Cotton Rohrscheib's Personal Blog & Podcast...
Trust me, if anyone can incur the wrath of a large bird it’s usually me, just ask my wife about the Mallard ducks that attacked me the last time we were in Natchez or about the sparrows that kept swooping in on me while we were on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Found this video on Break.com and couldn’t resist posting it, this Goose is hilarious trying to attack this dudes dog…
Crazy Goose Attacks Boater and Dog – Watch more free videos
I was talking to a friend today who has a pretty large development team working on a government project and he invited me into his project management software to help him troubleshoot an issue he was having during testing. Needless to say when I found out he was using an Axosoft product I couldn’t wait to jump in and look around. Thirty minutes later we had already fixed the issue but he was still showing me all of the components related to his Axosoft project management software, this thing is a wiki, intranet, support system all on steroids!
Unfortunately this only runs with Windows but is going to be released as SAAS (software as a service) hosted in the near future, it’s pretty cool stuff. Here’s a preview video I found on their website: OnTime 2008 Overview Video
My wife and I were watching the news last night and saw this news report about the Snakehead Fish being spotted in Arkansas. I did a little research and found out that this predator fish is pretty vicious to other fish, there are some videos on YouTube showing them devouring largemouth bass. Not really a funny story like the other videos I post on here, I Just thought this was pretty interesting…
They have even spotted about 100 of these in Lee County (which is close to where my parents live). A unique characteristic of this fish is that they can live out of the water with little oxygen and they even reproduce rapidly, looks like this could be a serious issue for the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission.
Also, in doing my research on this species of fish I found out that this is also the notorious “walking fish” that you use to hear a lot about as a kid. Just thought this was an interesting story, wonder if this is a cousin to another fish I blogged about a while back, click here
There is also some pretty good info on www.agfc.com (Arkansas Game & Fish Commission) website, click here
Invasive Fish Species Spreading in Arkansas – FOX16.com
This is pretty original, these two guys got bored so they decided to head to their local Bass Pro Shop and dive into the huge aquarium they have inside the store. Notice the second dude yell out “Cannonball” before he dives in, priceless! I think the staff at the store was so shocked that the guys actually got away with it.
Operation Bass Pro Shop – Watch more free videos
I have seen a lot of trends come and go over the past ten or so years that I have been working with the web but I don’t think that I have every seen anything pick up as much momentum as Twitter has. Even MySpace and Facebook took a little while to get off of the ground initially. This is an impressive list of applications that are currently being used either in tandem with or added onto twitter, just amazing, I had no idea. Also, I am pretty sure this list is only partial, I have heard of a few more that aren’t listed…
Source: Bloggers Blog — Twitter Links: Twitter Applications, Mashups and Tools
I see where wordpress has just released version 2.5.1 as an update. Here’s an excerpt from the WordPress website about the update, I guess I know what I will be doing on Monday morning!
Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.
In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes. If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.
If you download the entire 2.5.1 release, you will be getting over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:
A couple of pretty interesting Cross Site Scripting (XSS) exploits have been launched as of late on presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s websites. Both exploits are unique in that they were highly publicized and pretty well documented online. It’s probably some good information for developers and hosting companies to take a look at, even if you aren’t developing or hosting a presidential candidates website. Here’s an excerpt from Netcraft’s website:
While Clinton and Obama are battling it out in the political arena, security researchers are continuing to find vulnerabilities in the candidates’ and supporters’ websites. Interestingly, while a typical exploit is to redirect one party’s site to their opponent’s, the reasons for seeking to discover such vulnerabilities are not always politically motivated.
Following the recent cross-site scripting attacks against Barack Obama’s website, Finnish security researcher Harry Sintonen has published an example of a cross-site scripting vulnerability on votehillary.org.
Sintonen’s example submits a POST request to the Vote Hillary website and injects an iframe, causing the site to display the contents of Barack Obama’s website. Unlike the Obama incident, which redirected the user’s web browser, Sintonen’s method retains the votehillary.org URL in the address bar while displaying the opposing website.
Sintonen told Netcraft that he was inspired by the recent Obama attacks and first examined Hillary Clinton’s official website at www.hillaryclinton.com. Sintonen did not find any cross-site scripting vulnerabilities on this site, adding that it looked quite secure, but subsequently found XSS opportunities available on the Vote Hillary website. Sintonen lives in Finland and has no strong interest in US politics.
While the example exploits have so far been relatively benign (limited to redirecting a user to the opponent’s website, for example), future cross-site scripting vulnerabilities found on political candidate sites have plenty of scope to be much more serious. Obama’s and Clinton’s websites both accept monetary contributions towards their campaigns, so cross-site scripting vulnerabilities could be leveraged to steal money and identities from supporters.
Sintonen told Netcraft he informed the webmasters of votehillary.org about this cross-site scripting vulnerability two days ago, but has not yet received a response.
