Archives for January 2008

Attack the websites you love to hate

by Jeff Hester · Jan 31, 2008

Ever run across a website that made you cringe? Maybe it was the flaming logo, the animated “new” buttons or the painful site navigation. Don’t get mad; get destructive with this cool little site called NetDisaster that came across my desk courtesy of Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter.

NetDisaster doesn’t actually damage the site that raises your ire, but does give you a chance to harmlessly deface it with scribbling babies, nuclear bombs, meteors, pee, fried eggs, crashing zeppelins and more. It’s a cathartic experience that must be lived to appreciate. And a perfect way to kill 10 or 20 minutes.

Projects in the Pipeline

by Jeff Hester · Jan 20, 2008

I had a perfect day yesterday, going down to Huntington Beach with Lynn and the dogs. We rode our bikes, played on “Dog Beach” and generally wore ourselves out in the fresh air and warm sun (see pics on Flickr). We capped the day with dinner and movie (Atonement, which I do not recommend).

Today is a working Sunday, with the NFL football playoffs in the background to distract me. Here’s an overview of the things I’m working on and what’s coming down the pipeline:

Installing Photoshop CS3 on Lynn’s PC (done!). She’s taking a Photoshop class at Saddleback that looks like a lot of fun. I’m hoping I can pick up a few new tricks by osmosis.

Upgrading phpAdsNew to OpenAds 2.4.2 (in progress). OpenAds is the very best free ad server out there, and I highly recommend it to anyone running a website with advertising. It provides great tools for rules-bases ad serving and reporting. They recently received funding that will allow them to proceed with plans to offer hosted ad serving, but until then, this is truly the best option out there. I’m using OpenAds for most of my sites in the BigBlueNetwork.

Over on BigBlueBall, I’m preparing to make some staffing changes. In fact, if you’re interested in instant messaging (IM) or pretty much any other social networking tools, we’re looking to add to the staff. See this post on the BigBlueBlog for details.

While keeping these balls in the air, I’ll be spinning some plates, too. Not literally, but I am testing a number of sites and tools that show a lot of promise.

Mint.com is what Quicken should be. It’s free, web-based and provides really clever ways of looking at your finances. As long as you’re not too queasy about them recording your login information to your financial accounts, it’s absolutely recommended. I may end up using Mint instead of the Quicken upgrade that I just paid $80 for!
Jott.com makes it easy to create little notes to yourself, or even add items to your blog, Twitter, Google Calendar, the list goes on. You call a toll-free number from your phone and speak your message. Jott transcribes the notes and sends you SMS reminders or integrates with your other web tools.
Todoist.com provides a really simple interface for managing your to-do lists. You can set up multiple projects and sub-projects, set due dates and view it on your PC or mobile phone. It’s similar to Mark Hurst’s gootodo, but free.

Finally, I’m also preparing a review of the various IM options available for the iPhone. I’m looking at both the web-based systems like Meebo and Mundu IM, as well as applications for a jailbreaked iPhone like Apollo IM and MobileChat. This one will keep me busy, but I want to get it done soon so I can apply the latest iPhone update (which hasn’t been “jailbroken” yet). I’ll be posting at BigBlueBall as soon as I’m done.

It fits on your iPhone!

by Jeff Hester · Jan 13, 2008

I did some housekeeping here at www.jeffhester.net today, cleaning up some problems caused by legacy files being mixed in with the latest WordPress 2.3.2 stuff. In the process, I made a number of changes. One change that I particularly like is the inclusion of ContentRobot’s very cool iWPhone plug-in (see the screenshot for an example of how this blog looks on my iPhone).

I’ve also updated the theme using N.Design Studio’s Mac-inspired Glossy Blue. I’m very happy with the shades of blue and green, though I’ll probably end up creating my own version with similar colors and a wider layout eventually.

I’m currently using the following plug-ins (in alphabetical order):

Akismet does such a great job of filtering out spam comments that I don’t even bother checking for false positives anymore. It’s a must for anyone running WordPress.

Feedsmith is also an essential — if you are already using Feedburner. And if you’re not, why not? It’s free and offers great stats on who has subscribed to your content.

Donncha’s Flickr Widget makes it easy to add a badge to your site. I’m using it for now, but I’m keeping my eyes open for something with greater configurability. I took a look at Erik Rasmussen’s Flash Flickr Badge Widget, which offers the configurability I want, but it caused problems (the WP Plugin page turned blank upon activating). So the search continues. If you know of anything better, please let me know.

Gregarious is an awesome social tagging plug-in that I also consider a must-have for WordPress bloggers. It is clean, simple, highly configurable and pretty fucking cool. That says a lot. Dont’ think; just get it and use it.

The MyBlogLog Widget is really just a custom text widget. You still have to cut-and-paste their javascript code to get it to display, but it is a nice way to see recent visitors.

The Scrobbles Widget shows your recently played music. You’ve got to have an account on last.fm, but works like a charm and also highly configurable.

Alex King’s Twitter Tools are indispensible for Twitter users. It will show your most recent tweets, auto-notify your Twitter followers of your new blog posts, and give you the option of posting new tweets directly from your blog.

Viper’s Video QuickTags make it super easy to embed video content from YouTube and a slew of other popular video sites. No, it’s not particularly difficult to do it yourself, but hey, I’m lazy!

