Introduction

I have a stinking cold this weekend and, apart from dragging myself out to walk the dog, I’ve been fit for nothing else but sitting on the sofa (or lying in bed) with my laptop. But I thought I’d try to use the time profitably by finally getting around to learning how to use Rails. I’ve been meaning to do this for over five years now – i.e. since the days when all the tech podcasts I listened to hyped it up as the great new thing on the Web.

Back in 2006 I even bought my daughter a copy of the original edition of Chris Pine’s Learn to Program book – which uses Ruby to teach programming – on the off-chance that she might get interested in coding. We sat and went through some of it together but she really wasn’t interested so the book then lay unread for years, until a couple of months back when I packed it into one of several big cardboard boxes with all my other computer books and it went off to the Oxfam bookshop.

The trouble has been (apart from inertia, laziness and wariness about potentially wasting lots of time on yet one more thing I really don’t need to know about) that I’ve been doing most of the dynamic Web page goodness I need to do quite fine all these years using PHP (well, a combination of PHP, MySQL, Javascript, CSS and plain old HTML to be precise). So I haven’t had a need to learn about Rails. But PHP seems antiquated these days and I really feel like I need to move on. I also wanted to get a better understanding what Model-View-Controller (MVC) is all about. I understand the principals of MVC, but it’s not until you actually use a programming concept that you really understand it.

Before PHP I was a committed Perl devotee and it took me a while to switch to PHP because I really liked Perl and I was doing some fairly complex stuff with it. I got into Perl because I’d started writing Web pages in HTML, discovered you couldn’t do much with HMTL alone, started writing Javascript, discovered that that had its limitations (as well as being the source of a great deal of pain back then) and so I ended up, like many people who followed the same route, writing Perl CGI scripts. That was before PHP had really got going and, for hobbyist Web site creators like myself, Perl CGI scripts on Apache servers was about the only way to go. And I really enjoyed writing Perl. The only thing that did for Perl was the whole issue with modules: figuring out which modules you needed, which versions were installed, installing multiple versions of modules so as not to break someone else’s scripts, and so on. Modules were a bit of a nightmare. PHP just seemed to have everything built in and you could just crack on and do the coding.

So I switched from Perl to PHP and never looked back. But I do remember being horrified at first by the mix of HTML and code within PHP files. The recipe seemed to be: chuck all your ingredients (design, content, functionality) into one bowl and give it a good old mix. It struck me as having massive potential for confusion and maintenance issues. With my Perl scripts I’d used separate HTML templates. The Perl script requested by the browser called up other scripts as required, did the processing, worked with the database, gathered together all the dynamic content and then selected from a choice of templates and built the final HTML by replacing placeholders with the dynamic content. I really liked the idea of keeping the page design and static content as separate as possible from the code – it just seemed a lot cleaner that way. So that’s one thing I’m expecting Rails to have got right and I’m looking forward to getting back to that kind of way of doing things. We’ll see.

Starting point

I can’t code in Ruby. I’ve read up about it at various points during the past few years and I’ve written a few little Ruby programs in the course of dipping my toes in the subject. Specifically, I’ve spent some time with these resources:

• Chris Pine’s book, mentioned above (I recently downloaded the 2nd edition to my iPad)
• Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional by Peter Cooper
• http://tryruby.org/ – a great, try-it-online-as-you-go, getting started tutorial
• why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby – better experienced than described; the story behind this is as intriguing as the book itself

But, as of today, I have to say I really can’t code in Ruby. Should I have concentrated on this for a bit before jumping into Rails? I’ve read conflicting advice answering this question definitely yes, and no, it’s not necessary. It’ll be interesting to see how much this lack of knowledge holds me back or trips me up.

As far as Rails goes, before this weekend I’d watched pretty much every video I could find about Rails at one time or another – including all the ones where someone zips through and creates a (seemingly) fully functioning social media Web site in about ten minutes. For non-macho programmers like myself that kind of thing (where someone is talking super fast and typing commands even faster, and things are zapping past you on the screen: zap, there goes validation, blink and you miss it, there goes authentication …), that just puts me off, because what it says to me is: only ubergeeks will really find this as easy as this guy seems to – the rest of us would doubtlessly only get mired in bizarre error messages before we ever got anywhere near creating a working Web page.

Anyway, I’d heard a podcast a while back where Michael Hartl was being interviewed about the Rails tutorial he’d written and the screencasts he’d created, and how he makes a really good living from people buying the screencasts and the PDF of the tutorial, even though the same content that’s in the PDF is available for free as Web pages. So this weekend I finally went and looked up http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book and started reading the first chapter of the tutorial book. And so far so good. I’ve done the first two chapters now and I like it. It’s up to date and it works.

gvim

The other thing I spent some time on was downloading, setting up and relearning vim (actually gvim). This is a lightly updated version of the UNIX vi editor. There’s a Windows version of gvim that lets you relive the experience of using a text editor originally created by a 22-year-old Bill Joy back in 1976. It might sound crazy to choose to go back to using vim, but I think it might make sense – there are some definite benefits.

I started using vi in 2001 when I got a job as a technical author and discovered, first day on the job, that I wouldn’t be using Word or even Notepad. I had a choice between vi and Emacs, neither of which I’d heard of before. I tried them both and settled on Emacs at the time, but since leaving that job I’ve never used Emacs again but I’ve used vi regularly over the years just because it’s always available on any UNIX/Linux server you ever connect to.

For a long time my text editor of choice was UltraEdit. I then switched to Notepad++ and I’ve stuck with it for the last eight or nine years now. But I thought I’d tie in learning Rails with brushing up my vi expertise (in the shape of gvim on Windows). I should point out that I’m working on Windows 7. So, after some tweaking of colours and window setup, and spending a little time revising the subject and creating a personal cheatsheet on vim (in vim), I’m using it quite happily now. I’ve never really been a mouse lover. I like keyboard shortcuts, and the great thing about vi is being able to keep your hands on the keyboard all the time: it really does allow you to get things done far quicker than you can by pointing, clicking, dragging.

git

git is another of those things I’ve been hearing about a lot over the past five years or so and felt I should find out more about. Back when I was learning vi and Emacs I was also learning about CVS, and I found it a steep learning curve. Fast forward a few years and, at my current job, we switched our version control from CVS to SVN and I came to really like SVN. I particularly like TortoiseSVN and its repo browser. But I’ve been thinking about looking at git for a while now – just to find out why people seem to like it better (it seems to be the most-used version control system for software source files now).

So I was pleased to discover that Michael Hartl’s tutorial gets you committing your Rails code to github right from the start. The only trouble I’ve had with the tutorial so far has been that I couldn’t push code up to github successfully to begin with and I struggled for a while (and posted a question on stackoverflow about it) before realising that I’d screwed up with one of my initial commands, meaning I had to delete the .git directory and start over. The problem was that I’d tried to push up my code before going to the github Web site and creating an account and a repository. Yes, I know: duh! But the problem seemed to be that having made this error, even though I then went and created the account and repository, something in my .git directory must have been messed up. So that held me up for a few hours, but – after backing up and redoing it – it now works fine.

The git commands are (like much in the world of Ruby on Rails, I suspect) the kind of thing that you just have to learn. It’s not obvious and you can’t just guess and figure it out. You need to know that exact words and syntax or it won’t work.

One of the things I like about having installed git from github is that I now have a bash shell on my Windows 7 machine. I can press the Windows key, type bash, press Enter and I get a console window with the bash shell, which allows you to do a lot more, a lot more easily than the standard Windows DOS-type command console.

Heroku

Finally, for this inaugural Rails Chronicle post, something else I’d heard about in a podcast but never used: Heroku. I spent a few days up in Glen Esk earlier this year and I remember one day walking the dog across the field to the river and than back up along the side of the Tarf listening to a podcast about Heroku, which is a hosting service for Web applications. Actually it’s more than that. It’s a system for continuous deployment of Web applications that’s intigrated with git to make it easy to push files up to Heroku’s cloud service and build a deployment that you can immediately browse to.

It seems to work incredibly easily and smoothly – but, again, working from the command line, you need to know the right commands; although these seem to amount to:

$ heroku create
$ git push heroku master
$ heroku rake db:migrate

Conclusion

So far so good. I’ve only done the first two chapters but they cover a whole lot of ground and I feel like I’ve learned a lot already. What I haven’t learned however, is any Ruby – so far.

However, periodically, after I haven’t used my local Web server for a while, I go to the XAMPP control panel, click to start Apache, but nothing happens. It doesn’t tell you there’s been a problem, but the “STARTED” indicator doesn’t appear.

The problem is that something else is hogging port 80. It might be IIS if you’re running that already, but more likely (in my case anyway) it’s Skype.

To solve this problem:

1. In Skype, go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Connection.
2. Clear the check box labelled “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections”.
3. Click Save.
4. Quit and restart Skype.