For the past week or so I have been working on developing my own custom wordpress theme so I could get my mind around how the template system works in WordPress. My partner Greg and I also setup an installation of wordpress on one of our sandbox servers for testing purposes, I have installed the theme there for previewing: Pleth / WordPress Sandbox (this theme will likely go away as I design other themes later on). This is a real basic theme, clean, and not a whole lot of bells and whistles so I can use it to test a lot of the Plugins that are out there. Here’s a screenshot:
(Keep in mind that my intention for this theme was to keep it really basic and to get up to speed with creating wordpress themes as I went along.)
You can click on the screenshot to download the theme to use on your wordpress blog or you can access it from this link: http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/downloads/wordpress-sandbox.zip
I learned a whole lot putting together this theme, most of my time was actually spent in the CSS portion of the site and getting all of the colors matched up for links, p content, etc.. I found a couple of good resources online that helped me get up to speed, here are some links:
During this little self-imposed project I also had an opportunity to get up to speed with TopStyle, Layout Master, and Microsoft Expression. (which is something I was needing to do anyway)
I know that this is a really, really, really, basic theme but I sort of intended it to be this way on my first project. I have at least two or three more themes that are just about ready to launch and test over the next couple of weeks as time allows in between projects.
I am a pretty big fan of WordPress, I have been studying it’s capabilities and watching it evolve over the past couple of years into a powerful web framework (for lack of a better word) for non-complex web development and content management. My partners and I have been learning the advantages of adopting frameworks for our clients projects because of the benefits they can bring to the table.
As of late we have been using MODx CMS Framework for our larger Enterprise Level accounts that are in development but a market segment that sometimes get’s overlooked or undeserved is the SMB (Small Business), Personal or Non-Profit Market Segment. In the next few months my company, Pleth Networks, LLC, is planning on adding WordPress Framework sites to our list of service offerings in hopes of capturing this market segment, this blog entry relates to the advantages of using WordPress from a developers perspective.
Stay tuned to the Pleth Networks Corporate Blog for announcements regarding our WordPress Offerings.
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If you follow the web very closely at all you probably already know what WordPress is. It’s an open-source web application that was originally intended as a blogging platform but has evolved into much, much, more than that. Today WordPress can be found in use on the backend of today’s top news and entertainment portals such as CNN, Yahoo, People, and the New York Times just to name a few, as well as on personal, non-profit, and church websites.
WordPress‘s rise in popularity comes from the many advantages it brings to the table from a management and development perspective. For the sake of this post I am going to cover the developmental advantages to using WordPress.
Back in the day, developers like myself would often times shy away from smaller non-profit websites simply because the client didn’t have the budget to afford the amount of time we would have to spend hand coding their website to make it do exactly what they wanted it to do. This is no longer the case with the option of WordPress.
Installing the WordPress Framework
Since WordPress is more or less a framework of base source code written in PHP that connects to MySQL it can be installed and up and running in minutes in it’s very basic form. By basic form, I mean that it’s sporting a very basic look and feel. WordPress is installed with a default template that’s very generic and doesn’t have any Plugins installed on the front end that offer any real functionality.
Real Basic Framework to start with…
This is not a bad thing though, as a developer I prefer the framework of a web project to be minimal on the front end, this allows me to add only the Plugins that the client or end user is looking for. There are a wealth of Plugins already listed on WordPress‘s website: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, and there are always new ones added to their directory on a daily basis.
Working with WordPress Plugins
Just like the WordPress Installation installing a WordPress Plugin is a pretty fast process and doesn’t involve a whole lot of development time as opposed to manually adding JavaScript like we used to have to do on hand-coded projects. The Plugin Directory allows you to search through the many Plugins that other developers have already written and contributed as open source. The Plugins are also categorized by tags as well such as Post, Widget, Admin, Comments, Sidebar, etc. to help you easily locate exactly what you are looking for.
One thing that I am sure developers run into is that while looking for Plugins to add is that there might be several Plugins listed that do pretty much the same thing, I have ran into this myself from time to time. For this reason I have tagged in my delicious account the Plugins that I like the best and just refer back to those each time so it makes it easy to manage multiple installations across the board in the event an update is available for a particular Plugin. (oh, and inside the wordpress admin area it alerts you when there is an update to your installed Plugins).
Managing the Presentation
Since WordPress is comprised of PHP source code that is styled by CSS all of your wordpress installations are standards compliant right out of the box. This is an important consideration these days for many developers. Again, back in the day we used to code websites with a lot of table based layouts that were spliced from Photoshop or Paintshop generated graphics, these were a far cry from the standards compliant CSS / XHTML driven websites you see online today. In order to bring some of these older websites up to standards compliance it can literally take hours of coding time (especially an old schooler like me) to recode a site and bring it into compliance. Many times the client doesn’t even concern themselves with compliance to start with, or even appreciate it, much less pay you to do. Starting out with WordPress, or migrating an existing site into WordPress is a great idea that also get’s you into compliance..
