Web

Yoono makes Firefox more social

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Although Flock has some nice features for integrating your social networks and media, it also has some very significant drawbacks. It always lags behind the current Firefox version for security updates & other fixes, and bookmarks work very differently (which I personally dislike).

Yoono is a Firefox plugin that gives you the best of both worlds. It adds a sidebar which provides much of Flock’s more useful functionality. Combined with Scribefire for blogging, you can have most of Flock’s functionality with a more mature & well supported Firefox browser.

Upload to multiple sites at the same time

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Pixelpipe is a new service that lets you upload your photos & videos to multiple services at the same time. You set up all of your photo & video sharing sites with Pixelpipe. You can then either email a photo or video to a personal address at Pixelpipe or use their free software to upload it. The photo or video will then be sent to all of your chosen sites.

Pixelpipe has an iPhone app, a Mac uploader app (based on Flickr Uploadr), a Firefox 3 extension, and an iPhoto export plugin. Unfortunately the Eye-Fi card doesn’t currently support it.

Google Chrome

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Google released their new browser today, but only for Windows. The Mac version is supposed to be available soon, so I tried the Windows version under VMware. Even in a VM it’s blazingly fast. Despite the speed, Chrome is ugly. The tabs are much too big. It lacks a menu bar and it isn’t too obvious where to find your bookmarks. It feels more like a toy or something you would use on a web appliance than a real browser. Chrome seems more appropriate for a kiosk or web-enabled device than a desktop browser.

Chrome looks like it would be great for someone unfamiliar with computers or web browser, but for anyone who’s used other web browsers, it just feels so different that you have to stop and think about how to do basic tasks.

Google Chrome
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Spambots running rampant?

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I noticed something very unexpected in my MediaTemple account GPU usage report: an unusually high number of hits for /user/register and /user/login, which I would expect to account for little or no usage. The only explanation I can figure is spambots attempting automated logins & registrations.

GPU Usage Reports
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Zooomr supports Flickr API

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Until I started poking around in Flickr’s Objective C code, I didn’t realize that Zooomr supported a variant of Flickr’s API. I found that it’s fairly easy to port code which uses Flickr to Zooomr. In less than an hour, I had LOLCats working with Zooomr. I plan to include Zooomr support in the other iPhone Flickr app I’m working on.

Make sure you own your domain

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If you have a web site, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is not owning your domain name. This week, Daniel Brusilovsky learned that the hard way when his new Teens in Tech site went public.

I was providing hosting for the site on my DreamNightmareHost virtual server, which proved unable to handle the load, no matter how much additional RAM & CPU I gave it. We decided to move the site to a MediaTemple Grid Server, which should be better able to handle sudden load spikes. At the same time, I moved most of my sites, including this one, to a separate Grid Server account.

Unfortunately Daniel doesn’t own the teensintech.com domain name. It was registered by a former partner who left and who we have been unable to contact. Without cooperation from the domain’s owner, it isn’t possible to change the name servers to point to the new host. As an alternative, Daniel registered a few additional domains including teensintech.net. Since the domain is still pointing to my DreamHost account, I was able to redirect it from there, although it isn’t the same as having it moved properly, since it depends on DreamHost’s server being up to serve the redirect.

A few years ago, Jimi M’baye had a similar experience. He originally used the domain studio-dogo.com, but the developer who registered it and created the site disappeared, so Jimi was never able to regain control of that domain. Instead, I registered the domain studiodogo.com (listing Jimi as the domain owner), which he is still using. The site is still hosted at my DreamHost account, which doesn’t seem to have any trouble with it since it uses only minimal PHP scripting.

Setting up Subversion at MediaTemple

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I recently moved my Subversion repositories from my home server to Dreamhost, for the extra safety of an offsite backup of my source code. When I switched this domain to MediaTemple it unsurprisingly broke my Subversion repository.

While DreamHost provides an easy one click Subversion setup, it requires a little more work on MediaTemple. After a few headaches, I managed to get it set up. I hope I can save some people a bit of trouble with these tips. This only applies to a GridServer. It will probably be different for other MediaTemple account types.

Unlike DreamHost, the GridServer doesn’t support HTTP access for Subversion; you can only use SSH. Note that your SSH login includes the domain name. The login will usually be serveradmin%yourdomain.com@yourdomain.com.

You’ll need to log in to your serveradmin account via ssh to create the repository. For best results, it should be in in the /data directory. After logging in, create the repository with the following commands:

cd data
svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs SVN

This will create a repository named SVN. You can use a different name if you prefer.

You can then set up the repository in XCode. Create a new repository configuration and enter a URL like svn+ssh://serveradmin%yourdomain.com@yourdomain.com/home/XXXXX/data/SVN. To find the actual path, when you’re logged in via ssh, enter the command pwd, which will give you something like /home/11111/users/.home. You can ignore the /users/.home part.

Be very careful to enter the login and password correctly. If you attempt too many incorrect logins, you will be locked out. To regain access, go to the Mediatemple control panel and click the button to unlock, and wait about 10 minutes.

SVN Setup
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Moved to a new server

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If you’re seeing this post, you’re at the right place. I moved this site to MediaTemple, after my DreamHost server had a major meltdown.

I was hosting TeensInTech.com on my virtual private server, along with 10 other domains, including all of my own sites. After TeenInTech went into alpha and got mentioned in TechCrunch, the server couldn’t handle the extra load. They now have their own gridserver separate from mine. I’m still in the process of moving both their files and my sites over to our new servers.

GMail tip

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This probably isn’t new but I never realized it until now. You can find all unread messages by entering “is:unread” in the search box. I use lots of filters to label messages and keep them out of the inbox, so I usually have to look in lots of different labels to find all of my new messages.