If you use twitter you'll be familiar with the concept of URL shortening. You want to tweet about that video where the dog thinks its own leg is trying to steal the bone but you've only got 140 characters to say what the video is and include the link to YouTube. URL shorteners allow you to change:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJgMueh-zLM&feature=youtu.be
to:
http://bit.ly/dfzFE6

Even if you don't use twitter URL shorteners can come in handy. For example, at the beginning and end of the ITauthor podcast I use some music by Amplifico and I like to put a link to their page on musically.com in the MP3 description that you can read on your iPod when you're listening to the podcast. It's much nicer to give the URL http://tinyurl.com/amplifico, rather than http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=cdef1ecef0d12844ed816b922fcada5d.

Some popular URL shorteners

• tinyurl – This was the first URL shortener most of us will have come across - way back before twitter appeared and ramped up demand for short URLs, leading to a proliferation of shortening services.
• bit.ly – twitter supported use of bit.ly which made it a popular service. Recently there have been doubts raised about the wisdom of using a Libyan registered domain (.ly) as the Libyan government have said they will take down domains that contain immoral content.
• j.mp – This is just bit.ly but with 2 fewer characters. If you already have a bit.ly URL you can use the same shortened path, stick it on the end of the j.mp domain and save yourself those 2 precious characters. For example, the dog video gets shortened to http://j.mp/dfzFE6.
• goo.gl – Google are one of the many big companies that have now got into the URL shortening business.
• is.gd – just a nice simple Web page that produces nice short URLs.
• ... I could go on, but there's not a whole lot of difference between these services.

Your very own URL shortener

Shortening URLs isn't difficult to do and there are a selection of free URL shorteners that allow you to produce your own short URLs. All you need is your own Web site and your own domain name. So, for example, I own the domain name itauthor.com, so I can produce short URLs like http://itauthor.com/1 or (more descriptively) http://itauthor.com/podcast36.

The solution I'm using is called yourls. It's a series of PHP scripts with a MySQL database behind it. So if you're already running a Web site based on PHP and MySQL (for example, a WordPress blog) then you've already got everything you need. Just upload it and browse to the admin page. The yourls contains all the instructions you need.

The only problem I had was as a result of some changes not getting written to my .htaccess file in my root Web directory. I had to go and manually add the following at the start of the .htaccess file :

# BEGIN YOURLS
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^itauthor.com$
RewriteRule . - [S=3]
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z]+)/?$ /yourls-go.php?id=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z]+)\+/?$ /yourls-infos.php?id=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z]+)\+all/?$ /yourls-infos.php?id=$1&all=1 [L]
</IfModule>
# END YOURLS

You don't need the two lines highlighted in red if you're not running WordPress, or anything similar that relies on being able to rewrite URLs. The yourls documentation says, in this situation, you need to put all the yourls files and directories in a subdirectory of your root Web directory (e.g. in a directory called "u"). However, this means that you need to include the subdirectory in the YOURLS_SITE configuration setting and it'll then be part of the shortened URL (e.g. http://itauthor.com/u/123, which kind of defeats the purpose. So the two red lines get around this by diverting URLs without "www" to yourls.

The first of the red lines says "only apply the following rule if the URL doesn't begin http://itauthor.com". The second red line says "if the previous condition resolved as true then skip the following three rules".

This seems a bit like a double negative but it's necessary because RewriteCond only applies to the RewriteRule that immediately follows it, so we need the skip rule. The result is that, on my site, the three RewriteRules that divert page requests to the yourls PHP scripts are only applied to URLs beginning http://itauthor.com. The "[L]" means "last" - in other words, if this RewriteRule is applied don't go any further, so we never reach the rules that WordPress uses, which are further down the .htaccess file. If a URL begins http://www.itauthor.com then the yourls rules are skipped and the URL is processed using the WordPress rules.

This means that http://itauthor.com/2 is sent to yourls to retrieve the original, long URL from its database, whereas http://www.itauthor.com/podcasts is sent to WordPress to create a Web page using content from its database.

What's the point?

Well, okay, there's really no point other than a bit of personal domain name vanity. Why have your tweets full of bit.ly or goo.gl URLs when you could have your own domain name showing up – even if clicking the link doesn't take your tweet readers to your Web site.

And to finish, just because I find it very funny, here's that video of the back leg bone thief:

Today I posted an ITauthor podcast onto this site. And the comparative ease and difficulty of the two process became immediately apparent.

Although I have some niggles with AudioBoo (there are some very obvious improvements they could make), it certainly does make publishing a podcast very, very easy. This is especially true if:

a) you have an iPhone
b) you're happy to record your podcast episodes directly into your phone and post them without any editing

Editing is the bane of podcasting - so I actually see a lack of editing as a good thing. However, the bad thing is that you can't slip over 5 minutes. If you try to post a recording that's longer than 5 minutes then it just stops dead after 4.59.

I don't have an iPhone, so my experience was a degraded one of recording onto a little digital recording, uploading to my computer, uploading a photo from my Blackberry, then uploading recording and photo to AudioBoo via the upload web page. But even still, it was way, way quicker than how I currently produce my ITauthor podcast. Here's the ridiculously complicated process I trawl through for that:

1. Record the podcast.
2. Upload it to my PC.
3. Edit it in Audacity.
4. Export it as a .wav file (I've tried exporting to MP3 but the sound quality is rubbish).
5. Convert the .wav file to MP3 using Format Factory.
6. Add tags and photo to the MP3 using ID3-TagIT 3.
7. Upload the MP3 to my Dreamhost server using WinSCP.
8. Open a previous ITauthor podcast blog post in Live Writer.
9. Copy it and use this to create a new blog post.
10. Post this to my WordPress blog as a draft.
11. Go to the web page for editing the blog post and add the MP3 using the Blubrry PowerPress plugin.
12. Publish the blog post.

This is a long and tedious enough process to discourage me from podcasting regularly.

There's got to be a better way. And if all you want is a mini, 5-minute podcast then AudioBoo probably is that better way.

Hi, I'm playing with a new idea - or actually a retread of an old idea of mine - an Audio Blog! I just quickly recorded a bunch of my thoughts and put them into a MP3 file to post here:

That was three years before podcasting really started to take off. And the thing that I really liked was the idea of listening to someone rather than having to sit there reading. The internet is still quite a texty medium (think of Twitter, and even FaceBook - although some people, insanely, keep all their photos there - is still largely just text), but back then in 2002, boy did you spend a lot of time reading off a flickering CRT! I spent most of my working day reading, so, although I liked the idea of blogs, sometimes the reading of them felt like a bit of a chore. Hearing the voice of a blogger you'd been reading for a long time was wonderful. As Russell says: "instead of just reading their thoughts you could hear their voices ... their inflexion and their enthusiasm". I was really surprised that audioblogging didn't take off and even Russell Beattie gave it up after a short while.

Then of course podcasting came along and for a while everybody who leapt on the idea thought they were broadcasting to the world when in fact, to begin with at least, the only people listening were other podcasters. And yes, I've made sporadic stabs at podcasting myself - and hope to do so again. My plans are currently on hold thanks to the utterly abysmal internet service I currently endure from Sky Broadband which makes any sort of internet experience tedious at best and renders the recording of Skype interviews completely unfeasible ... but I digress.

Now there's an easy way to do pretty much what Russell Beattie was doing back in 2002, it's called Audioboo. It's an application for the iPhone, Android and the Web that allows you to record up to 5 minutes of audio, tag it and post it to your Audioboo profile. They've branded these recordings "boos" - which gives you a clue as to how this must have been pitched to the venture capitalists who no doubt funded the site: trendy social media, with an audio twist. However, for podcast lovers like myself a really nice feature is that every tag and profile has an RSS feed, which means you can subscribe to any of these as a podcast.

Sounds great. And it could be great if it wasn't so difficult to find anything worth listening to. The problem is the lack of classification. I want to find people who generally record stuff on a certain subject, but there's no way to do this, other than stumbling upon something by blind luck. The only way to find "boos" is to browse:

• everyone's boos (the most recent boos: completely random)
• featured boos (also seemingly random - you just don't get all the "This is a test" recordings of people trying out AudioBoo)
• popular boos (a perplexing selection if these are really the most listened to recordings - the list is also strangely static)

On the iPhone you can also browse for boos that have been geotagged to somewhere near to your current location. I can see how this might occasionally throw up interesting recordings. Unfortunately I don't own an iPhone.

However, there's no classification of booers (boozers?), so it's impossible to find people who might be talking about things you want to listen to. Yes there's tagging, but try searching for "software" and you just get a ragbag of boos that people decided to tag as "software". What I'm looking for are people who generally record their thoughts about software.

This highlights the problem with tagging versus less free-for-all methods of classification. If AudioBoo allowed people to choose to classify their profile with a maximum of three keywords, only the people who generally talked about software would choose "software" as their classification. Then I'd be able to find them.

It's frustrating because I'm sure there is a lot of audio in Audioboo that I'd enjoy listening to. I just can't find it. I can try, but all the rubbish and nonsense is going to put me off the effort very quickly. It's like a going into a huge library to find something to read, but the books are stacked in a completely random order and they have unmarked spines so I have to open them up, one by one, to find out which book each one is. After opening a couple of cheesy romances, a car repair manual, several books in foreign languages and a biography of a 1980s cricketer I give up and head home to buy something off Amazon.

