Month: July 2008

Why Linux is Better does
a great job of explaining the reasons for people who are not geeks. If
you find yourself trying to convince your grandmother to run Ubuntu by
using terminology such as “linux kernel”, “package manager”, or “sudo”,
give up and send her here.

And speaking of Linux, here’s a list of Linux Commands I Hardly Knew, some of which you may or may not
know. I found a few time savers I had never known. More good commands
can be discovered in the comments of the article.

If you are tired of creating HTML tables (for tabular data only, of
course) by hand, here’s a quick and dandy way to do it online with a
tool called Kotatsu.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you will know I am quite the jQuery advocate as of late. jQuery is
a JavaScript library that rivals (and beats the pants off of) libraries
such as mootools and scriptaculous, and can add all sorts
of dynamic, eye-popping and usability enhancing functionality to your
pages. Just one of the powerful, gracefully degrading things that
jQuery can enhance is the CSS dropdown menu. Check out this article describing how to enhance
the Suckerfish CSS dropdown menu with jQuery.

If you are interested in learning more about what jQuery has to offer,
check out 5
0 Amazing jQuery Examples.

I’ve tried various backup utilities for my Windows desktop over the last couple of years, including File Hamster and Microsoft’s own Synctoy, but I’ve finally found the one.  You know — the one that does everything you want it to easily, nothing more, nothing less, and is free.

That tool goes by the name of Karen’s Replicator.  It will run in the background and synchronize changed files at given intervals.  This makes it easy for me to do lots of work on client web sites, then rest assured that anything I’ve done is backed up to my spare external hard drive every day.

I learned long ago the value of making backups on a separate disk.  Unfortunately, I learned it the hard way, which is why I implore anyone reading this to make backups!  Hard drives do fail!

On a side note, let this be the first time I’ve italicized text so much in one post in all my 8 years of blogging.

37Signals has decided to abandon support of Internet Explorer 6 in all
of their web applications (Basecamp, Backpack, etc). I think this idea
is superb. IE6 came out in 2001 and is an antique which is hard to
support in modern web applications and design. Yes, it still has
roughly a 20% marketshare, but it is quickly being ousted by IE7,
Firefox, and Safari.

What do y’all think? Ditch IE6 or still support it?

If you see this, it means I have succesfully made my first blog post
by email. I set up a cron job to check the blog email account
automatically every 10 minutes, and it takes anything it finds and
converts it to a blog post.

This has been a built in feature of WordPress for quite some time, but
I never took time to try it out until now.

If all goes well, I will be able to blog much more often 🙂

Sent from my iPod