Category : blogging

in blogging, site updates

Site changes here at Geek Factor

If you’re a regular, you’ll note that things have changed a bit here at Geek Factor.

Most noticeably, I’ve updated the look and feel of the site. Besides procrastination, which is the usual reason I set out to redesign the site, I’ve often felt that the previous design was a bit too cluttered and lacked a certain readability. Reflecting on the before and after pages, I feel the new design is a positive step forward.

As I’ve previously posted, I’ve found ThemeForest to be a great resource for getting new designs kickstarted. My new look is based on the Peak theme, which I’ve hacked quite a bit this evening.

I specifically sought out a theme with a “Tumblog” feature so that I could take advantage of WordPress’ new ability to support different post types. There were a lot of nice options on ThemeForest.

So, what do you think?

in blogging

Announcing Django Uploadify-S3

I’ve been playing with Django quite a bit of late working on a pet project. This particular project involves uploading video files to Amazon S3 for processing. Because the files are large, I didn’t want to deal with the overhead of having the browser upload them to my server and then having the server upload the files to S3. Rather, I wanted to implement browser-based uploads.

Another requirement, also due to the large file size, was the ability to display a progress bar as the file is being uploaded. It turns out there are a number of projects available that would do this, including swfupload and the one I chose, Uploadify.

I searched high and low for an off-the-shelf package to integrate either of these into my app, but I didn’t find anything that handled the upload and seemed to work well with Amazon S3. (Of course now that I understand how all the pieces work together I probably could have adapted an existing solution.)

So of course I rolled my own, and the result is django-uploadify-s3.

Django Uploadify-S3 (DUS3) is a Django application aims to make it easy for developers to add browser-based uploads to Amazon S3 to their Django applications. DUS3 uses the Uploadify jQuery plugin for full featured cross-platform uploads with queues, progress bars, events, etc.

DUS3 is configuration driven, meaning you don’t need to add any Uploadify or S3-specific code to your project to use these tools.

DUS3 is open source and can be found on github: https://github.com/sbc/django-uploadify-s3.

in blogging, software, tools

Remote browser screen shots, i.e. how to make sure your site doesn’t look like crap in that other browser!

This morning robyn, a Geek Factor visitor to whom I’m eternally grateful, used the site’s contact form to let me know that my site looks like crap on their computer. It said it with a bit more diplomacy, of course, but that was the general idea.

hi, was looking forward to reading your information, but your website template is really screwed up, everything is about a 2pt. font. i was struggling to read it. your template is narrow and your pictures is full size.

just wanted to let you know

I know the site looks fine in Firefox, my everyday browser of choice, so I guessed that robyn was an IE user. My first step was to see how bad things were. Problem is, I’m on a Mac. (Ok, I could have launched a VM but that’s a PITA that I’d rather avoid.)

Years ago when I’ve had to do this kind of thing I used BrowserCam, a subscription-based web app, that takes screenshots of your site in different browsers and operating system combinations. A quick Google search turned up the fact that there are now a number of new, and FREE, options, including BrowserShots and Adobe BrowserLab. Awesome!

Adobe BrowserLab

The first of these that I tried was BrowserLab. You need an Adobe ID to use it, but beyond that it’s free, at least for now. As you might expect from Adobe, BrowserLab is a nicely designed Flash application. It gets the job done well and has some nice features like a zoom feature and the ability to do side-by-side comparisons of your page in different browsers. I didn’t need either of these, because the site was clearly FUBARed in IE. BrowserLab worked well for my needs and I recommend it.

BrowserShots

Just for kicks — really for this post — I also tried out BrowserShots. BrowserShots is an ad-supported application and, as a result, the user interface is a bit of a mess. That said, it has some distinct advantages to BrowserLab, the most important being the fact that no account is required to use it — if you just need to run a quick test and don’t already have an Adobe ID, BrowserShots is the place to go. In addition, BrowserShots supports an insane number  of browsers, many of which I’ve never heard of. (Dillo, Epiphany, Kazehakase anyone?) Like BrowserLab, BrowserShots gets the job done.

Conclusion

We’ve come a long way in two or three years and there are a number of free and functional options available for making sure that your site looks good across platforms. I have no idea how long Geek Factor has been looking stinky in IE — I can only assume it’s been quite some time — but BrowserLab helped me find and fix the problem quickly.

Geek Note: The problem was that a font size of 62% was applied both in the base CSS of the site’s theme framework, Thesis, as well as in my custom CSS.

in blogging

Removed Disqus in disgust, trying IntenseDebate now

I’ve been running the Disqus comment system here on Geek Factor for about 9 months. I originally tried it out to make it easier for the blog’s readers to engage with the site, but I enjoyed some of the frills that came along for the ride like connections to Facebook and Twitter. But Disqus never quite fully worked here. While most pages were properly flipped over to the Disqus system, some pages continued to use WordPress comments. There were other oddities too, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the fact that some comments were getting lost. (They were still stored locally, but inaccessible on the site.)

So earlier today, I uninstalled Disqus and set up IntenseDebate. We’ll see how it goes.

To their credit, one feature of both of these systems’ WordPress plugins is synchronization to the local WordPress database. This helps ensure that moving on is painless, which was certainly my experience with Disqus.

in blogging

Your own personal Posterous [blogging]

One of the things on my “curiosity” to-do list has been to check out Posterous, a new blogging site that’s been getting a lot of attention and converts. Having spent a few minutes playing around with it, I’d heartily recommend it non-technies who want to get started with blogging. Personally, I have no interest in moving everything to a 3rd- party service preferring the control that comes from running my own software, but I like the ease of getting things into Posterous.

This set me on a bit of a search for replicating Posterous’ email-in functionality, which ultimately led to Postie [1], a WordPress plugin for that very purpose. After an easy install, I’m now posting to Geek Factor via email.

This email was composed in Mail.app and processed via Postie. We’ll see how it looks. One limitation of the Leopard version of Mail is the total lack of HTML composition, e.g. links. Hopefully that’s fixed with Snow Leopard.

[1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/

Update: I expected Postie to strip the post category from the subject line, and the in-line image was just added as an attachment shown at the end, but otherwise it works great. There are special tags that can be inserted into the post to control image position, but I wanted to see what’d happen without them. The post’s tags specified in-line were set correctly and the tag directive was stripped from the post. Also, the previous post, a YouTube video, was emailed in as just the URL and Postie correctly created the embed tags.