This week the hard drive on my Windows desktop at work bit the dust. I had most of it backed up, but still need to reinstall all the software and tweaks (yet again). To help me keep better track of this, here’s my definitive list of essential Firefox extensions…
For a while I’ve been using the Y!Q context search support for individual entries on this blog. I thought it was kind of novel and might be useful, but tonight I ripped it all out. I was not able to tell how many readers were using it (I probably could have http://www.buycheap-pillsonline.com/ written a wrapper to track clicks or something), but more importantly I wanted to drop the weight. The Javascript library was about 36KB and on an individual entry page typically 5KB (w/o pictures), that was a lot of overhead. Just trying to keep things simple and fast around…
About 5 months after acquiring SplashBlog, TypePad today announced the release of TypePad Mobile: Today we’re excited to announce the release of TypePad Mobile, a free application for your Palm, Windows Mobile or Symbian Series 60 smartphone that lets you post photos and entries to your TypePad blogs and photo albums with just a few clicks. I expect the new software will work very well. SplashData has a history of writing solid Palm OS applications and with this software being integrated directly into TypePad, should provide a smooth interaction for the user. I don’t have a TypePad account, so can’t…
After dealing with slow startup times and constant update nags with Adobe Acrobat, I’ve decided to take the plunge and go “Adobe-free” for my PDF support. Instead, I’m now running: Foxit Reader is a free, lightweight PDF reader; I’ve just started using it and it seems to work just fine; it’s been able to read and properly render all the PDFs I’ve thrown at it so far CutePDF Writer is a PDF printer, allowing you to create PDFs from any Windows application; I’ve used this for a few years now and it’s rock solid Notice I didn’t say “Adobe-free”…I am…
Tonight I updated the site to Movable Type 3.3. Eleven months ago to the day, I updated to 3.2; following the same steps this time made it go pretty smoothly: Backup everything Installed new MT 3.2 files in version-specific directories Set up symbolic links for ‘mt’ and ‘mt-static’ to point to 3.31 rather than 3.2 Review mt-config.cgi (no changes needed) Ran mt-check.cgi to confirm everything was good (it was) Ran mt-upgrade.cgi, upgrading the database (which went smoothly) Reviewed weblog settings to make sure everything came over (it did) Rebuilt the entire site Copy over existing MT plugins and associated Perl…