448 280]
Flowers, anybody? Just a macro shot I took the other day. Turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself!
Some shots from North Shore Park. A few panoramic shots in there that turned out nicely; one or two HDRs that weren’t too bad.
A Few Changes