Good luck Audioboo, but I can't see me visiting very often until you put a bit of thought into usability.

The problem

I created a video in Camtasia and output it as a Flash file to put on a website. I chose FLV format in Camtasia, but the file that runs initially is a .swf file. This displays a little animation and shows the first frame with a big play button on top. It all worked fine locally on my PC but when I uploaded it to the website it just displayed as a black box with no initial animation. This suggested a problem with the .swf file and, sure enough, when I tried loading the .swf file directly in the browser all I got was a grey page (that's gray for anyone Googling for that spelling).

The debugging

The strange thing was that I'd previously added another video elsewhere on the site and it worked fine. It wasn't anything to do with the size of the .flv file because the working video had a larger .flv file, and anyway I was convinced the problem was the .swf file.

My immediate thought was that it was a permissions problem. So I blew the permissions wide open but it wasn't that. I then thought it could be a security issue but telling the browser to trust the website didn't help either.

I'd actually added this within the help authoring tool Madcap Flare, and this took me down all sorts of wrong paths. And, eventually, paths were the problem. I fell back to more Googling and eventually came across a Techsmith forum post by "Showland" that had the solution.

The solution

Showland's forum comment said:

Hi. I had this problem as well, where the compiled file would play locally but not over the Web. I discovered that it didn't like a super long path to the files. Once I stored them with a shorter path, the screencast played fine over the Web. Hope this helps!

Eureka!

The URL for my .swf file was something like this:

http://www.my.website.xyz/documentation/authoringDocs/videos/Flare-adding-glossary-popups-FLV/adding-glossary-popups_controller.swf

So I moved the file up the hierarchy and gave it a simple name:

http://www.my.website.xyz/documentation/authoringDocs/videos/test.swf

and, hey presto, it worked just fine.

I don't know what the character limit is, but it's worth bearing this in mind if you work with videos on websites.

This got a little bit nearer with HTML5, but Firefox 3.6 doesn't support MP3 files (which most people still use for audio files on the Web), just Ogg Vorbis. IE9, on the other hand, supports MP3 but not Ogg.

There is a jQuery plugin called jPlayer which goes part of the way to providing a cross-browser solution, but it's a very techie solution and not easy to configure.

So, until all of this gets sorted out finally, most of us just follow the path of least resistance and use a Flash-based audio player and accept that, because Steve Jobs is on a crusade to kill off Flash, no one browsing your pages on an iPhone or an iPad is going to see the player.

As I write this, in June 2010, the podcast pages I produce to accompany my podcasts use a Flash player that comes as part of the Blubrry PowerPress plugin for WordPress. And at the top of the sidebar on each page I use the Easylistener player. Here's a screenshot, just to remember it by, as it's only a matter of time before I have to remove it:

I periodically scour the internet for small, nice-looking audio players that can be pointed at an RSS feed, and Easylistener is the only one I've found that I really like.

William White describes the origins of Easylistener:

Easylistener was developed in the Yahoo! Media Innovation Group by William White and Joseph Magnani. It was inspired by the work of Fabricio Zuardi, Lucas Gonze and many other amazing and talented engineers working for Yahoo! Music in San Diego and Santa Monica, who were developing the Yahoo! Media Player.

Easylistener feeds off XSPF, a venerable XML format for playlists. The little chunk of code that places the player on your Web page includes a reference to a Web site that will take the URL of a Web page and will go and read that page, extract details of any audio files it finds and build them into XSPF that it then feeds back to the Easylistener Flash application.

The trouble is all of this was developed by Yahoo! and they provided the "playthispage" service that produced the XSPF for the player. But Yahoo! lost interest in (or never really noticed) Easylistener, so it was left to rot. Back in July of last year I blogged that the URL for the "playthispage" service no longer worked, which resulted in no content appearing in the player. After a while they seemed to have moved it to another server and I got the player working again. However, it recently stopped again, and this time I was sure it was dead for good.

I emailed William White, who had commented on my original blog post, and I asked if he could help. He got back to me to say he'd set up a PHP script that provided the same XSPF generation service. As a result, for the time being, the player is working again.

To get it working again I added:

playthispage_url =http://musiclibre.org/playthispage/?url=

to the flashVars attribute within the embed element.

So my embed element now looks like this (note: the flashVars value should be one long string, I've broken it into lines here just for good looks):

<p style="margin-left:-10px; margin-top:0">         <embed src='http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mig/playlistbadge/25.swf?referer='          width='170'            height='200'            wmode='transparent'            flashVars='playlist_url=http://www.itauthor.com/category/podcasts/feed&             playthispage_url=http://musiclibre.org/playthispage/?url=&             rounded_corner=1&skin_color_1=0,-100,-29,18&skin_color_2=0,-100,-27,20'          type='application/x-shockwave-flash'            pluginspage='http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer'        />                                                                              </p>  

However, if you  want to use Easylistener to your own Web pages, the easy way to get it is to go to:

http://www.musiclibre.org/easylistener/

There's a nice little Web application there for setting the page that gets scraped for content and choosing the way you want the player to look. You then just copy the embed code and change "http://webjay.org/flash/xspf_player" to either "http://musiclibre.org/xspf_player" or "http://musiclibre.org/dark_player".

For example, here's one I just went and grabbed.

And if you don't see anything (or the player is empty), it means it's broken again.

Such a shame Yahoo! didn't continue supporting this because it's still way better than anything else out there that tries to do the same thing.

The other things you can do with the sidebar are:

• Add the link to any of the newsgroups you belong to.
  Tom has set up a “Technical Communication” newsgroup and it’s the links that get added to this newsgroup that appear on Writer River. This is great because it means you can have your own personal list and then, from that, choose who you share particular links with.
• Send a tweet about the page.
  Rather than going to your twitter client and tweeting about this separately – just write your tweet in the sidebar.
• Publish the link to your blog or to delicious.
  The sidebar has WordPress and delicious integration. In my case, I want to have my own “What I’m Reading” list in my WordPress blog. So I have a “What I’m Reading” category already set up and I have Publish2 set to select this as the default category. The good thing about this is that if Publish2 disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t lose all my “What I’m Reading” links they way I would if I was just adding details dynamically to my site by pulling in information from the RSS feed for my list at Publish2. There is a Publish2 JavaScript widget that you can add to any Web page to pull information down from Publish2 if you want to do it that way. But by actually posting to my blog from the sidebar it means that data is saved to my WordPress database as well as to Publish2’s database.

So here’s how I add things to my “What I’m Reading” list. Note: the way I used to populate this list is described in this post – but it was massively complicated compared to this method.

1. When I've read a page I think other tech writers might be interested in I just go to my Bookmarks list, click the Publish2 link and fill out the sidebar form that's displayed.
2. I type in a description of what I like about the page in the Public Comments box.
3. I select the check box for the Technical Communication newsgroup.
4. The check box for twitter is selected by default - I just add some tweet text.
5. In the Also add this link to section I select the check box for ITauthor.com.  My What I'm Reading category is already selected - I just have to copy some text from the Public Comments box and that becomes a link to the article in the resulting blog post.
6. I click Save and I'm done.

   My blog's updated with a new post, Writer River also gets a new link entry and a tweet gets sent out to my twitter followers.

   Quick, easy and kills three birds with one stone. Brilliant!

In pseudocode this goes like this:

<if this evaluates to TRUE> then <parse this> else <parse this>

All you need to do is replace the "then" with a question mark and the "else" with a colon:

<if this evaluates to TRUE> ? <parse this> : <parse this>

For example:

print  $trueOrFalse ? "you're telling the truth" : "you're lying";

Ignore the print command, it's not part of the if/then/else statement, it's just here to do something with the outcome of that statement.

The expression immediately to the left of the question mark is evaluated. The expression between the question mark and the colon is parsed if the expression evaluates to TRUE, otherwise the expression immediately to the right of the colon is parsed. So in the above example, either "you're telling the truth" or "you're lying" is printed, depending on whether $trueOrFalse is ... you guessed it ... TRUE or FALSE.

But perhaps a more common situation is toggling the value assigned to a variable. For example, toggling between TRUE and FALSE:

$trueOrFalse = $trueOrFalse ? FALSE : TRUE;

Here's a practical example of the use of if/then/else one liners. There's two in this chunk of PHP. The scroll box list below the code is the kind of thing this PHP produces.

<div style="overflow:auto; height:100px; width:300px; border:3px groove #DDD; padding:0">
<?php
    $alternateLine = FALSE;
    while($presidentsArray) {
        print "<div style=\"background-color:";
        print $alternateLine ? "#F5F8F9" : "white";
        print "; padding-bottom: 1px\"> &nbsp; &nbsp; <a href=\"someURL\" title=\"This link goes nowhere\">" .
          $presidentsArray['name'] . "</a></div>";
        $alternateLine = $alternateLine ? FALSE : TRUE;
    }
?>
</div>

But Yahoo quietly choked it and hoped that nobody noticed. I’m not sure why they would do this. I’m sure they could handle the bandwidth of people pulling down the Shockwave file off some server that had been left to serve up the old webjay.org pages. Maybe someone at Yahoo just pulled the plug on that server and not enough people have complained. I wish I’d gone and grabbed the files while they were still there. I looked at archive.org but the URL was never spidered.

