Owner: franzone.com - thoughts of a web geek URL:http://www.franzone.com Join Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:56:48 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: I'm a work from home web geek, a father of three, a husband, a world of warcraft nerd, a martial arts practitioner, a musician and many other things. Product reviews, technical articles, April Fools posts, live stories, oh... and we have comics! Site statistics:Click here
LyricWiki Search Gadget Released 2007-06-23 13:42:29 I just released my latest WordPress plugin, the LyricWiki Search
Widget. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog or site it adds a sidebar widget to search for song lyrics on LyricWiki.org. You can see it in action on my sidebar now, right below my last.fm album listings. I thought that was a fitting place for it.
I’ll also put a quick download link to it here, just in case you can’t wait to grab it!
LyricWiki Search Widget Plugin (24 kb)
Read more:Gadget
Low Cost Batteries. Really. 2007-06-22 09:37:03 Have battery needs? Don’t want to pay a lot for them? Cell phones, camcorders, PDAs, UPS Backups, Digital Cameras, Rechargeable, Watch, Toy - R/C Car… the list goes on and on. LowCostBatteries.com sells… well you guest it, tons and tons of really low cost batteries. They even have FREE shipping on any orders over $99! What a bargain!
Well, being a tech geek I’ve dug through the site to see if they could fit the bill to meet some of my personal needs. Let me tell you they do not disappoint. Their prices on HP Laptop Batteries extremely competitive. Not only that, but they have a lot of other laptop batteries that you can browse through by make. Just click which laptop you own and they’ll list the batteries you need and the lowest prices! Simple.
This post has been sponsored
Read more:Low Cost
FeedBurner MyBrand Activated 2007-07-06 00:10:11 I received my FeedBurner
MyBrand technical email today. I was giddy with anticipation and yet disappointed because a) I had other things to do today and b) I really didn’t want to try anything wacky in the middle of the day. So tonight I experimented with it and was very happy with the outcome.
The process was, at least for me, extremely straightforward and simple. They let you know ahead of time that it is not for the feint of heart and to read the email in it’s entirety before you begin making any changes. I would definitely suggest this as well, just as I would with any major change.
The first change I had to make was to create a subdomain to hold my feeds. Instead of going to feeds.feeburner.com I will now be pointing to feeds.franzone.com… cool. So I created my subdomain. Easy. Now you have to create a CNAME DNS entry to point your new subdomain to the feedburner domain. This process will depend largely on your hosting and what process they allow or give you. I
Got Space? 2007-07-04 23:07:05 Every try to email somebody a file and their stupid email server rejects the message because the attachment is too large? I have and let me tell you it is really frustrating. I mean that was really hilarious video of… I mean an important presentation video. Well, you get the point. Even most of the online email systems such as GMail have limits of how much data you can send via email, typically rangin from 10 - 20MB.
So what’s fella or gal to do? Driveway to the rescue! No, I’m not talking about where you park your car; I’m talking about FREE online file sharing. This service is awesome! Not just because it’s a sponsored review… but because it flat out rocks! Unlimited total storage… ummm hello? Did you read that? Unlimited downloads! The only limit is a total single file size of 500MB. I can live with that. Seriously folks, you need to get on over there before they realize that they’ve completely lost their minds and are giving away u Read more:Space
FeedBurner Pro Services For FREE 2007-07-03 16:03:42 Google’s acquisition of Feedburner is turning out to be a good one! Well, so far and for the users at least. I’ve seen bits and pieces of this scattered about the internet today so I decided to go check it out for myself. Want the scoop?
Well, the PRO services aren’t actually free. You can try them out for free on a 15 day trial. Yay. Wooptey-doo. After that they are the same price as before.
Here’s the kicker and the one that IS exciting though… at least for me. The MyBrand PRO services offered by FeedBurner
IS now FREE. Completely. Wow! What is MyBrand you ask? It’s a service that allows you to serve your FeedBurner feeds on your domain url. Instead of redirecting people to http://feeds.feedburner.com/franzone for my feed, I’ll be able to send them to http://www.franzone.com/feed/ just like normal and it’ll be completely legit through the FeedBurner service. That’s what I’m talking about, baby!
