You just can’t make this stuff up. I don’t think that I have ever heard of anything like this before. I bet that 9 times out of 10 that whole “whack you with an army shovel” thing works…
As bad as I hate to say it, the Vacation is over! My wife and I just got back from a fun filled week in Destin, Florida with about 20 of our closest friends. We pretty much did everything you can imagine while we were there, including snorkeling, swimming, sunning, and of course eating. On the last day of the trip Donna and I went on a fishing trip with my cousin Craig on his fishing boat about 3 miles off the shore. We managed to take in some awesome scenery including at least 4 gigantic sea turtles. I caught a Kingfish (photo below) and a Dolphin Fish that was actually larger than the Kingfish but it got off before we could get the gaff stuck into it to bring it in. Donna also hooked a Kingfish and fought it to the boat. It was a real treat and we had a blast! Can’t wait until next year!
Of course today when I walk into my office, the phone is ringing, I have approximately 119 emails in my inbox, and my Internet dies about the time I sit down in my chair. My Internet connection, which is a Static IP Address from ConwayCorp wouldn’t get back online until around 9 tonight so if that tells me anything, it tells me that the Vacation is Over!!!!
Oh yeah, if you are interested, here are some pics from the vacation. I will be posting some of the Wedding Photos once I have had a chance to go through and photoshop them a little bit more…
This is something that I can honestly say that I have never had an issue with prior to today but I have a client project that I have been working on for a few weeks now and almost ready to launch until the client mentioned that he didn’t like the way that Google Toolbar was turning some of his form fields a yellow color, it took me a minute to realize what he was talking about because I have honestly always overlooked this and not really thought a lot about it. I went in search of a way to workaround this issue and stumbled upon Jenseng.com’s approach to a workaround using javascript, here’s the snippet if you are interested…
1: <script type="text/javascript"><!--
2: if(window.attachEvent)
3: window.attachEvent("onload",setListeners);
4:
5: function setListeners(){
6: inputList = document.getElementsByTagName("INPUT");
7: for(i=0;i<inputList.length;i++){
8: inputList[i].attachEvent("onpropertychange",restoreStyles);
9: inputList[i].style.backgroundColor = "";
10: }
11: selectList = document.getElementsByTagName("SELECT");
12: for(i=0;i<selectList.length;i++){
13: selectList[i].attachEvent("onpropertychange",restoreStyles);
14: selectList[i].style.backgroundColor = "";
15: }
16: }
17:
18: function restoreStyles(){
19: if(event.srcElement.style.backgroundColor != "")
20: event.srcElement.style.backgroundColor = "";
21: }//-->
22: </script>
And here’s a link to Jenseng’s Blog Entry about Outsmarting the Google Toolbar | jenseng.com
I just noticed this morning that there is an upgrade for Wordpress available. I will probably block out an hour or so this afternoon and run through to upgrade all of our clients installations. Not for sure what all is included in this upgrade but found this on the Wordpress blog posted by Matt Mullenwig, the Wordpress Founder and Lead Developer at Automattic Software. I thought I would pass it along for any of you that might be running wordpress installations of your own. Also, anyone that knows me well knows that I am a huge fan of wordpress!
I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.
Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
With the power of modern computers, it’s silly that we still use save and editing metaphors from the time when the most common method of storage was floppy disks. WordPress has always respected the importance of your writing with auto-save, and now we’re taking that to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.
This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person
Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
A few months ago on my blog we started a conversation about the posting bookmarklet in WordPress and which systems we should look to for inspiration, like Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious. From these suggestions and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, we developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog.
For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. On my blog I’ve been experimenting with using different categories and the
in_category()function — such as video, quote, aside, et cetera — to create a more tumblelog-like format.
Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers like us can use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. There are a lot of things we can do with Gears in the future, but in this release we’ve stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.
Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing
mistakesdevelopment.
Additional Fixes
This list of smaller enhancements and bug fixes that is included in this installation / release of Wordpress…
- Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
- Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
- Bulk management of plugins.
- A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
- Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
- Plugin update notification bubble.
- Customizable default avatars.
- You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
- Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
- Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
- You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
- Ability to move your
wp-configfile andwp-contentdirectories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.- Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
- You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
- A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
- Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
- Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
Developer Notes
WordPress.org had over 75 people contributing code to WordPress 2.6. In addition to the core commit team we had contributions from Dion Hulse, Austin Matzko, Otto42, Benedict Eastaugh, and pishmishy. AaronCampbell and Marco Zehe provided more than a few patches. Back among the top code contributors is Jacob Santos. Alex Concha continues to have WordPress’ back. Joining bug reporting and gardening elite are hakre, Simon Wheatley, mtekk, and Matty Rob. Finally, congratulations to our Peter Westwood on your recent wedding! I’m also proud to announce we’re adding a new core committer to the team: Andrew Ozz (azaozz) has been a huge help to the core team this year, particularly around TinyMCE and making the WYSIWYG something that works for you, not against you.
Because of the new capabilities to make WordPress a clean SVN checkout, plugin and theme authors should do their best to handle forms and posts through WP rather than trying to post to their files directly, here’s a quick Codex article about how to do it using our forward-compatible APIs.