So I’m going to have to find another solution, but it won’t be for a while because I know there’s nothing quite like it out there, so I’ll have to do some switching around and PHP-ing to sort it out.

It’s symptomatic of the Web though: it seems like a solid, reliable structure, but it’s really entirely transitory and kept in working order by a lot of people and a lot of effort. It’s a bit like a car: as soon as you fix one thing, something else breaks.

Nevertheless, lots of people would still like somewhere to share photos (if it was really easy to do), or they might want somewhere to collect stuff they’ve spotted somewhere online, or they might want to keep notes somewhere they can always get to easily, or they might want to share and save conversations with loved ones, or they might want to start podcasting, or they might want to … well, the list goes on.

Posterous allows you to do all this:

• without signing up for anything
• without setting up anything or choosing options
• without having to pay
• without having to wait for more than about a minute for your new blog to be available

How does it work? Send an email to post@posterous.com.

Then what? No, that’s it. That’s all you do. Just send the email. The subject of the email becomes the title of your first post on your new blog and the content of the email becomes the content of your first post.

Wait a short while and an automated email comes back telling you the address of your new blog. Email post@posterous.com again and you’ve got a new post on your blog. Attach a photo to your email and it appears at the top of your post. Attach several photos and you get a control for seeing them all in the order you attached them. Attach a sound file and you get an audio player embedded in your post. Attach a video, or a PDF, or a Word document and … well, you get the picture – it all just works sensibly without you having to do anything complicated.

Some great features

If you want to choose your own subdomain name (like leoville.posterous.com/) you need to sign up, but it’s painless. You can then manage your blog, add additional email addresses if, for example, you want to post from gmail when you’re at home, Outlook when you’re at work, and using your Blackberry mobile email address when you’re out and about.

You can also set up multiple blogs and use them for different purposes. When you have multiple blogs (e.g. a work one, a family one and a club one) you can choose which one you post to by using the subdomain name (e.g. post@yoursubdomain.posterous.com instead of post@posterous.com).

You can allow other people to email to your site by adding them as contributors.

You can make a blog private so that your need to enter a password before you get to see the blog.

If you trust posterous with your login details for other places (e.g. twitter, Facebook, other blogs, etc.) you can post to multiple places at once. You can choose to post to all your other places (by mailing post@yoursubdomain.posterous.com) or you can select just to mail to selected places (e.g. twitter+facebook+posterous@yoursubdomain.posterous.com). You can even use posterous as a way of posting to an existing blog without posting to posterous, which is useful once you realise how convenient posting by email is, but your existing blog doesn’t have that facility.

You can tag your posts just by adding ((tags: your tag)) at the end of your email subject line.

Easy subscription. The people who will find posterous most useful probably don’t use RSS aggregators – even Google Reader. As a result they may not click the Subscribe to this posterous link when they go visit a posterous blog, and if they’ve ever clicked a Subscribe link before they’ve probably been put off the idea because all they’ll usually get is an RSS page with little clue what to do with it. But if they do click the Subscribe to this posterous, and provided they’re signed in, they’re going to like what happens because all that happens is the link changes to tell them they’re now subscribed. What happens after that is that they get a daily email with updates from all of the blogs they’ve subscribed to. And if you’re a regular email user (and who’s not? – for most people it’s still the killer app) then that’s exactly how you want to get things you subscribe to. You don’t want to have to go away and manually check in another place, like Google Reader, you want stuff to come to you, in your inbox.

The bookmarklet. This is just a smart bookmark that you can add to your browser from your posterous site. Whenever you’re using the browser and you come to something interesting, just pull up the bookmark and you can quickly post it to your blog. The bookmarklet window gives you a choice of all the photos on the page and you can choose one of them to include in your post.

A few example uses of posterous

All day diary writing

If you’ve got email on your phone, posterous is a great way of keeping a diary. You never want to write up a diary last thing at night, but you might want to write up little one-liners or short paragraphs during the day when you’ve got a minute, or you’re waiting for the bus and got nothing better to do.

Create a posterous blog and mark it private. Add the email address to your contact list. Then just post to it every now and again.

Share stuff with friends

Out and about and see something interesting, photograph it with your phone and email the picture to posterous. Add your friends as contributors and get them all to email photos. You then end up with a social site for a group of friends that you might not want all your other Facebook friends to see.

Subject-specific site

Want to collect ideas together in one place, either just you or you and friends, family, work colleagues, club members, etc. Make a little posterous site just for one subject. You could have a family site, a site for your department at work, a site dedicated to one specific event – whatever you want, it doesn’t cost anything so it can be as trivial or short-lived as you want. But it can also be a permanent place to gather photos and videos.

Lifestreaming

Because posterous hooks up to Facebook and twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and YouTube and so on, it means you can post to one place, with a single email, but update all your online locations. Some people follow you on twitter but don’t use Facebook, others are Facebook fanatics but just don’t get twitter. This way one email and you cover everyone.

And if you want you can keep your photos on Flickr, your videos on YouTube, your in-depth thoughts on your WordPress blog and your fly-away, ephemeral comments on twitter – but aggregate them all in one place on posterous to the complete record of you.

Preserving email conversations

Over the years my wife and I have discussed a ton of things via email. Most of it’s inconsequential, but some of it’s funny, sometimes it’s maybe touching, often it’s just plain silly – but almost all of it is now gone. It’d be really nice to have all of that, both sides of the conversations, preserved in one place and easy to search through. With posterous that’s dead easy.

Set up a private blog that only you two have access to. Each change the other’s email address in your contact lists to the email address of this posterous site. Now when you email each other you still get the emails, but the emails are also collected together in one place, online, as a blog.

Podcasting

Want to be a podcaster? Never bothered because it all seemed too complicated. Now it’s not complicated at all. Just record some audio (e.g. on your iPhone) and post it to posterous. Then put the following in your posterous Profile:

<a href="itpc://yoursubdomain.posterous.com/rss">Get the podcast in iTunes</a>

When someone clicks the link it will open up iTunes and subscribe them to your podcast. Alternatively, just putting /rss on the end of your posterous URL to display the RSS feed with enclosed audio files. People without iTunes can use this feed with an alternative podcast client.

Other stuff

I’ve only been looking at posterous for a couple of days. I’m sure there’s lots more you can do with it. Let me know if you know of any other good ideas.

Want to know more? Go to http://posterous.com/faq/.

Suppose you write a diary-style blog and you want to give your great-great-great grandchildren the chance to read about the life of their distance forebears. How are you going to do that? Right now, if you get run over by a bus tomorrow, when your hosting company mails you to tell you you need to renew your hosting deal or your domain name nobody’s going to pay up and your blog will disappear from the blogosphere. It’ll probably remain in some form within the Internet Archive, but no one will find it there and it won’t look or work like it was supposed to.

What you need is for someone (Google is the obvious candidate) to offer to capture your fully functional blog, or website of any kind, and keep it in its fully working state for ever, for a one-off payment.

Probably, for an additional regular payment, they’d snapshot your site on a regular basis. But, because you’ve made the initial lump sum payment, when you pop your clogs and stop paying for the snapshotting, the blog will just stay up there as you left it. I like to think of it as internet cryogenics.

For a company with vast storage capacity and the chutzpah to think they might be in operation for ever, it’s a sure-fire money making venture if ever there was one. So come on Google, what’re you waiting for?

If you publish content on the internet, for the world to view, you might wonder how your site performs around the world. Pages might load okay for you, but how quickly do those same pages load for people on other continents?

A handy tool for checking on this is the InternetSupervision Web site:

http://internetsupervision.com/scripts/urlcheck/check.aspx

You stick in a URL and click Check and it loads those pages on servers around the world (so they say) and reports back its findings. Each time you click Check the numbers change, presumably because the servers are busy doing other stuff, and the connections they’re using each get quicker and slower from second to second. But it gives you an indication of who’s getting the best of your Web site and which locations probably have to wait longer for pages to finish loading.

Here are the stats for www.itauthor.com:

The BBC Home Page, by comparison, generally takes about 0.1 of a second to load in the UK, and is a bit faster than the current ITauthor Home Page in most place, but is about the same on their Los Angeles server.

To go out there for a year, volunteers need to raise £4660 to cover travel, Project Trust’s running costs, etc. In order to make donating easy, and to provide a page of information to refer people to, Martha set up an account at JustGiving. It’s a really good use of the Web and I’d highly recommend it to anyone raising money for a charity.

Martha’s page is at http://www.justgiving.com/marthachristie but it expires in September, so here’s a screenshot of how it looks today:

Just an idle thought.