How do I sign up!? Login to F Read more:Services
Happy 4th of July 2007-07-03 15:55:13 Happy Independence Day… well to all of you citizens of the great United States of America! For the rest of world, carry on with your regularly scheduled business. Or you can take the day off too if you like.
Jonathan, it’s not the 4th, you posted a day early. Yes, but I won’t be doing anything tomorrow now will I? Take it easy!
Read more:Happy
FeedBurner MyBrand Integration Complete 2007-07-10 22:10:38 Well after hours of labor and hard coding I have finally switched all of my feed links over to the new MyBrand feed located at http://feeds.franzone.com/franzone. To test it out you can just click on this link http://www.franzone.com/feed/ or any of the other feed links on the site to see the new URL. Wooptey-do, right?
This tutorial is for WordPress users, so if you’re ready we can jump right into the nitty-gritty of how to get it done. Are you ready? If you’re using the FeedBurner
service then you should have their FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin installed. Just go to the Options admin page, then the FeedBurner page and finally type in the new URL for your MyBrand FeedBurner service.
OK, it wasn’t all that hard after all. Just goes to show the power of using a plugin to do something over modifying the source throughout your entire theme.
5 Terabyte Hard Drives 2007-07-09 21:25:46 How big is big enough! It seems that no matter how big a hard drive I put into my computer I always seem to fill it up and need more space. On a side note, I think that is just a human character trait. Think about it… don’t you hate moving? Why? Because of all the stuff! Usually in the process you get rid of some of the stuff, but not much. Then the place you move into to (hopefully) is larger than the previous. Ah, more room… I’m not going to fill this one up. Wrong! In no time the new space is just as occupied as the previous.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, hard drives. I can remember when Terabyte
was a word that people had to lookup. “What does Terabyte mean?” they’d say. Wow, you should never need that much space. Nowadays you can purchase a 1 Terabyte Hard Drive for well under $500. It is very common place to see this much storage sitting comfortably next to a video editing workstation.
When will it stop? Will it ever end? I seriously dou
Java In The Fast Lane 2007-07-12 13:06:33 Java is my language of choice and has been for some years now. My first language was C++, which I still love and use on occasion. Why the switch? Fast development… that’s why. Most of the work I do in Java is back-end server applications and/or web applications to which Java is perfectly suited. Add to that the advantages of easy JDBC coding and I can get a Java application up and running much quicker than a comparable C++ application.
On the other hand Java on the desktop has never been a major focus of my development. In the beginning stages it was just too darn slow. Now with common computer hardware being much more beefy it is actually feasible to run Java applications on the desktop, but it can still be pretty slow sometimes. Not to fear! I just read the following article on Java Developers Journal - Digital Edition that describes some new advancements in both the language and the runtime that may be alleviating some of Java’s slow woes. Check it out!
AJAX World
Youlicit Bookmarking, A New Way To Search 2007-07-11 21:06:36 I read a new story on Mashable today about a new bookmarking service called Youlicit. Yeah, I know… just another bookmarking service. This one looks pretty interesting though. when you arrive at the home page you have a search bar similar to the default Google search. You can perform regular searches, but you can type in a specific domain/URL and it will attempt to find other sites that have similar content. Not only does it do this using some computer heuristics, but it also gathers data from user-suggested similarities from the bookmarking side of the service. They also have a few FireFox addons to enable you to quickly access all of their features.
You can check out Youlicit or read the original article on Mashable titled, Youlicit Uses Bookmarking
Tools to Minimize Your Online Search
.
iPhone… Will It Blend? 2007-07-11 20:59:37 franzone.com is in remorse tonight and must take a moment of silence at the useless destruction of the iPhone
. The cruelty… the horror… the anguish. That just hurts even more because I can’t afford to buy one right now. If you are reading via RSS and cannot see the video, then click through to the site to view.
