I get tons of spam comments on this blog. I think it’s a common problem rather than it is because this blog is so popular(it isn’t). One of the tools for dealing with spam here is Akismet, the other one is me.
The other day I decided to do some maintenance on this site. The first thing I did was to do a backup of all files, by downloading via FTP. Then I did some changes locally, deleted this blog on the server, and uploaded it again. Since I hadn’t changed anything that could possibly go wrong I didn’t test the site afterwords, I just check that it was there on devcase.com and it was. Big mistake. In fact, it was only the fist page that was good, no other pages worked and I didn’t notice until today, a few days later.
What had happened was that the FTP program ignored hidden files, which includes the essential .htaccess which meant that the Apache web server didn’t know how to serve my permalinks. It was my fault obviously, not a fault of the FTP program. It as a background task while doing other things but I should have been more careful and pay more attention to what I was doing. Oh well, it won’t happen again.
I really like ScribeFire. It’s a blog authoring tool in form of a Firefox extension. The features I like most are:
Do you use ScribeFire?
If you’ve ever moved abroad or to a city you don’t know much about, you know how difficult it is to find a flat in advance. If you haven’t, well you can imagine. The problems are - you don’t know what the areas are like, it’s difficult to compare prices and looking at a list of available properties doesn’t give an overview of where they are located. If it is in another country with another language it makes it even more difficult.
Cristian Suazo, a dear friend of mine, has been working on homein.com, a property rental and property sales site for quite some time which aims to solve these problems. I have known about it for quite some time but the other day I stumbled upon a Spanish article about it that made me have another look. It really is a brilliant service!
The unique feature is that all properties are marked on a map, so you can immediately see where it is located. Each property marker has a colour representing a price level, hovering the mouse pointer over a marker shows the price. You can set a filter so that only flats within your budget are displayed.
At the moment the serivice is only available for a handful cities in Spain, namely - Barcelona, Madrid, Mallorca, Marbella, Costa Brava, Sant Cugat and Sant Just. I hope they roll this out for other locations around the world. If this had been available for the cities I’ve moved to and within, it would have saved me a lot of time and money!
I have a list of domains that are up for renewal. Most of them I haven’t used for anything, they’ve been parked since I bought them and are only costing me money. They are not very generic but good for what I bought them for, it’s just that I’ve never come round to implement the sites that I had planned to. I’ve learned this now, if I come up with an idea I no longer start the project by buying a suitable domain. The thing is, if the site is good and useful, the domain name isn’t really that important, people will find and use it anyway. I also don’t need a separate domain for each project. I will only keep the very good ones and make use of them, anything else is stupid.
Google’s products are good but as an avid user there are a few things that I’d like to suggest to make them even better. Read Post ›
Late last night as I was uploading and fixing with a new site I’m working on, the server suddenly started to load extremely slow and after a short while didn’t load any pages at all. I was editing some configuration scripts and for a moment I thought I had brought it down myself by some unfortunate setting. I tested if a couple of other sites I have on that server could load but none of them did.
This website shows the positions of Swiss SBB trains on a Google Map. Unfortunately the positions are not updated using the trains actual position but calculated using the timetable. Still a pretty cool app. In the UK this would have been completely pointless, but they say:
as Swiss trains are almost always on time, most of the time the position is accurate
Believe it or not but one of the more popular posts on this blog is the one with the gingerbread Star Destroyer. No wonder that it’s popular. Who doesn’t like Star Wars? Who doesn’t like gingerbread? It’s a killer combo.
Gingerbread is very Christmas, but hey a Star Destroyer never goes out of season.
As an extra treat to all Star Wars fans, here’s a site tip on that topic.
Feels good to know.
…had almost forgot. I also hadn’t read my usual round of daily reads for a while, so today I did. Paul writes some interesting stuff every now and then but I was surprised to see this post today.
If you don’t have the energy to read through it I’ll round it up for you. He basically found a web site that didn’t conform to his high standards. Hello!? First time? If I go so upset whenever I found a useless website that I had to write about it I would have little time left for other things. Oh well, I guess that’s always something to write about and everyone’s got a right to an opinion. And when I think about it, everyone with an opinion should write a blog post about it, really, why not. That’s one of the reasons that makes it fun to read blogs, personal stuff, the kind of stuff you don’t see here very often(because you don’t see anything here often, or even rarely).
I’m having a hard time lowering my standards. It’s all in my head anyway, so you won’t notice if I do. There’s nothing to compare to. But this post wasn’t very good was it? I certainly don’t hope so, I’m just adding a few more bytes to the interweb, something for Google to chew on. There you go, you’re welcome.