I just installed the Twitter Notify plug-in for Live Writer and I’m about to see how it works. The idea is that when you post to your blog a dialog box pops up with some boiler plate words, the blog post and a TinyURL. You can modify the template, and you can edit the message before it gets tweeted - or at least I’m hoping you can. Let’s find out.

What she said (about 24 minutes into the show), while discussing Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s book Groundswell, was:

There’s this ladder of involvement in social media. Some people like to write blog entries. Some people only like to comment on blog entries. Some people like to review products. Some people just like to read other people’s reviews and act on that review.

I’m an occasional blogger. Sometimes I’ll post every day, other times months will go by and I don’t post at all (usually when I’m up to my eyeballs at work). In some ways I admire the committed bloggers who write lengthy and well thought out posts every day without fail – and sometimes more than one a day. But I do often wonder why they’re spending so much time and thought on this rather than on their paid employment, or their family.

I’m also an occasional blog reader. I use Feedblitz to mail me posts from lots of blogs, but a lot of the time I just read the summaries and never the whole blog post, or I just delete the email without reading anything. My reason for not reading more blog posts is that I know that if I didn’t ration myself quite strictly I could easily spend several hours a day doing nothing else but reading blogs.

What I’m not is a commenter. I rarely ever comment on blog posts and as for forums, I can’t remember ever answering a question on a forum. And this makes me feel bad for two reasons:

1. I love it when people email me, or add a comment to my blog, with a point about something I’ve said in a post, or on a podcast. However, I rarely ever contact the writers/hosts of the blogs/podcasts I enjoy reading/listening to regularly. So they never know I’m out here, one of an invisible audience, enjoying their work. I really should do something about that!
2. I don’t use forums except as a last resort – at which times they often prove invaluable. I have some questions out in forums at the moment as part of my search for the right online help architecture/method for our new applications. And I remember back in 2002 when I was doing some pretty hairy stuff with RoboHelp, I got a lot of help on the Help forums from people like Rick Stone, Rob Chandler and Char James-Tanny. But I’ve never felt any inclination to become an MVP of anything myself and watch the forums on the lookout for people to help.

Am I just a bad, self-centred person?

Well, no, I don’t think so. For me it’s all about a balance of guilt. I hate spending much time at work doing anything that’s not what I’m being paid to do. I pretty much feel like my company has bought my time from nine to five (with an hour off for lunch) and therefore they own my labour during those hours and if I’m writing a blog post or helping someone on a forum I’m essentially cheating my employers. So I make every effort not to be drawn into this kind of thing, and if it does happen I make sure I work extra hours at the end of the day to make up for it. I think this is the generations-old Calvinistic influence showing through.

And when I’m not in work I feel guilty if I spend too much time blogging or preparing podcasts, because I have a wife and kids who deserve some of my time and attention. So once I’ve done some blogging and some podcasting, that just doesn’t leave much time for anything else that would take me away from my family.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating things. Maybe, as Ann Gentle suggests, it simply that there are some people who mainly just blog, some people who mainly comment and some people who never blog or comment.

About six years ago we got a new manager at work and he had trouble with all the names and acronyms we use. He asked me to put together a Web page of terms and explanations for our intranet. But - without doing any consumer research - I thought I’d go one better and, using a vast amount of home brewed Perl and Javascript, I construct a Glossary site that was essentially a Web front end for a little database. Anyone in the company could add new glossary terms and definitions or edit existing ones. I spent quite a bit of time on it (my own personal time because the guilt thing prevented me from effectively charging the company for my work on this), and the end product was pretty damned good and did things like emailing specified addresses every time a change was made (because I was a little bit worried that a loginless system would tempt someone to go in there are write scurrilous definitions). However, in six years, although I know people (mainly new-starts) refer to it, no one but me ever adds or changes anything. It’s exactly like me and Wikipedia. On average I probably use Wikipedia a few times a week and have done for years. But I’ve never ever edited or added a single thing. I’m not proud of this, I’ve just never felt any desire or obligation to do so.

Communications from DMN:
Talking shop with Anne Gentle

Have a listen to Hanselminutes Show 134 to hear Jeff Atwood, CEO of Stack Overflow, talking about the concept of the site and what they’ve done to make it an appealing place for software developers to hang out. The bit that really struck a chord with me was when he described Stack Overflow as sort of an antidote to Experts’ Exchange, the latter being a site that really rubs me up the wrong way because of its underhand tactics. There are so many times I’ve searched for something technical on Google and found a hit that looks like it might provide the answer I was looking for but I don’t notice it’s at Experts’ Exchange until I get there and discover the details are obscured because the site is run as a private club, which I refuse to join.

I like Stack Overflow. The only thing I don’t like about it is that I think its search facility is very weak right now. If you want to find stuff it’s best to use Google, like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com/questions YOUR QUERY

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com/questions online help

The other aspect of it is that, if you’re not a programmer – or even if you are – it can be an intimidating place for the newcomer. You have to brace yourself and be prepared to be told you’re an idiot and should go away and never darken the doors of Stack Overflow again. But, in some ways, that’s not altogether a bad thing. It’s intended to be a games room for professional programmers – it’s not designed for just anybody to go and find an answer to any old thing. But, unlike Experts’ Exchange, everyone’s allowed to come in and wander around and listen in on the conversations. However, if you try answering a question you’re not qualified to answer, or you start asking questions that should have been asked elsewhere, then you can expect the regulars to give you a hard time.

I came across EasyListener from Yahoo:
http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener

It's a free RSS reader/MP3 player that is incredibly easy to configure. It also set me thinking that what would be good would be, rather than just listing my own podcasts in the player, to offer a mix of other tech writing podcasts, or podcasts that tech writers might find interesting.

I investigated a few options, but by far the easiest way to do this, and configure it just how you want it, is to use Yahoo Pipes. The first half of this video shows how you do it:

http://revver.com/video/1245467/yahoo-pipes-and-how-to-merge-filter-and-sort-multiple-rss-feeds/

Here's the configuration I came up with:
 

As I'm writing this the resulting feed combines four feeds:

• Tech Writer Voices
• Grammar Girl
• A Way With Words
• The ITauthor Podcast

Yahoo Pipes takes the 15 most recent posts (except any where the enclosure is video rather than audio) and generates the following feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techwriterpodcasts

Note: The above feed actually comes from Feedburner, but it's got the same content as the one from Yahoo. I just dropped the Yahoo feed into Feedburner because Feedburner gives me a nicer URL and generates some nice stats about how many people download and subscribe to the feed.

When I put this feed URL into the EasyPlayer code generator, I get this:

A nice easy way to help promote other podcasts that you enjoy listening to and want to share with other people.

UPDATE:

OK, so you may have noticed that the embedded EasyPlayer widget doesn't work. It seems to be picky about which feeds it'll play with. It's fine with the RSS feed for ITauthor, but it doesn't like the output from Pipes - even though both EasyPlayer and Pipes are Yahoo creations and the feed I produced from Pipes is valid RSS (I checked).

So here's the same feed in the old, slow-loading, and uglier SpringWidgets player:

UPDATE 2:

My default browser is Firefox and, in Firefox, you can see a SpringWidgets audio player above. Internet Explorer, however, all I can see is a big white space. So my enthusiasm for audio player widgets has just taken a severe dip. I've messed around with both of these widgets for too much of my weekend, so I'm going to give up now. I'll maybe try again in a few months and see if I can find one that's less buggy.

:-(

I thought it would be interesting to check how many other broken links there were throughout my blog. I remembered writing about a link checker and a quick search revealed it was almost exactly five years ago. More interesting though is that the a) the Web page for Xenu looks just as I remember it in 2003 b) you can still download Xenu free of charge c) it runs fine on Vista and d) although it's a no-frills application it's an extremely thorough and effective way to identify broken links buried deep within a Web site. 

One nice feature is that at the end of the check you can output a report as a Web page that contains list of all the broken links and the pages they appear on (which you can click on to check the page) and another list of all the pages containing broken links - it's useful to have both orders because you probably want to check through page by page, but it's also useful to identify multiple broken links for pages on a particular domain.

Download Xenu from here:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download

There's an interesting page about The Story of Xenu Link Sleuth which reveals how the program was written by Tilman Hausherr in 1997.

Incidentally, when I ran it against www.itauthor.com today, Xenu reported that I had 2363 links, and just under 200 of them are currently broken:

ok	2167 URLs	91.71%
not found	162 URLs	6.86%
no such host	8 URLs	0.34%
no connection	5 URLs	0.21%
forbidden request	12 URLs	0.51%
skip type	1 URLs	0.04%
the resource is no longer available	2 URLs	0.08%
auth required	1 URLs	0.04%
temporarily overloaded	3 URLs	0.13%
timeout	1 URLs	0.04%
precondition given in request failed	1 URLs	0.04%
Total	2363 URLs	100.00%

]]> http://www.itauthor.com/2008/11/29/xenu-link-checker-5-years-on/feed/ 0 http://www.itauthor.com/2008/10/14/deleting-a-symbolic-link-via-ftp/ http://www.itauthor.com/2008/10/14/deleting-a-symbolic-link-via-ftp/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:40:24 +0000 ac http://www.itauthor.eu/2008/10/14/deleting-a-symbolic-link-via-ftp/ I just struggled for a while to delete a symbolic link on my Web server that was causing me problems. The main problem was that I couldn't download it, which meant that I couldn't download the whole of my WordPress installation as a backup. I had to copy directories down piecemeal to specifically avoid copying that file (advanced-cache.php).