Read more:Blend
Beef Up Your Search! 2007-07-11 10:25:46 Need more traffic to your website? It’s been proven time and time again that 90% of the time people will start looking for products and services on the internet via a search engine (yeah, I just pulled that statistic out of the air so don’t quote me on it). It’s also common knowledge that people rarely will browse past the first or second page of search results. So how can you get in on this customer action? Well you need to rank higher in the search engines for your target keywords. If you’re not an SEO (Search
Engine Optimization) expert and don’t have the time and patience to struggle through this battle alone then there are some good companies willing to help you out.
Apogee Search is just one of these companies. They’ve been around since 2001, but don’t think they can’t get the job done. They have quickly grown to become one of the largest 25 Search Engine Marketing Firms in the world! Want to see what they are all about? Just head o
Say No More To Heavy Lifting 2007-07-16 14:02:48 Ever get called in to help your buddies move? You know those sleeper couches that are so ultra convenient? Well, they’re not so convenient when you have to move them! Especially when stairs are involved. Well, you know those As Seen On TV products? Come on… you know you own at least one of them. Here’s one to help you with that moving problem. Introducing the Forearm Forklift, a simple strap device that just attached to your forearms and whatever you happen to be lifting. Not only does it make the lift easier and prevent dropping and rolling over, but it encourages proper lifting techniques so that you don’t throw out your back. Isn’t that nifty?
This post has been sponsored
Read more:Heavy
, Lifting
Free X-BOX 360! 2007-07-21 00:32:53 Check it out! You can get a free X-Box 360 from this site…
Where’s The Love? 2007-07-21 00:31:34 Sorry guys, I know I haven’t been updating very often lately. I’ve been going through some life issues and blah blah blah… yeah I know you don’t want to hear about it. I’ll be getting back on my regular post frequency this coming week. Stay tuned!
Tech Bundle - July 23 2007-07-23 21:33:28 Have more than one email? Want to aggregate them all into one interface that is online? Fuser, a new service that is still in beta, may be just what the doctor ordered! There’s also a review of the site on Mashable: Fuser to Launch Email Aggregating Service.
EachDay is photo and multimedia sharing site that has a unique approach. They automatically (as much as possible) put your photos, videos and other information into a timeline. The idea is that by sharing your profile people can not only view photos, videos and read about you, but they will have a unique snapshot of your life. Pretty cool. Read a review on Mashable: EachDay Launches Great Multimedia Timeline Tool.
Here’s an interesting one I pulled out. YummyFriends is a social network for mommies. Interesting name. Guess they couldn’t have gone with YummyMommies… that’d probably put them into a whole other genre. Ahem; Sorry. Read a review on Mashable: YummyFriends is a Community for Busy Moms.
Looks Read more:Bundle
ReiserFS: File System or X-Files? 2007-07-22 21:27:24
A brilliant but irascible coder. A missing wife. Incriminating drops of blood. And a host of unanswered questions. How a Linux geek got accused of murder.
As a Linux user I’ve used the ReiserFS for some time on some of my installations. It’s interesting how you use certain things in your life and never stop to think if there is a story behind that piece of code, or software or technology. I read this very interesting article in Wired Magazine and was shocked at the strange lifestyle and thoughts of the creator of this file system. It’s also interesting to read about all of the circumstances that lead to this Linux geek being accused of murdering his wife.
Here is the original article if you want to go give it a read for yourself: Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder.
Read more:System
Voice Recognition Toys For Kids? I Don’t Think So. 2007-07-26 19:14:03 There has been a new trend in toys for the past couple of years that includes various forms of voice recognition software. Voice
recognition technology has always, at least in my personal experience, been a hit or miss proposition. It has definitely gotten better in recent years, but how does it perform on a budget? These new toys have to include stripped down, cost effective versions of voice recognition so that they can sell the units at a reasonable price.
My seven-year-old daughter has one of these kid gadgets. She has the Radica Girl Tech Password Journal. Girls just love journals and diaries so this seems at first glance to be a great idea. Instead of using a key to enter their journal they use a voice password. Even if little brother discovers the password the journal uses voice recognition to recognize just who is entering the password.
