誰要快速的Firefox？

所以不只是我覺得Firefox有好幾個問題。現在Wired有一個新文章討論為什麼Firefox變比較慢和不穩定。從我的上個文章我決定用Safari。我想Shiira還沒就緒，但是它是有希望。

Firefox, Safari and Shiira

Firefox hasn’t felt right since version 2 was released. There are some nice new features, session restore being one of them. Although, it seems like this feature was added simply to alleviate the anger when the browser inevitably crashes every few days.

So the time has come, once again, to try some other browsers. When looking into Safari and the plugins available for it I stumbled across Shiira, a japanese developed Mac browser. Shiira is based on the Safari rendering engine, Web Kit, and their goal is to simply “create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari.” Shiira 2.0Beta has some great features such as Page Dock and an Exposé like method of viewing open tabs. After only briefly using Shiira I’m impressed and will be trying it out as my main browser over the next few weeks and will post up my thoughts. You can see screenshots of all the features here. A Mini version of Shiira is also available for use in the OS X dock.

A Safari plugin that I found via 43folders is Inquisitor 3 which enables Spotlight-like functionality in the Safari search bar. A very slick plugin and well worth a look if you are a safari user.

Photoshop Colour Profiles

A quick tip for anyone wondering why their images appear washed out when ’saving for web’ in Photoshop - Check you are using a web colour profile.

I had never found this to be as big an issue when using Photoshop in Windows XP and it only caused enough of an issue on the Mac as for a recent project I’ve been using more vivid colours.

This Design Geek article explains why this happens, and how to correct it. It also explains that Windows has a higher gamma than OS X, meaning colours appear darker - which probably explains why It’s only just become an issue for me.

Ensure you’re using a web colour profile by going to Edit -> colour Settings, in Photoshop, and change the colour profile to one that has ‘Web’ in it’s name, and that the RGB working space begins sRGB followed by a series of numbers.

Edit: It seems the solution to this problem is not so simple. Somehow I’d managed to check the ‘Desaturate Monitor colours By: 20%’ option in colour Settings - which makes images in photoshop appear exactly how they appear when exporting for web. With this option unchecked, having a Web colour profile barely makes a difference to the working space colours.

There’s some helpful discussion in the comments of this blog post about colour profiles and OS X but apparantly no definitive solution. I’ve set the gamma on my Macbook to 2.2 to match Windows and that somewhat helps but is not ideal

Does anyone have any input on this?

Typo and Trackback Spam

I recently got hit with over 100 spam trackbacks on an article and then a few more everyday. I really like Typo, although trackbacks suspected of being spam are still listed under an article.

John Wilger has a quick fix for this by adding a few lines to two template files for Scribbish.

Asynchronous Image Uploading and Database Storage

Here’s a code snippet that I mashed up recently. I started with Asynchronous image file upload without AJAX and worked in code from one or two tutorials. The result is an asynchronous image uploading script, using an iFrame, that resizes the images and stores both the original and the thumbnail in a database.

Get it here:

The table that needs to exist in your database:

CREATE TABLE `image_upload` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`name` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`type` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`size` int(11) NOT NULL,
`content` mediumblob NOT NULL,
`thumb` mediumblob,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)

Trulia Feed Creator for Wordpress

Here is the first release of my Wordpress plugin for creating a Trulia compatible XML feed of properties. The feed can be submitted to Trulia and subsequently used for creating a Trulia Map of your properties.

The current version of the plugin is 0.3 and can be downloaded from the following links:

Trulia Wordpress Plugin - Development Update

Update: The plugin has been released and can be downloaded from this page

Here’s a quick update on the progress of the Trulia Wordpress Plugin i’m developing. Development is almost complete and I should have a release posted some time very soon.

Features of the plugin will include:

• Table creation in the Wordpress Database
• Image uploading
• Image resizing
• Database stored images
• Trulia compliant feed generation
• Post creation with the property details
• Feed Caching

I’ve been using this project to ease myself back into PHP coding, as I’ve been focusing on web design over server-side scripting for a good while now, so there will be a lot of room for improvement. Once it’s release anyone is welcome to add-to/modify/or enhance the code.