I'm not sure what the problem was because the file the symlink was pointing to (wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php) was still there. I had to use ClassicFTP to find this out because FileZilla doesn't show you were a symlink is pointing to. In fact, FileZilla treats symlinks as if they are directories and doesn't show the destination. ClassicFTP does, but doesn't show the ownership or permissions on files, which makes it inferior to FileZilla.

The other problem was that I couldn't simply delete it in FileZilla or ClassicFTP.

The solution I finally found was just to FTP to my Web server from the good old Windows command line. Fire up a command console window, type: ftp <host> then, when prompted, your user name and password. Use ls and cd to navigate to the directory containing the symlink.

Strangely, the symlink doesn't show up when you do an ls. However, if you do delete <symlink name> it will delete the symbolic link successfully.

Job done!

Here's another, slicker version for Google Docs. This is the one I came across first because Google use it on the front page of Google Docs. It's style is very Google like - simple, no frills - which made me think it was an in-house production from Google.

Note that although it's slicker it's not more effective because of that. It's the method of communication that's the important thing here, not the adeptness of the execution.

There's a stack of videos on all sorts of things like blogs and RSS and social media. You can find them on YouTube or at http://www.commoncraft.com/. One of my favourite is the one on podcasting. Next time someone asks me what podcasting is, I'm going to send them a link to this video:

I looked at moving to a new hosting solution, but it was going to cost me $120 a year, and I've still got a few months left with Euro-Reg before I need to renew. Then I remembered about SkyDrive - part of Windows Live. Because I have a Hotmail account going back donkey's years I automatically have a Live account that gives me 5 GB of space for free.

So the solution to my problem is to put my MP3 files on Sky drive and just redirect traffic to the new location of those files.

Adding the files is easy. Just sign into Windows Live, go to SkyDrive, click Add files:

Once you upload files, you need to discover what their URL is. Unfortunately, they don't all live in their own directory. So, for example, I created a folder called podcasts, but the URLs of the files in that folder don't contain a podcasts directory which means I can't just redirect everything in the podcasts directory on my Web server to the podcasts directory on SkyDrive. Unfortunately, you can't rely on any part of the URL being the same for different files. This means you have to redirect each one individually. This stinks and we can only hope Microsoft realises this and fixes it. For now you've just got to work with what you've got.

Click on the icon for one of the files you uploaded. This displays it on its own page. Right-click the icon on this page and copy the location of the file. This will give you an ugly big URL like this:

http://ubpq3q.bay.livefilestore.com/y1prhoUMaUaRKTKYapF5RrPEgkMKc5XUgMd4tWocxrw5LDC0oWaw5IhRTBE_jSZOcKZUvzwwlhh9vs/ITauthor-podcast01-01Dec2005.mp3?download 

Remove the last bit. The long ID string identifies the file so you don't need the file name. This reduces the URL to something like:

http://ubpq3q.bay.livefilestore.com/y1prhoUMaUaRKTKYapF5RrPEgkMKc5XUgMd4tWocxrw5LDC0oWaw5IhRTBE_jSZOcKZUvzwwlhh9vs

Now you've got the URL, all you need to do is add a Redirect statement to the .htaccess file in the Web root directory of your Web host. This is a single line taking the form:

Redirect <old directory/file> <new URL>

Where the old directory or file is denoted as a path relative to the location of the .htaccess file.

So, to redirect the file  ITauthor-podcast03-16Dec2005,mp3 to its new location on SkyDrive I added:

Redirect /wp-content/uploads/podcasts/ITauthor-podcast03-16Dec2005.mp3 http://ubpq3q.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pC8IalwMyNgTVgzoON30m5vmKc0gRTei4qqcoQF88Nkbd1Oivca-2OmkaXPJr2kEK5WCDGzf82ns

Annoyingly, you need to do this for each file. What would have been nice would have been if my SkyDrive podcasts directory had a URL like http://alistairchristie.spaces.live.com/podcasts, then I could have done:

Redirect /wp-content/uploads/podcasts http://alistairchristie.spaces.live.com/podcasts

and all my podcasts would be picked up from SkyDrive without having to edit the .htaccess each time I add a new one.

Anyway, for now it saves me having to fork out cash just for more disk space.

For more information, or to configure one for yourself, go to SpringWidgets.

1. Copy the URL of the RSS feed.

Note: For a Google calendar, go into Settings, open the settings for the calendar you want to subscribe to, scroll to the bottom of the page and copy the URL for the publicly available RSS feed.

2. Go to
http://www.rssfwd.com/

3. Paste the URL into the "Enter the URL ..." field (replacing the text that's in there already).

4. Click Submit.

5. On the next page, enter your email address.

6. Select an email format from the drop-down list.

Note: As of today, individual emails are only being sent out once a day. I got a clutch of emails all sent at 2.40 am. So, given that you don't get individual emails throughout the day, you may as well choose one of the combined email formats.

7. Untick 'Share at "popular feeds" page'
THIS IS IMPORTANT!

8. Click Subscribe.

9. Go to your email application and check for a new email from <feed name>.

10. When you get the email, click the link in it to confirm your subscription.

You will now be emailed updates to the RSS feed - for example, changes to a shared Google Calendar.

I'd set that up with a couple of blogs and then forgotten how I'd done it. Turns out I use FeedBlitz (as described in a previous post on this blog).

 
Here's how to do it:

1. Get your RSS feed URL (for example, the RSS feed for this blog is
   http://www.itauthor.com/feed).
2. Paste the URL into the field below.
3. Click Submit Query.

Some whois services are better than other. A good one is at DomainTools:

http://whois.domaintools.com/ 

You can use this by just sticking the IP address you want to check on the end of the URL. For example:

http://whois.domaintools.com/212.58.250.36

Dan's Guardian is a content filtering service that can be installed as an add-on to SmoothWall. I have SmoothWall running on an old PC, behind my Sky router, as an always-on firewall for my home network. Because I have two kids, I want to filter Internet content and Dan's Guardian does a pretty good job of this. I like it because it's very configurable and allows me to determine the level of filtering, specific sites or domains to block, exceptions to filtering, types of files to block and so on. However, Dan's Guardian relies on transparent Web proxying being enabled, so I need to have that turned on:

Anyway, I couldn't figure out what the problem was until I eventually found a page on the SmoothWall Support site called "Using ident on Windows XP - common problems", which says:

Ident is a service running on port 113 and as such, port 113 needs to be opened on the workstations, in order for ident to be able to server the username. If the built-in firewall is enabled on any Windows operating system, it needs to be configured to allow access to port 113. This can be done using a log-in script or by manually configuring the Windows firewall software. Please refer to the Windows documentation for information on how to do this.

And then a lightbulb went on and I remembered that I'd previously had Windows Firewall turned off. Sure enough turning it off again solves the problem and lets me access the Internet via the transparent proxy. But, as the quote describes, you can run Windows Firewall so long as you add port 113 as an exception. To do this, go to Control Panel, open up Windows Firewall, click the Exceptions tab:

Click the Add Port button and add port 113, with a description:

But sometimes you come across a blog that you really do want to keep up with. The answer may be to get emailed each time the author posts a new entry. Many sites have a little form to make this easy, but you can set this up for any RSS feed by using FeedBlitz from FeedBurner.

 
First get your RSS feed URL. For example, the RSS feed for this blog is:
http://www.itauthor.com/feed 

Now take the following partial URL:
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Track=

and add the RSS feed URL at the end. For example:

http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Track=http://www.itauthor.com/feed

Paste this into the address bar of your browser, hit Enter and just fill out the form at FeedBlitz.

Take a look at the Quick Start screencast from fiddlertool.com:
 
This video is hosted at: http://www.fiddlertool.com/Fiddler/firstrun.asp

If, however, you get a blank page, it suggests the Web server knows that .php files should be served up like Web pages, but the PHP isn't being handled properly.

On Apache, the most likely cause - or at least the first thing you should check out - is that the httpd.conf file hasn't been updated properly to point to the PHP module. Make sure this file contains LoadModule, AddType and PHPIniDir statements such as the following (these are for an XAMPP installation of Apache/PHP on Windows):

LoadModule php5_module "c:/xampp/php/php5apache2_2.dll"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
PHPIniDir "c:/xampp/php"

If these lines are in the httpd.conf file, the problem may just be that the file hasn't been read since the change was made. Restart Apache and the changes in the file will be applied.