Upgrading
2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade. Our standard 3-step upgrade instructions apply to this release. There were at least 1,984,047 downloads of the 2.5 series, the fastest growing release we’ve ever had, and I think all of those people will find 2.6 adds a level of polish that really makes WP a pleasure to use every day. (At least I do. :))
Easter Egg
There have been rumors and allegations that there was a so-called “easter egg” added to 2.6 early in its development. These rumors and allegations are completely false!
P.S. If you’re a fan of WordPress, consider joining our fan page on Facebook.
WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6
FYI, I am getting ready to walk out the door with my wife and a few of our friends to head to Destin for the week. I will check email a few times a day and will have my cell phone for any rare emergencies or life threatening situations that may pop-up, I am praying they won’t. Have a great week and I will be back in the office the first part of next week!
Oh yeah, I will be snapping photos the whole time we are there and uploading them so keep an eye out for them on here in the photo galleries if you are interested!
From time to time my partners and I are questioned about our rates for things like domain registration, web hosting, etc., and often times even have our rates compared side by side to companies like GoDaddy, etc. This has always been an amusing thing for me to explain to those who are less tech-savvy because about 10 seconds into my response they are wishing they would have never asked…
Well, today my business partner Greg was asked by one of our reseller partners today to differentiate between what we offer and what they can get from other providers out there for a client that she is working with. Greg went on to word a nicely written email to the client that you can read portions of below or on his blog…
First of all we never try to hide the fact that many of our price points are higher than what you can get through services like *******.
The primary reasons for the pricing differences are related to the services we associate with our domains/hosting. First of all we consider ourselves the caretaker of your domain, we monitor all our domains for renewal status. We have had customers that have unintentionally allowed their domains to lapse and their site/email stops working. It is also possible that, in that scenario, they permanently lose their domain — even to a competitor. Pleth won’t let this happen.
Many companies also don’t tightly control who registers their domain, often times the legal domain owner appears to be an employee who registered the domain on the company’s behalf and often that employee is gone as issues of ownership/domain control arise.
Another big issue is DNS management. At Pleth we manage the DNS for all the domains in our registrar account. This relates to all the settings for the domain and email to work. Without our services this is left up to the customer who rarely has the knowledge of the DNS system to manage this for themselves.
Another wrinkle with the DNS management is based on the fact that we maintain virtualized servers. We do this in order to leave ourselves nimble in case of technical difficulties. It is not unusual for us to move around domains/servers on our side in order to route around outage issues. If the DNS is not within our service and therefore not within our control it is possible that customer uptime could be affected as we perform all the technical tasks on our side that are necessary to keep things running smoothly. We have 4 people that directly manage this on our side, full-time, and not having control of the DNS can negate a lot of the work that we do day in and day out.
So, if you boil it all down, with “warehouse” pricing in a system like *******’s you are essentially on your own. With Pleth, you should never feel like you are alone. In fact, most of our customers never realize any of our management activities are going on at all.
And this prompted me to throw my two cents in here as I always do…
Usually I will spout off no less than 20 techno-jargon laced reasons why we are a completely different type of company than GoDaddy or some of the others that are out there. Now, keep in mind that I am not knocking GoDaddy, I think they have done a tremendous job in cornering the Web Hosting and Domain Registration Market these past few years, and that took pure genius! Especially during the rise of the Internet when we were all scrambling around looking for exactly the same thing building up our own companies.
The truth of the matter is this, companies like GoDaddy are out there, and always will be, offering low-cost domain registrations and budget web-hosting plans to the masses in hopes of upselling their other various products and services. You see it’s kind of smart the way they do it, they mark their prices really low for primary services like Domain Registrations and Shared Hosting Plans to get you in the door with them, then once you are on board you will find yourself in need of their other products like Email, SSL, Storage, etc., these are the products that they have a slightly higher profit margin built into, even though their prices are still pretty low!
Now, here’s something that you don’t get from GoDaddy and the other budget hosting companies that are out there. I call it the “Relationship Factor”, this is something that our company was built upon from day one.
While we might have several hundred clients all spread out across the globe, we know their names and their businesses very well, and they know our names as well as our direct contact information in case they need something or have a question day or night, and trust me they sometimes do…
Do I feel threatened by the bigger hosting firms out there similar to GoDaddy? Absolutely not, never have. We both provide completely different services. While there are some customers out there that are a perfect fit for GoDaddy’s service offerings, there are just as many, if not more, who simply do not have the time, training, or infrastructure to utilize GoDaddy’s products or services because they are not going to have the same level of personalized service they get with a company like Pleth.
This is where we come in… Instead of trying to compete with the millions of web-hosting companies that are out there today, we have always seen ourselves as an extension of our clients businesses, whether it’s in the capacity of consulting, offering deliverable products such as software, web development, email solutions, or custom applications. We see ourselves as a hosting provider second. I will go as far as to say we probably have one of the nicest setups in terms of hosting and infrastructure as anyone else in our industry, large or small. We have so many procedures and processes in place alongside some of today’s top management software and virtualization. Our investments toward our hosting infrastructure has never been to decrease overhead or increase profits I can promise you, instead it’s always been to put into use the best products and equipment for the job, regardless of the costs related. It’s kind of like this, there are cheaper cars on the market but you still purchase a Mercedes because it makes you feel good, and you have peace of mind knowing that it’s reliable, safe, and well worth the investment!