How does it perform? Miserably! This thing is a parent’s worst nightmare. For starters kids that age have a hard time speaking something Read more:Recognition
, Voice Recognition
Win A USB Cooler Autographed By John Chow! 2007-07-26 18:44:37 This USB Drink Cooler has a very interesting story of being autographed by John Chow and then passed off to several other people in blog/web competitions and giveaways. Now it is up for grabs yet again at the Everybody Go To blog. Of course this time the giveaway include this cool looking USB lamp. How do you enter? Just head over to the blog and make a comment. Pretty easy, eh?
Read more:Autographed
Your Blog Has Been Thoofed! 2007-07-25 17:28:09 What!? Thoof is another social / networking site similar to Digg, Stumble and the likes which allows you to have your blog postings rated by the internet community. Signing up is extremely easy. Just click the previous link to go to the site and look in the upper right hand corner of the page. There is a Login link and also a Sign Up link. Just enter an email, check your email and then enter a few simple pieces of information (username and password) to register.
Now what? Well, obviously you’ll want to submit some of your awesome blog entries into the fray, right? Of course! Just click on Submit A Story and enter a few details. After that they’ll also give you a Thoof Badge that you can embed into your blog story and show off your ratings. Just highlight the badge HTML, copy it to your clipboard and then paste it into the code of your blog post. Easy!
Not only that, but after signing up you can get personalized news just by logging into Thoof. Pretty cool. Hey where’s
The Real Slim Shady VS Apple 2007-07-31 23:46:20 As if Apple
didn’t have enough troubles with an idiotic class action suit. Now Eminem represented by Eight Mile Style LLC and Martin Affiliated LLC, his music publisher and copyright manager, is suing Apple for millions. Why? He says that he never gave Apple the right to distribute his tunes on iTunes. The funny thing is he has actually benefited from this distribution; Apple pays him for every song downloaded (minus a fee I’m sure). Not only that but the suit includes exemplary damages to compensate for using his song, Lose Yourself, in an iTunes commercial that aired on MTV last year. Eminem stated that any endorsement of his for a product would cost a company in excess of $10 million. Wow.
What I’m wondering is… how long has he been planning this move? Has he been accepting all of his profits from the iTunes distribution and television exposure all the while planning to get even more out of them with a lawsuit? Or is he really a victim of intellectual proper Read more:Shady
Goodbye Sage, Hello Netvibes 2007-07-30 22:53:29 I am no longer a “work from home” web geek. Still a web geek, yes, but I have accepted a full-time position with a company that requires me to be in the office. Sad But True. Of course this means that I have multiple machines that I am working on and more importantly reading RSS feeds on. Up until now I have used the Sage FireFox AddOn and have been extremely happy with it. Instead of trying to synchronize my various FireFox installations to keep using Sage I decided to take the plunge and start using an internet based RSS reader. I’ve tried several different ones in the past but never found one that I have really liked.
That is until now. Netvibes
, as most of you probably already know, is at the top of any list of customizable home pages, internet desktops and what-have-you. This is also one of the very few that I neglected to try in the past. As of yesterday, however I have setup my browser home on Netvibes and so far it feels quite cozy. I was able to export an OPM Read more:Goodbye
, Hello
WordPress XML-RPC Patch For metWeblog newPost() Method 2007-07-30 05:00:27 I have been doing some work with the XML
-RPC functionality of WordPress and ran into a problem with the metWeblog.newPost() method. The problem? If you try to post a dateCreated value you actually get an error. At first I thought it was the format of the date/time that I was trying to post. So of course I tried about a googolplex combinations of formats, but always received the same error.