Live Writer large image problem

Live Writer large image problem #2

Basically, if I tried including an image above about 30KB I got the following error:

I got the problem again, this evening, trying to upload my previous post, which included several decent-sized images, and I was determined to get to the bottom of the problem. It turns out the problem is with the PHP memory limit. The fix is to adjust the memory limit for PHP for your blog. To do this, simply add the following line to the .htaccess file in the root directory of your blog (in my case this directory is /var/www/html/wordpress on my Web server):

php_value memory_limit 16M

You don't need to restart Apache or anything. Just change the .htaccess file and click Publish in Live Writer and it should work fine now. I can't promise it'll work in all cases, but it worked for me.

javascript:if(frames.length<1){alert('This%20page%20has%20'%20+%20document.links.length%20+%20'%20links.')}else{alert('Sorry.%20This%20page%20has%20frames!%20This%20bookmarklet%20only%20works%20on%20frameless%20pages.')}

The easiest way to create this bookmarklet is just to create a Favorite/Bookmark to the current, call it "Link count" and save it. Then go back in and change the properties of the Favorite/Bookmark, changing the URL to the above JavaScript and, if you want, choosing an alternative icon.

1. If you're in the middle of a redesign, where you're changing the presentation features of the site without changing the content, you have to clear the cache to see the effects of changes.

   To clear the cache, go to the wp-content/cache directory and do:
   rm -rf *
   

2. If, like me, you have some fairly static pages that contain dynamic content in a sidebar (e.g. an About page that has a list of recent posts in the sidebar), the sidebar content will not change because wp-cache makes sure the page from the cache gets served up unless something actually changes in the content.

   Effectively this means doing a manual cache clear every time you post if you want your static pages to be regenerated.

Turning off wp-cache

WordPress leads you to believe you can turn off wp-cache by deactivating it in the Plugin Management page of the admin interface. Unfortunately it's not as easy as that.

What you need to do is go into your wp-config.php file and delete or comment out (by adding // at the start of the line) the following line:

define('WP_CACHE', true)

If you want to completely remove wp-cache, rather than just temporarily disabling it while you do some redesign work:

1. Delete the wp-cache directory within the wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Delete the line from the wp-config.php file, as above.
3. Delete the wp-cache-config.php and advanced-cache.php files from the wp-content directory.

Where wp-cache comes into its own is if you have a standard blog that gets a lot of hits. wp-cache stores ready-made HTML pages that can be served straight up to your visitors without having to use PHP to generate SQL queries to the MySQL database and build HTML dynamically.

Another one for IE7 users. Similar to the last one but this time "about:tabs" rather than "about:blank".

If on opening a new tab you see the "about:tabs" page and checking the Don't show this page again check box has no effect, you can modify your Registry to fix the problem (looks like something Microsoft forgot to put in there).

Note: Don't attempt the following unless you're familiar with editing the Windows Registry and are aware of the inherent dangers in doing so. Always export a copy of the Registry (or the bit of it you're changing) before making any changes.

1. Go to:
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing]
2. Add a new DWORD called
   ShowTabsWelcome
   with a value of 0
3. Restart IE7.

To me, opening a blank page just feels like a bug somehow, even if it does get the tab opened quicker and the chances are the first thing you're going to do is put a URL in the address bar or do a search from your Google toolbar.

So if, like me,  you don't like getting the about:blank page, here's what to do:

1. Choose Tools > Internet Options.
2. In the Tabs section of the General tab, choose Settings.
3. Select the Open home page for new tabs instead of a blank page check box.
4. Click OK.
5. Click OK again on the Internet Options dialog box.
6. Try opening a new tab. You should see you first-choice home page.

This might be a handy way of creating little apps to do personal stuff. I'm going to have to go back and investigate the example applications when I've got some time:

http://code.google.com/apis/gears/sample.html

If you're using XAMPP and Apache fails to start (e.g. after a reboot), check what the problem is by looking in the Windows Event Viewer.

Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel.

In the Control Panel double-click Administrative Tools.

In the Administrative Tools window double-click Component Services.

In the left pane of the Component Services window, expand Event Viewer (local).

Select Application.

The right pane lists system messages. Look for any with the source Apache Service.

Double-click the most recent Apache Service message.

In the Event Properties dialog box, review the error and click the down arrow to browse through all messages that happened at the same time.

When I did this I had the following three messages happening every time I tried to start Apache from the XAMPP Control Panel:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Apache Service
Event Category: None
Event ID: 3299
Date: 02/04/2007
Time: 11:27:30
User: N/A
Computer: JOKER
Description:
The Apache service named reported the following error:
>>> Unable to open logs .

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Apache Service
Event Category: None
Event ID: 3299
Date: 02/04/2007
Time: 11:27:30
User: N/A
Computer: JOKER
Description:
The Apache service named reported the following error:
>>> no listening sockets available, shutting down .

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Apache Service
Event Category: None
Event ID: 3299
Date: 02/04/2007
Time: 11:27:30
User: N/A
Computer: JOKER
Description:
The Apache service named reported the following error:
>>> (OS 10048)Only one usage of each socket address
(protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted. :
make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443 .

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

If this happens it indicates that something else is hogging port 443, the standard SSL port. You need to find out what's using port 443 (and, most likely, also port 80) and stop these programs.

In my case the problem was IIS. The IIS Admin service was set to auto-start and was grabbing port 443. I wanted to use Apache, so I could happily turn off IIS. If you want to run both, you'll have to run one of them on non-standard ports - e.g. 8080 instead of 80 and 4443 instead of 443 (you then have to specify the port to browse to a page via that web server - e.g. http://mydomain.xyz:8080/whatever.html.

To turn off the IIS Admin service:

Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel.

In the Control Panel double-click Administrative Tools.

In the Administrative Tools window double-click Services.

In the right pane of the Services window, look for IIS Admin. If its status is reported as "Started", select this service and choose Action > Stop.

Now try starting Apache from the XAMPP Control Panel.

If this works, disable IIS Admin by going back to the Services window, right-clicking the service, choosing Properties and in the Properties dialog box changing Startup type from "Automatic" to "Disabled", then Apply the change.

A tip for IE7 users:

If on opening a new tab you see the "about:tabs" page and checking the "Don't show this page again" check box has no effect, you can modify your Registry to fix the problem (looks like something Microsoft forgot to put in there).

Note: Don't attempt the following unless you're familiar with editing the Windows Registry and are aware of the inherent dangers in doing so. Always export a copy of the Registry (or the bit of it you're changing) before making any changes.

1. Go to:
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing]
2. Add a new DWORD called
   ShowTabsWelcome
   with a value of 0
3. Restart IE7.

Useful tip if you ever need to get a Web server up & running on Windows ASAP. Use XAMPP:

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

It's a Windows installer that installs the following in minutes:

• Apache 2.2.4
• MySQL 5.0.33
• PHP 5.2.1 & PHP 4.4.5
• phpMyAdmin 2.9.2
• FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.22
• OpenSSL 0.9.8d

There's also a separate installer that adds Perl 5.8.

It's an ultra-low hassle way to get yourself a working PHP-enabled Web server + MySQL.

right-click > Web Developer > View Source > View Generated Source

This shows you the HTML as it is at this moment in time, rather than the original HTML that came down the pipe.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides some useful functionality for the Web developer, but it doesn't have a View Generated Source option. However, I remembered an old posting (from March 2004) that had a way of viewing dynamically modified source for IE:

www.itauthor.com/notes/archives/2004/03/viewing_dynamic.html

The trick is to paste the following into the IE address bar:

javascript:void(window.open("javascript:document.open(\"text/plain\");document.write(opener.document.body.parentNode.outerHTML)"))

This opens a new window or tab and shows the generated source. I've been using it in IE7 and it's a God-send.

BTW: to get the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar, visit:
www.microsoft.com/downloads/

If you're likely to find this useful, a handy tip is to create a shortcut. For example, from a Web page (not the JavaScript-generated page), drag the icon in the address bar to IE's Links toolbar. Right-click the new shortcut and choose Properties. In the Properties dialog box, change the name of the shortcut to "View Generated Source" and the URL to the JavaScript in the box above.

Now whenever you're browsing in IE, you can click this link to see the generated source.

In this example I'm just displaying a message, in real life you could use this to change what's displayed on the page. For example, I'm using similar code in a linked JavaScript file to show or hide a div on the page. I use this in a Flare Help project so that, when a topic is viewed as a standalone page a link is displayed allowing the user to view the page within the 3-frame Web Help (i.e. topic frame, navigation frame and toolbar frame).

<script language="javascript">
<!--
function showHideHelpLink() {
   if (location.href == parent.location.href)  {
     alert("single page");
   }
   else {
     alert("I'm in a frame");
   }
}
// -->
</script>

If you want:

1. First item.

2. Second item.

instead of:

   1. First item.

   2. Second item.

you can use the following CSS.

ol, ol li {
   margin: 0;
   padding: 0;
   list-style-position: inside;
}

Note: Make sure you don't use quote marks around the numbers, or Firefox will ignore the style. I started out with margin: "0em"; and it took me a while to figure out what I was doing wrong!

In Firefox you can add this to your CSS file:

*:focus, *:active {-moz-outline:0px none red; outline:0px none red;}

However, this won't always work in Internet Explorer. I have IE 6.0.2900 on my home PC and IE 6.0.2900 on my work PC. The CSS above works in IE on my home PC but not at work. Same IE version, same CSS!