The relatively new WordPress.com Stats plug-in is also very nice. I’ve now got it installed on two blogs, and it seems to do a great job of providing all sorts of great data without any perceptible performance penalty. Nice.

And last, but not least, the venerable scalability powerhouse: wp-cache. If there was one thing I took away from this year’s WordCamp, it was that you mustuse wp-cache; it’s that good. I have it installed and activated, but not turned on. Next time I get dugg or slashdotted, I’ll quickly flip it on and let the server smoothly handle the extra load.

So there is the update for Sunday. I still have a long list of projects to write about, but I’ll get to that after dinner.

On Today’s Schedule

by Jeff Hester · Jan 13, 2008

I’ve got a lot of little projects cooking right now, and today is my day to play catch-up. Before I give you a rundown of today’s schedule and the varied projects I’m juggling, let me give you a peek at my weekend.

Yesterday I took the day off — not such a bad idea considering it was Saturday. In the morning, Lynn and I took a hellacious ride on our mountain bikes. Hellacious not because of the technical difficulty of the ride, but because of the hill we climbed to get back home: one mile uphill at about a 7% grade is enough to make anyone’s calves just about burst. It was also my first time out with my new biking shoes that click into the pedals. And yes, I fell over, not once, but twice. I’m really looking forward to my first endo on Meadows.

After one of Lynn’s wonderful veggie wraps for lunch, I headed to the Apple Store in Irvine for an iPhone workshop. This is the more basic of the two workshops the store gives on iPhones, so I didn’t expect much, but I was curious to see if there was some hidden features I haven’t stumbled across.

There were about ten people attending, as the 20-something Apple employee gave his tour. As expected, it was pretty basic. Most of the attendees were about 15-20 years older than me (and I’m no spring chick), and were really struggling with the most basic concepts. I did, however, learn a couple of new things.

First, when viewing wide-screen videos, you can double-tap the video to fill the screen. This should come in handy, especially when I’ve watching them on my TV through the A/V cables.

He also shared a great website specifically for iPhone users. AppMarks.com is optimized for display on the iPhone, and even looks much like the iPhone springboard, with links to a number of handy iPhone web apps.

Next, I learned how you can search for nearby businesses when using the map application. Simply search for a business — say Starbucks — and all the mega-corp’s nearest coffee houses will be sprinkled across your map with push-pins.

Finally, I learned how to easily type special characters like ñ, í, and ¿ — especially handy since my Spanish 2 class starts up this Tuesday. You simply hold down the key for a moment and you are presented with other variations.

I would not recommend this workshop to your average person. This is for your mom who isn’t sure how to use a mouse. There is an advanced class next weekend. If time permits, I’ll see if its any juicier.

After the workshop, I caught the end of the Packers-Seahawks game in Green Bay. When I left for the workshop, the game had just started, and the field was dry. When I got back, it was the third quarter and there was about four inches of snow on the field. Awesome for the unpredictable nature of football in snow, and for the fact that Green Bay won.

Although I really don’t like the Patriots, I watched that game, too. They handily beat Jacksonville, but that was no surprise.

Finally, I hooked up the Xbox 360 and practiced my Guitar Hero licks until Lynn got home. It was fun to just play for a change. Something I probably need to do a little more often.

Now, what’s on the docket for today?

Well, there is football, although I will be working on my laptop. I’ll post a list of the projects next.

Updates

by Jeff Hester · Jan 13, 2008

UPDATE #2, 6:31PM PST – The site is pretty much put back together. I’ve updated the theme, reinstalled, activated and configured most of the plug-ins and widgets. I still need to create a rule in my .htaccess file to handle 301 redirects from the old Moveable Type static pages (which no longer exist), and a few other tweaks, but the site should be ready for browsing, posting and commenting.

UPDATE #1, 4:47PM PST – I’ve completed a clean install of WordPress, but still need to install and configure the theme and plug-in files.

I’m going to be reinstalling WordPress here, so you may experience some hiccups. Hopefully nothing like the downtime Flickr has had lately!

Embed Google Presentations

by Jeff Hester · Jan 6, 2008

Google Docs is making it really easy to share work and collaborate online, and they’ve just announced a new feature that seems like a no-brainer: embeddable presentations. You’ve been able to create or upload Powerpoint presentations to Google Docs for some time now, but embedding in a page (or a blog entry) makes so much sense, you wonder why this wasn’t done earlier!

Here’s an example:

To embed a presentation, you must first “publish” it, making it visible to anyone on the Internet. Now during the publish process, you’ll be given the direct link to the full presentation, as well as the embed code for this new, mini-view mode.

Damnation

by Jeff Hester · Jan 3, 2008

I was reading an interesting story about how Netflix (one of my favorite services) is going to start downloading rentals directly to set-top devices hooked to your TV. Great idea, but what really caught my eye was the quote from Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO and founder:

“It (the set-top device) is going to be very slick and easy,” said Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive officer. “We want the TV experience to be very relaxing and not like visiting a Web site.”

What struck me about Hasting’s quote is how he casually damned all of the web in one swift stroke. Apparently, the web is neither “slick and easy” nor relaxing. Is it really that bad?