Righteously angry tweets of the day: - December 16th, 2010
One of my favorite things about Twitter is the chance to see truly angry people sum up their angst in concise bursts of text. These were a couple of my favorites from today:
Yep, Del.icio.us is dead, and Yahoo! is in a death spiral. I have a feeling Warren’s not the only user harboring those feelings toward them. Let’s not forget that along with Delicious, they’re also killing Altavista and a handful of other smaller operations. On that note… Read more on “Righteously angry tweets of the day:” »
My inevitable switch to Android - December 12th, 2010
Earlier this year, I wrote about my departure from AT&T and the cult of iPhone, in which I extolled the virtues of simpler technologies like those found in Blackberry devices. It was nice to leave the App Store and its countless fart-apps. It was nice to have an indicator light to tell me when I had a missed call or message. It was nice to no longer be under the thumb of AT&T, which is without a doubt one of the worst companies in existence today. Above all else, it was nice to no longer be lumped in with a crowd that I had grown increasingly resentful of over the past couple of years — the masses of dim-witted socialites with delusions of techno-hipster prowess. I can’t possibly say it any better than I did back in March:
“I was tired of AT&T. I was tired of feeling limited by Apple, and unable to use my own phone the way I wanted to use it. I was tired of every braindead woo-girl on the street having the same phone as me, and acting like it suddenly made her not only “an Apple user” — but a “geek.” I grew to hate my iPhone. I hated what it stood for, I hated what it did to me, and I hated the way I felt every month when AT&T sent me a notice of assrape they politely call a bill, just so I could feel privileged enough to have an iPhone in my pocket. I had had enough.”
So for the next several months, I used the Blackberry as a sort of respite from mobile technology (since it barely qualified as a smartphone). Eventually, I began to simply leave the phone at home when going out. It wasn’t long before I left the phone turned off for a month at a time — something I could do on a whim with my T-Mobile no-contract plan. It was relaxing in a way, but like any vacation, it had to come to an end sometime.
While I enjoyed my nearly year-long sabbatical, the time did finally come when I felt the need to be mobile again, in the same way I was able to be mobile with my iPhone. The only catch was that I absolutely would not relent on my defection. As beautiful and tempting as the iPhone 4 may have been, it wasn’t enough to woo me back to the clutches of AT&T, and the crowd of Apple sycophants had only grown since my disgust with them led me to turn my back on my favorite tech company to begin with. And therein lay the problem, because I didn’t feel that any other smartphone currently on the market could possibly pique my interest like the iPhone did. Serendipity proved me wrong. Read more on “My inevitable switch to Android” »
Flexible-width LEFT5 now available for photoblogging WordPress users - October 10th, 2010
Yesterday, I made the fixed-width version of LEFT5 available for download, but today is a day for would-be photobloggers. The flexible-width version is now available at the LEFT5 download page, in all its image-centric glory.
The flexible-width version has all the same goodies as its fixed-width counterpart, but has the added feature of being built for large images. The standard “Large” size for uploaded pictures is 1024px-wide, and there is technically no limit for full-sized images. With its flexible-width, it’s still netbook-friendly.
It really is meant for photoblogs, though. So if you’re looking for general blogging, the fixed-width is still the version for you.
You can see flexible-width LEFT5 in action over at Loupe.
LEFT5 version 1.5 (fixed-width) now available (WordPress theme) - October 9th, 2010
It’s been a little over 3 months since I released version 1.2 of my LEFT5 WordPress theme for anyone who wanted it, but it’s come a long way since then. Version 1.5 is, in every essential way, the same great theme that the initial release was — now it’s just sexier.
The main reasons you may want this theme are few and simple; it’s netbook-friendly, it’s clean, it’s light, it’s HTML5, and it’s completely devoid of widgets. It’s also the exact same theme this blog is using, so if you like the way this place looks, then you like LEFT5.
Changes since version 1.2 include:
- Newly sexified comment forms. Seriously, they’re hot.
- Many bug fixes, cleaner markup.
- A better screen presence, with all reader focus drawn to the articles.
- New dot-grid background makes it more hipster than ever.
So, if you feel like widgets and Web 2.0 have junked your WordPress blog into a MySpace analog, feel free to give LEFT5 a try. The theme can be grabbed here.
LEFT5 is tested compatible with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. If you use Internet Explorer, then you shouldn’t even be here. If you use Opera, please forgive my utter hatred for your choice of browser, but accept my apologies if the theme breaks in it.
Clean URLs for Textpattern with Nginx - October 4th, 2010
I don’t really use Textpattern at the moment, but I had been curious about it so I thought I’d give it a shot. Having recently ditched Apache for an LNMP-stacked VPS, I wanted to see if the spry little CMS would be compatible with Nginx without going through a gauntlet of issues. It’s especially important to me, since I don’t think any CMS is worth using if you can’t use clean URLs (a.k.a. pretty permalinks). So, since I’d already posted about getting WordPress to work with Nginx — pretty permalinks and all — I figured I’d go ahead and post the results for Textpattern as well.
Textpattern and WordPress are two very different beasts, but I was surprised to find that Textpattern’s clean URLs worked despite warnings to the contrary once I setup the site’s Nginx vhost file exactly the way I would for WordPress.
UPDATE: I’ve added another string to the location section to fix an issue that cropped up when upgrading to 8.x versions of Nginx. Everything works fine now :)
A line-by-line guide: Setting up Nginx, MySQL, PHP-FPM, phpMyAdmin and properly functioning WordPress on an Ubuntu 10.04 VPS - October 4th, 2010
I’ve been using Media Temple for well over a year now, specifically the Grid Service. While it’s a great service for people looking to get hosted on a budget, it’s a bit lacking on the control side of things, and I really felt the need to move out of the cloud and into a VPS. MT’s new (ve) service is a full-on VPS with dedicated resources and above-average hardware. At $30/mo, it’s a seriously good deal for the amount of performance and control you get — but you get it at the expense of any automated controls that would normally be found in either the Grid Service or Dedicated Virtual account center administrative panels.
Since the (ve) service is about as bare-bones as a VPS gets, you get a completely raw system to work with; nothing is installed but the operating system itself, and no users exist but root — which also makes it somewhat of a true VPS, since there isn’t anything really making it provider-specific. It’s whatever you make of it. As far as I know, there are nearly identical offerings at other hosting providers like Linode and Slicehost, with varying prices throughout. Instructions for one should work on others with few if any discrepancies, so long as the OS is the same, and your server responds to localhost and not some funky proprietary identifier.
UPDATE: I’ve added a couple of small changes to the location sections of php-enabled sites to fix an issue that cropped up in upgrading to Nginx 8.x versions. Everything works fine now :)