After much hunting around and trying all sorts of different techniques, the only one I found that worked reliably for IE 6.0 was to add the following JavaScript to each anchor element:

either
onfocus="if(this.blur) this.blur();"

or
onfocus="this.hideFocus=true;

You probably don't want to have to add this manually to each anchor in your HTML. The smarter thing to do is to use JavaScript to add it for you.

The following JavaScript by Cody Lindley shows a script that you can put in the head section of a page.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">

//add event function
function addEvent(obj, evType, fn){
  if (obj.addEventListener){
    obj.addEventListener(evType, fn, true);
    return true;
  }
  else if (obj.attachEvent){
    var r = obj.attachEvent("on"+evType, fn);
    return r;
  }
  else {
    return false;
  }
}

// Find all link elements and add an onfocus attribte and value
function hideFocusBorders(){
  var theahrefs = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
  if (!theahrefs){return;}
  for(var x=0;x!=theahrefs.length;x++){
    theahrefs[x].onfocus = function stopLinkFocus(){this.hideFocus=true;};
  }
}

//event added using the addEvent() function above
addEvent(window, 'load', hideFocusBorders);

</script>

Source:
http://codylindley.com/Javascript/223/hiding-the-browsers-focus-borders-should-i-shouldnt-i

Better still, add the above JavaScript (minus the script tags) to a central JavaScript file, and then add something like this to the head section of each page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/javascript.js"></script>

Finally, I got tired of having to fire up IE just to use Google Maps, so I decided to spend my lunch hour fixing the problem - and here's how I solved the problem.

It seems that I had a corrupt file in my default profile for Firefox. I didn't even realise I was using a profile, but Firefox has profiles just like Opera or the old Netscape used to. It's just that most of the time you're using the default profile, so you don't notice.

To fix profile problems, close down all instances of Firefox, then start a Command Console window (Start > Run then enter 'cmd' in the edit box and click OK).

At the command prompt, navigate to the directory that contains the firefox.exe file. In my case this lives in D:\programs\Mozilla\Firefox, so I did:

d:
cd D:\programs\Mozilla\Firefox

Then enter the following command to pull up the Profile Manager dialog box:

firefox --profilemanager

In the dialog box, create a new profile and make a note of the location of the directory that is created to house the files for this profile. Mine was in:

C:\Documents and Settings\Alistair\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\p19ivq9k.Alistair

Go to this location in Windows Explorer.

You might want to step up a couple of directories make a backup of the Profiles directory, just so that you can reverse anything you do from here in.

At this point I started copying the files from the new profile directory into the profile directory for the default profile - one by one - starting up Firefox after each copy, checking Google Maps, and closing Firefox if there was no improvement, until I located the problem file. This was prefs.js.

So try just copying prefs.js from the new profile to the default profile.

Start up Firefox and choose to use the default profile.

If the problem is solved you can now close Firefox, start the profile manager again and delete the profile you created, so that you automatically start with the default profile again.

So I'm borrowing this here, just to see if it works for me:

When I was looking around for a suitable application I came across the work of Infoworld columnist Jon Udell. Jon produces what he calls "screencasts". I'm not sure if that's his term for it - probably not - but I hadn't come across the term before.

Jon Udell's blog is at
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/
It's currently number 44 in Userland's top 100 most-subscribed-to RSS feeds (Adam Curry's blog is at number 8) and is well worth a visit.

You can find a collection of Jon's screencasts at:
http://del.icio.us/judell/screencast+jonudell

The RSS feed for this is at:
http://del.icio.us/rss/judell/screencast+jonudell

Joh has written an introduction to screencasting (what it is and how to do it) and you can find this at:
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/11/16/what-is-screencasting.html?page=1

For a really good example of what can be done, you should have a look at the screencast Jon has done on the Wikipedia article about the heavy metal umlaut. I use Wikipedia (who doesn't?) but I'd never really taken the time to find out how articles are created. This screencast explains the process better than any written article could. I won't explain why - just go and have a look at the screencast:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

So, I was convinced Camtasia was worth trying out. I downloaded the 30-day trial version and I gave it a go this afternoon. The following page contains my very first try-out at a screencast. I wouldn't have put this up here, but my son thought it was so funny I thought I'd offer it up for your amusement:

screencast-test1.html

I can only get better!

This is good for blog/podcast authors because it gives you an idea of a) whether anyone out there is reading/listening to your stuff, b) it shows the geographic distribution of your audience and c) it allows your readers/listeners to give you a little public feedback, without having to write you and email (and thereby reveal their email address).

It's a nice idea, so I've created a Frappr map for ITauthor.com. Right now it's empty, so if you're quick you can go and add the first pin. Go to:

www.frappr.com/itauthor

However, the really funny thing about it is that at the bottom of each page it has a banner with a Firefox image and the words: "The Frappr Team Loves Firefox!" But, here's the comical bit, using Firefox 1.5, the map doesn't display, just a grey box with some lines and placeholders for the pin images. Woops!

So if you want to look at the ITauthor map - use IE.

I didn't ever think I'd ever recommend that!

By the way, in yesterday's posting I said I was using Lemon, which "used to be called iPodder". Scratch that. It's now called Juice, but it used to be called iPodder Lemon. Apparently, Apple issued a cease and desist notice to iPodder telling them to change the name to avoid any inference of a connection between them and Apple (see http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27684).

After reading around the subject of publishing podcasts I decided to give dircaster a try. My reason for choosing dircaster was its simplicity. It's a PHP script and basically all you do is put it in a podcasts directory on your web server and then upload your MP3 podcast files into the same directory and the PHP does all the RSS stuff for you. If anyone out there has subscribed to the RSS feed for your podcast channel they get to see the new editions when they update (which is usually a scheduled operation). In other words, by simply uploading the MP3 files, your listeners get access to your new podcast via their podcast client or aggregator. The version I installed was dircaster 0.4e. See www.shadydentist.com/wordpress/archives/2004/12/23/dircaster-v04-podcasting-php-script I made the recording for my first podcast using my PDA, I then cleaned up the recording on my Windows laptop using Cubase, saved it as an MP3 then used WinSCP to move the MP3 file to the podcasts directory on my Linux Web server. If you want to listen to my first podcast (or any subsequent ones I might have done since writing this), go to http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor and click on the "Listen" button. Alternatively, if you want to subscribe to the podcast feed using your podcast application, just do the following:

In Juice:
1. Click the Subscriptions tab.
2. Click the Add New Feed button (+).
3. Paste the following into the URL field: http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor
4. Select the "ITauthor" subscription.
5. Select the Episode to download.
6. Click the Check/Download Selected Feed button (V).
7. If you've set up the Preference to play the download right after it's download you'll hear the podcast. If not, double-click the podcast edition in the Downloads tab.

In Apple iTunes:
1. Select Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast.
2. Paste the following into the URL field: http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor
3. Double-click ITauthor in the Podcast list. It works!

If you want to try creating your own podcast feed there's an excellent article called Where to Submit Your Podcasts: Best Podcast Search Engines and Directories on masternewmedia.org that contains a long list of podcast directories you can submit your feed URL to. Another useful thing to do is to ping audio.weblogs.com each time you publish a new podcast. You can do this using the form at: http://audio.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm

Occasionally I've recorded radio documentaries and Radio 4 science/medical programmes from the BBC Web site to listen to via my XDA, but it's a laborious process.

A better solution comes in the form of podcasts.

Podcasts have been around for a while now. The thing that's stopped me investigating them before now is the daft name. However, I eventually thought it was high time I put this to one side and took a closer look (or listen).

The first podcast application I tried out was the iTunes client. Whoever added Podcast functionality to iTunes did a really shoddy piece of work. It's very difficult to use. It's particularly difficult to navigate around and find podcasts. Click on podcasts takes you to the iTunes Music WebSite. After lots of clicks you can eventually find the podcast category you're interested in, but when you download one you're taken away from the list you were looking at, and if you want to download another podcast you have to go through the same series of clicks to get back to the list again. I found it incredibly irritating to use and went searcing for something better.

After trying out a few alternatives, I settled on using Lemon as my podcast client. Lemon used to be called iPodder and is a free download from SourceForge (see juicereceiver.sourceforge.net). It's a simple application and I only found two flaws with it: 1) it's not obvious how to download podcasts, although once you figure it out it's easy enough, 2) I'd like it to automatically download new postings to podcasts I've subscribed to and then send me an email a link to the downloaded file.

I downloaded some tech-related podcasts and put some postings to the WebDevRadio podcast on my PDA to listen to on the way home from work.

I use a small FM transmitter to allow me to listen to audio files on my PDA over my car radio. It's a neat little gizmo called an iRock (see www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/irock_wireless_music_adapter_review) and it does the job very nicely.

So my long drive home this evening was more interesting than usual, listening to Michael Kimsal talking about Web-related issues (see
www.webdevradio.com).

I found a useful article about WebDAV at:

www.akadia.com/services/mod_dav.html