Don't Back Down

This morning I released a new version of the Bloglines Toolkit (version 1.6.2, for those playing at home).

Read "Bloglines Toolkit 1.6.2" »

About six weeks ago (probably a bit longer, but it's not all that important), I broke down and bought a Tivo off of eBay. When it arrived, we found that it had a bit of subscription left from the prior owner, which allowed us to test out the service while deciding if we wanted to spend the money. After about two days, we made our decision.

Read "I'm a Tivo Man" »

All of the extensions and plugins that I've written (I think) are licensed under the Open Software License. Heck, the site itself is too. This means, in a nutshell, that you can do whatever you want with these things, and I'm not responsible for the outcome. Even if I happen to use something copyrighted - which I wouldn't do intentionally - it's your problem to figure that out, not mine.

In exchange for not being held liable for what it does to your system, you get the right do do what you want with that product, whether it is a plugin, extension or just some random thoughts. I've "washed my hands", as they say. And in general, I have no problem with that whatsoever. It just isn't an issue.

But in recent days, weeks, months or some other indeterminate amount of time, I've decided that perhaps this isn't the best idea.

Read "On Open Source Licensing" »

Denise and I were talking just yesterday about trying to get our projects more organized. What do you know - the answer fell right in our laps with Basecamp. Actually one of my customers started using this during one of our projects, so checked it out. Thus far, I'm impressed.

Read "Online Project Management" »

Today I needed to move some databases. Data files, technically, but it's essentially the same concept. Instead of moving both the data file and the log file to another machine, I just moved the data file to the other drive, as having the data files on one drive and the log files on another speeds the access a bit. Everything else is identical to moving from one machine to another.

Read "Moving Databases with SQL Server" »

It is a good idea, for security reasons, to prevent visitors to your site from seeing the files in any given directory. While this will not prevent users from accessing the files, it will keep them from knowing what files are there, which does help to some degree. It's easy to implement such a feature using the .htaccess file.

Read "Preventing Directory Listings" »

Make sure your form is set to use the "POST" method. Make sure that the "enctype" is "multipart/form-data". Add a field of type "file". That's it for your HTML. The rest of the work is done on the host side. And that isn't really that hard either, but different browsers make it more challenging.

Read "File Uploads Through HTML Forms" »

Here in Charlotte, the holiday is only cause for a furor over the fact that we don't have a street named after the late civil rights leader. Councilman James Mitchell, who most times looks like he has just been woken from a deep sleep, is apparently losing said sleep over this fact. The reason being that Charlotte, the backward metropolis that we are, is not one of 730-odd other locations throughout the country that have some form of street named for MLK.

Read "Martin Luther King Day" »

As you may know, Yahoo! recently announced their offering of Movable Type on their small business hosting platform. Cool. Well today I started work on my first client using this platform. Thus far I'm underwhelmed.

Read "Movable Type and Yahoo!" »

As mentioned yesterday, I had some issues with Movable Type on the new Yahoo! Small Business hosting package. Most of which have now been resolved. The final problem I had was that I was unable to install MT-Blogroll on their server.

Read "MT-Blogroll and Yahoo! Hosting" »

I recently mentioned that I had been working with BaseCamp. I also mentioned that I liked it. The product - even the free product - has a lot to like. But then, like so many other times, I hit the wall. I wanted to do this or that, and it just didn't do that. Or this. So I started searching again.

Read "Sometimes You Feel Like a Tool" »

This last week has been tough. I have had three separate tickets logged with Site5 having to do with issues on the server. This is highly unusual. I won't say that I've never had problems, only that those problems are typically rare and very short-lived.

The problem this week appears to stem from the fact that two of the drives (holding /backup and /home) have filled up. So while the site in general seems to work, I often find that I am unable to upload anything, be it image or updated plugni or whatever. At least at the moment the database still works, so I can still post (and you should still be able to comment, if you are so inclined).

Read "Site5 Service and Guarantees" »