Update Oct 6th 2006 - The plugin is now finished but I want to test it properly to make sure everything works okay, I also need to install it for a client to use. The plugin will be posted for download at some point in the next few days.

Update Oct 10th 2006 - I was ready to go live with the plugin when I thought I’d test it with a non-root wordpress installtion without pretty permalinks and there’s a few problems that need fixing. I originally didn’t want there to be any configuration, but it seems i’m going to have to add an admin panel so you can specifiy the page that the Trulia Form is installed on. I need this info as I use $_GET variables to pass data at some points in the plugin and I was parsing out the vars sometimes to get the URL of the plugin page (which won’t work if pretty permalinks aren’t being used). I’ll fix this and release the plugin by the weekend.

Box.net now charging in Asia?

I was just about to log into my box.net account (from here in Taiwan) and was presented with the screen below on their home page, that - “Box.net has temporarily disabled free registrations. You can now register for a Basic package for only $10/year!”

I’ve just had a friend in the UK try the same thing and free registrations are still available. Is it possible that the free accounts in the UK are to go next? Can anyone in the US confirm that free accounts are still available over there? It might be time to register for a free 1GB account before they go.

Box.net homepage viewed from Taiwan:

Box.net homepage viewed from the UK

Stepping down from Admin in Mac OS X

If you’re planning to reinstall OS X or move all your data over to a new account after hearing about how an OS X installer package can gain root access without a password, then don’t. There’s an easy way to turn your admin account into a standard account that is detailed on Mac Geekery. The steps are as follows (taken from the Mac Geekery post):

• Make a new user. Call it admin (or flyingmonkey, whatever).
• Make it an admin.
• Logout or FUS to the new admin user and strip your user of administrative rights.
• Logout of the new admin.

This exploit/feature is also discussed by Adam Knight on this week’s Mac Break Weekly.

Redirects with .htaccess and Wordpress

Redesigning a static site as a Wordpress based site usually means that the page URLs will change. If any other sites are linking to the old URLs visitors who follow those links will receive a 404 error. If you have a custom 404 this isn’t so bad since the visitor will now be in your site and could presumably use the site navigation to find the page they were looking for. Although most people, including me, can’t be bothered to do this.

The answer is to have a redirect that forwards a visitor to the new Wordpress version of the page. For instance, if a visitor follows /old_page_name.html they will be forwarded to /wordpress_page_name

The easiest solution was staring me in the face when I had to do this today, but I found a few other methods of redirecting on the long way round.

Wordpress Page Template: Redirect to Page
This seemed like the perfect solution - to recreate pages, using this page template, with the same names as the old pages and have them forward to the new pages. It turned out not to work for this purpose though, as when creating permalinks Wordpress removes the full stops from page titles. So a new Wordpress page e.g. page_name.html would become page_namehtml (missing the dot). This page template still seems very useful, though, even if not for this purpose, so i’ve included it here.

HTML Meta Tag Redirect
The second method is based on using a HTML Meta tag to forward one page to another page. In order to use this method pages with the same names as the old pages would have to be created and then the following tag included in the <head> section of the HTML -

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”5; URL=url_of_new_page”>

This method would work, but it’s not really ideal having a ton of html files positioned around your site, for one it makes a mess and two they might be overwritten during a Wordpress upgrade. Read more about this method here.

htaccess
I should have used this all along instead of searching for another method, I have no idea how it slipped my mind.

If you use a custom permalink structure in Wordpress you’ll most likely already know about the htaccess file. This file contains directory-level Apache configurations that can set things like permissions for a specific directory, URL rewriting and among other things… redirection - Which is what we’ll be using it for. Simple redirection is enough for this purpose, all that is required is that the following line be added to the .htaccess file -

RedirectPermanent /some_page.html http://example.com/page_to_redirect_to

So now you can keep your clients happy and have all the old links redirect to their new location. More detailed information on simple and complex redirection using htaccess is available here.