My next step was to investigate the code and find the line that was throwing the error. When I found the line of code the problem was only too obvious. The code block that caused the problem is as follows:
// Do some timestamp voodoo
$dateCreatedd = $content_struct['dateCreated'];
if (!empty($dateCreatedd)) {
$dateCreated = $dateCreatedd->getIso();
$post_date = get_date_from_gmt(
iso8601_to_datetime($dateCreated)
);
$post_date_gmt = iso8601_to_datetime($dateCreated, GMT);
} else {
$post_date = current_time('mysql');
$ Read more:Patch
And The Winner Is… Me! 2007-07-29 13:47:06 I wrote a couple of days ago about a giveaway that Everybody Go To was doing for a USB Cooler and USB Desk Lamp. Well guess what? They just announced that I won! (w00t) This was a huge surprise as I believe myself to be one of the unluckiest people on the planet as far as winning stuff goes. Perhaps it was just my time.
Stay tuned… I’ll be sure to post some pics of the goods after they arrive.
XML-RPC Java Sample: Sorry About The Formatting 2007-08-03 09:32:22 I just installed the WP-Syntax WordPress plugin for the last post. This was so I could have my sample Java code formatted and syntax highlighted in the post. Wow! I didn’t realize how bad it was going to be formatted. The plugin is nice and the syntax highlighting is good, but the code is formatted so that it runs off the page. Sorry… mah bad! This is probably due to the fact that it is in a <PRE> tag and so does not wrap any. You can still copy-n-paste the code from the blog entry to view it better.
So I figured I’d offer the code sample as a download for convenience. Again, sorry about that.
XmlRpcPoster.java (1.38 KB)
Read more:Formatting
, Sample
, XML
Would You Like To Post To WordPress From Java? 2007-08-03 09:21:24 I use and love the WordPress platform for this and several other blogs that I maintain. One of the many cool features of WordPress is that it supports XML-RPC. What does that mean? Well XML is… XML. It’s the extensible markup language and is basically just a way of formatting data in some meaningful way. RPC stands for remote procedure call. That is making calls to methods/procedures on a remote system. Put them together and you get the idea… making method/procedure calls on remote systems using XML to bundle up the method calls and returns.
Great, now I have to write some sort of custom program to build an XML formatted message and submit it to WordPress. Then I have to have the same program be able to parse and decipher the return XML format. Well, no you don’t! There are already libraries that will do this for you. WordPress supports the Blogger API, the metaWeblog API and the MoveableType API. These are blog specific APIs that use XML-RPC to communicate.
Microsoft Offering AdWare, What? 2007-08-01 12:51:44 It appears that the software and operating system giant, Microsoft
will be offering it’s next version of Microsoft Works as a free ad-supported software suite.
For the time being, however, the new version of Works will be ad-funded, according to Satya Nadella, the newly minted Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Search & Advertising Platform Group. Nadella told me during an interview on July 27 that Microsoft recently released the new ad-funded version of Microsoft Works.
The funny thing is nobody seems to be able to find a real download for the software. ZDNet actually contacted Microsoft to get the skinny and they were given the runaround.
Even though Microsoft’s own vice president discussed the product, no one will talk. The official comment, via a Microsoft spokeswoman: “We’re always looking at innovative ways to provide the best productivity tools to our customers, but have nothing to announce at this time.”
Seems a bit odd to me. Perhaps Micros
100+ Tools For Flickr Addicts 2007-08-05 23:25:22 The folks over at Mashable.com come up with some great lists. Here is one that I thought was particularly useful in the internet and blogging realm. Over 100 tools for Flickr
addicts. Head on over to check it out!
FLICKR TOOLBOX: 100+ Tools
For Flickr Addicts
ClickTale - Beyond Analytics 2007-08-05 23:18:36 If you are at all concerned with analyzing user activity on your site, then you are probably already using a tool such as Google Analytics
or Statcounter. These are two very good tools and they give a LOT of information. A new site called ClickTale however is pushing the envelope in this arena with some very interesting features. They give their users the ability to play back movies of users’ activity on their site, including clicks, hovering over links, scrolling, etc. This feature alone is worth taking a look at. You could really get into your visitors heads and see what they like about your site and what they don’t like.
There is an article on Mashable (ClickTale Launches Link Analytics: How Hot is Your Site?) covering ClickTale’s recent launch.
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