There are also a wide variety of WordPress Themes available online: http://themes.wordpress.net/, these themes are available as “starters” for wordpress projects and are all usually pretty inline with standards compliance and optimum usability. These “starter” themes can be a great place to start designing your clients vision online, also, if you are interested there is a lot of documentation online for those interested in crafting their own themes: http://themes.wordpress.net/faq/
Incorporating WordPress into legacy Site Revisions
As I mentioned earlier, a good way to bring an out of compliance website into compliance is to migrate it into wordpress. This is something that I am going to try to make a conscious effort to do with older client web projects that have been online for years and are out of standards compliance is to bring them into the wordpress framework in a phased manner. I plan on doing this when the client contacts us for a major site revision. I have already handled a few of our older client projects like this and these clients have really appreciated the flexibility that the WordPress CMS brings to the table. Not to mention the Windows Live Writer Desktop Application that can be used to manage WordPress Blogs, it’s a super nice blog editor that Microsoft released for free a while back. It’s much like using Microsoft Word and a lot of clients already understand the concepts of Microsoft Word.
Cost Effective Solution for Small Businesses, Non-Profits, and Personal Websites
Since WordPress does cut down on the amount of time it takes to deploy an installation and add Plugins, Theme, etc., the usual amount of time billed out for developing a client project is considerably less on the front end therefore allowing us (developers) to deliver complete web solutions with content management built in for a lot less time and money, whereas a typical enterprise level client is looking at a minimum of $5,000 to get started on their project coding we are able to estimate a new installation at around 10 hours of time at our current rate of $60 per hour, this leaves them with an initial build fee of around $600 getting started (custom Plugins not estimated), this is a lot easier for some small businesses and non-profit organizations to justify in terms of cost. Since WordPress also has a pretty small footprint in terms of hosting, most clients can expect a managed monthly hosting rate in the ballpark of $50 or so, this also is enticing to those who might not have a large budget allocated for hosting. With a lot of companies out there, like my company Pleth Networks, LLC, this “managed hosting rate” basically means that the client doesn’t have to know anything about web hosting, they don’t have to enter their control panel at all, we handle the installation and configuration of their site, database, graphics, and ftp all of their installation files in place for them, they simply just have to manage their website which from what we have found, is why they chose a company like us (Pleth) in the first place.
A New Portable Frontier for Smaller Projects
With companies like my own, Pleth Networks, now offering full service WordPress Framework websites I can see the landscape of the web changing quite a bit over time. In the past each and every web firm out there had their own methodology for developing client websites and content management solutions, often times this methodology was proprietary and not very portable from host to host, especially on the content management side of things. If a lot of other companies out there shift their focus toward offering WordPress based websites for smaller accounts I think that we will find client websites to be a lot more portable in the future.
For example, we (Pleth Networks) used to get a lot of phone calls from prospective clients who were tired of their current providers or worst case scenario their providers were going out of business. Whether their provider was a development firm or a hosting firm they basically had the client in a bad situation. The client would want to switch to Pleth as soon as possible in order to avoid downtime but due to proprietary coding this often times that hasn’t been a reality. We (Pleth Networks) have always welcomed the idea of bringing clients into our client base but on occasion we have had to hesitate and even turn down accounts for this very reason. This more or less blocked the client from making a cost-effective migration to another service provider like Pleth. With WordPress, migrations can be pretty fast and even transparent to the end user. No one wants to keep an unhappy customer (at least development firms with good ethics) so developing projects in WordPress takes on an even more favorability in terms of giving the client their money’s worth.
Wow, I had no idea that someone was cloning Mac’s, this has to have a lot of the higher ups at MAC pretty nervous right now. I have often thought that a whole lot of MAC’s pricing had to do with their exclusivity in the market place. A lot of times end users pay more for high end cases, thin sleek designs, and attractive hardware enclosures as opposed to the actual horsepower of a machine in my opinion. This should be interesting to see how fast it takes for MAC to sue these folks.
Source: Mac Clone Maker Psystar Starts Shipping Computers — Psystar — InformationWeek
After reading the post on Information Week I decided to go out and check out Psystar’s website and see what they had to offer, I pulled this info from their website, pretty interesting:
Why spend $1999 to get the least expensive Apple computer with a decent video card when you can pay less than a fourth of that for an equivalent sleek and small form-factor desktop with the same hardware. Sometimes reinventing the wheel is a good thing. The Open Computer can work for new Mac users and Mac geniuses, alike.
Here are some of the features, or specs:
The Open Computer is a PC that works just like a Mac with Apple’s latest operating system OS X 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard. With the Open Computer you can run OS X natively as if you had purchased an expensive Apple computer except that, while paying less, you receive more. Apple’s entry-level computer, the Mac Mini, is a small and not very powerful machine. When comparing base configurations, the Mac Mini costs 150% of the price of the Open Computer while offering poorer performance, smaller storage space, and RAM. Not only that but the Mac Mini doesn’t have the option for an nVidia GeForce 8600 video card like the Open Computer does so playing games on it is a lost cause. You can view the comparison and see for yourself. You can even buy one right now. Check out the detailed specifications.
Source: http://psystar.com/open_computer_the_smart_alternative_to_an_apple.html
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