I Switched to Dreamhost

Posted on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by Seán Hayes

Sorry for the downtime last Monday. My virtual dedicated server plan for GoDaddy expired and I switched to Dreamhost.

GoDaddy’s customer service has really gone down the drain since I first went there. I only went with them in the first place since it was recommended by a professor I knew, and there’s a few things I never liked about it. For instance, why does a domain name registrar have spokesbabes? It seems kind of low brow, and as a man it feels demeaning. Another major problem I have with their site is the UI is a gorram cluster fudge; I’m trying to keep my site family friendly, but you get my meaning. And then there’s the automatic renewals that you don’t know exist until they’ve already charged your account.

Dreamhost is a lot better. Since it’s just hosting I can’t install my own software, but that wasn’t something I did a lot of anyway. It’s also a lot cheaper. I had multiple hosting accounts with GoDaddy and switched to a VDS since it was cheaper to put all my sites on there. At Dreamhost though, you can host multiple sites on one hosting plan. My GoDaddy VDS cost over $300 a year, but Dreamhost only costs me about $70 per year (I got $50 off with the coupon code “50Bones”). Network speed for Dreamhost appears to be faster too.

Also, Dreamhost offers free privacy when you register domains. At GoDaddy I had to pay about $13 per year per domain for that service.

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Redirection WordPress Plugin

Posted on Monday, June 23, 2008 by Seán Hayes

So when I first set up this blog I opted for the /archives/%post_id% permalink structure, which I liked because it was short, elegant, and used unique identifiers. I didn’t like the idea of date and slug based permalinks since they don’t use the hour, minute, and second you published your post; just the year, month, day, and title are used, none of which have to be unique. Although extremely unlikely, theoretically you could publish 2 posts with the same title on the same day and they would have the same URL, which doesn’t sit right with me.

As it turns out though, SEO calls for slug based permalinks since search engines strongly favor pages with keywords in the URL. I decided to switch to date and slug based permalinks, but what about all the numbered archive/%post_id% links that have been posted, linked, bookmarked, indexed, etc.? Well I found this great WordPress plugin called Redirection. It lets you specify URLs you want redirected and what HTTP response code (301, 302, 307, 404) to use. It also features a log of redirects and 404 errors, so you can look for common requested URLs that don’t exist and redirect them. It would be kind of hard to update a few hundred links to the new slug URLs, but for 5 posts it was very simple and just what I needed. Another great feature is, anytime you edit a post slug it automatically adds a redirection rule to the new URL.

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WordPress Twitter Better Plugin

Posted on Friday, June 20, 2008 by Seán Hayes

One great way I recently found to publicize new blog posts is with the Twitter Better WordPress Plugin. It serves 2 functions:

  • Shows your latest Twitter posts
  • Optionally updates your Twitter status when you save, publish, and/or edit a post, with a link to the post

It’s a really simple way to spread your URL around the internet, especially since Twitter is integrated with so many other web apps. For example, I have Twitter Better set to update my Twitter status when I publish a new post with the title and URL of the post. That new Twitter status is then used to automatically update my Facebook status with the title and URL of my new blog post, and the same can work for any other Twitter enabled web apps I use in the future.

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Firefox 3 Launch Party at RIT/Download Day 2008

Posted on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 by Seán Hayes

Tonight I’m hosting a launch party for Firefox 3 since the final version is being released today. Here’s some links for more info:

Today is also Download Day 2008. Mozilla is trying to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in one day, and so far 1,599,887 have already pledged to download Firefox 3 today, Tuesday June 17th, 2008. Pledge on the site, download FF3, and help set the world record!

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Planned Upcoming Features for Color Management

Posted on Monday, June 16, 2008 by Seán Hayes

Here’s some planned features for future releases of my Color Management extension:

  • Prompt to restart after changing options
  • File selector defaults to OS specific color profile directory
  • Add filter to file selector for color profiles
  • Ability to extract color profiles from images on a webpage and save to local color profile directory

Also, if I’m not mistaken color management in Firefox 3 is only for images with embedded color profiles; if a color profile is referenced but not embedded in an image it’s not used. It would be nice to eventually allow referenced color profiles to be used, and maybe add a download feature for referenced color profiles that aren’t present on the user’s local machine.

If you have any other suggestions please comment below.

Posted in Color Management | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Color Management 0.4

Posted on Monday, June 16, 2008 by Seán Hayes

Here’s a quick release for my Color Management extension that fixes a bug with the file selector on Linux. I’ll be updating it again later today or tomorrow, but I wanted to get this released so that I can get my extension out of the Firefox add-ons Sandbox before the release of Firefox 3 Final tomorrow. Thanks to Tim Rowley for finding the bug. He’s also the guy who wrote the color management feature for Firefox 3.

Download Color Management 0.4

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Color Management 0.3

Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008 by Seán Hayes

Here’s the next version of my Color Management extension. This is just a compatibility update, supporting Firefox 3 RC1. In the next week I plan on releasing another version with some feature enhancements.

I’ve been having trouble uploading the new version to the Firefox Add-ons Site (the connection keeps timing out), so for now it’ll only be available here.

Download Color Management 0.3

Posted in Color Management | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Touchkit

Posted on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 by Seán Hayes

I own an HP tx1000z Tablet PC. It’s a really great notebook, but the touchscreen isn’t all I thought it would be. I’d heard about this software called Touchkit that could increase screen sensitivity (among other options), and until today was unable to successfully find it.

Touchkit, made by EETI, has versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows (including Vista). I recommend disabling cursor stabilization if you’re going to be writing: open the Calibration Utility, click the Setting tab, then click Option.

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Color Management Extension Released

Posted on Tuesday, April 1, 2008 by Seán Hayes

Well, fixing the bugs in my Color Management extension went a lot faster than I though, and in 3 short days I had a usable release. Last night I posted my extension to the Firefox Add-ons site and the Songbird Add-ons site. It’s nice to see that in the 10 hours since I first posted it, my extension has been downloaded 7 times from the Songbird site.

I was able to add in the file browser fairly quickly, which is something I wasn’t planning on doing until after the first release. It’s a really simple extension, so all that’s left to do is add more localizations and fix bugs if there are any. If anyone finds any bugs or has a localization to add, just post below and I’ll add it in. The only other thing I can think of is linking to the ICC test page and/or putting the test image right in the extension.

Download the Color Management extension (Firefox 3.0b4, Songbird 0.5)

color-management-preview-songbird.jpgcolor-management-preview-firefox.jpg

Below are links to information on Color Management that I found useful:

Firefox 3: color managed web browser coming near to you
FireFox 3 – Color Management Done Right
Gfx.color_management.display_profile
Safari ushers in better browser colors

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First Post

Posted on Friday, March 28, 2008 by Seán Hayes

So, I set up this blog about 7 months ago and forgot about it. I intended to talk about projects I was working on but got really busy with classes and never posted anything, not wanting to talk about what I was going to do without actually doing it. I’m about to launch my first small time project though, possibly within a week, and I now have more free time to write about other technology and business related topics of interest to me since I’ve started my co-op, so I decided now’s the time to start posting.

For a long time I’ve had a strong interest in XUL, the language used in applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Songbird. I’ve been reading tutorials for the past 2 weeks and started my first Firefox extension, entitled Color Management. It’s a very simple extension that simply provides a GUI front end for users to enable the color management feature that’s included with Firefox 3, but is disabled by default. Down the road I hope to add new features that might be applicable to color management.

In case you’re wondering,  color management allows images to be displayed with the same color profiles used to create them, meaning images will display in your browser the way they were meant to. This article has a test image showing how different color profiles are displayed in browsers without color management.

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