The Playground

If you browse using Firefox, here’s a must-have add-on. Clipmarks is one of those tools I wonder how I ever lived without.

Instead of copying and pasting links, Clipmarks is like adding a pair of scissors to your browser, letting you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on [clipmarks.com](http://clipmarks.com/) and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email.

Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you’ll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.

Posted by Toni at 4:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

This was the news that greeted some Sitemeter account holders on Monday.

Our hosting provider's data center had some electrical issues which required them to relocate the servers to another data center. The servers have been moved and are fully operational. Unfortunately we are unable to provide statistics during this time period due to the extended power outage. We apologize for the inconvenience that this outage has caused and the inability to access your stats pages.

The “power outage” was a fire in a datacenter in Houston followed by an explosion, which had knocked down three walls surrounding the electrical equipment room.

If your account number is s24, s45 or s48 (hover over your Sitemeter logo to get an idea), check your statistics. You might find that they're reporting significantly less traffic than normal. Fortunately my account numbers are s18, s22 and s15 so I wasn't affected.

Posted by Toni at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

You're at work or at a friend's house and you don't have a flash drive to save something to. Drop.io, an all-purpose file-sharing and communications service, delivers instant gratification. No registration is required: Just go to the site and type in a name (or a random collection of letters and numbers) to create a "drop"--in effect, a folder where you can park up to 100MB of pictures, videos, audio, documents, or whatever else you like.

You can also type notes or add URLs. Drop.io catalogues everything neatly, by content type. You can then share the drop URL (it will be something like 'www.drop.io/myfiles') with friends or colleagues, who can grab the content.

But there's more. You can send text messages from a mobile phone to your Drop.io e-mail address. Your friends can leave you voice mail by calling a phone number listed on the drop. And you can set up a teleconference, again by referring to a number shown on your drop. People can even send you a fax by using a provided cover sheet.

The nicest thing about Drop.io is its disarming spur-of-the-moment nature. You can set permissions for your drop (so that only authorised users can get in), or not. And you can set up as many drops as you need--and speedily dispose of them when you're done.

Posted by Toni at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

In a previous post I wrote about dbsender, a script that would back up your MySQL database, zip the contents and email it to you. It worked very well for me for a long time, but recently hasn't been working at all. I rechecked everything to see what the problem was, but without success.

My site is hosted on Dreamhost, and the reason I signed up with them was so I could use shell access. No more hours of waiting for conventional FTP installs! I use WinSPC, an open source SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers basic file manager functionality. It uses Secure Shell (SSH) and supports, in addition to Secure FTP, also legacy SCP protocol.

Posted by Toni at 9:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Google just recently launched another site called Google Gadgets. It's a collection of add-ons that you can use on your web pages to add dynamic content. You can add third-party applications from Google Maps to Picasa Web Photos, a simple calculator to jokes and games. This is part of the announcement from the Google Press Center:

With almost no effort and at no cost, webpage owners can add complex, dynamically updating content to their own websites using Google Gadgets. Because there is such an enormous variety of Google Gadgets to choose from, webmasters also have a great deal of freedom to select only the gadgets that will best complement their own page. There are games, news clips, weather reports, maps, and more.

There's over 1500 different gadgets, and creating a gadget is easy � anyone with even a little experience with web design or programming can do it. Here's a simple calculator, created with one line of code.

Posted by Toni at 7:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

It's good practice to backup your mysql database often. How often depends on how important your data is.

I've been using a utility called dbsender to backup my database and send it to me via email for a few of months now but have never received the email attachment. I get the email saying it's attached, but no attachment. I know the database backups are in the dbsender folder and my database is getting backed up weekly. If ever anything goes wrong, I'll always have a recent backup.

Today, however, I investigated the email sending part of the script, and to my disgust I realised the problem all along has been permissions. After reading a post on a hosting forum, I changed the file and folder permissions to 770, rather than 777 as was recommended in the script, and everything is working. Such a simple little fix that's been a problem for months.

I set it up outside of my public_html directory and made the changes to the file as explained in the comments.

I then set up a crontab to run it once a week, you can do this daily if you wish, and used

php -q /home/username/dbsender/dbsender.php > /dev /null

as the command. I set the permissions to 770 on the actual file and the folder.

When the file runs it will use gzip to compress the file then send the file to me via email or ftp.

Posted by Toni at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. It will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you. GeoURL is listing 214,520 sites, indicated by the red dots on the map.

Add yourself to the database.

First you need to find your co-ordinates. Coordinates are in the form of a latitude and longitude, separated by a comma, for example: 47.98481,-71.42124. Western hemisphere longitudes and Southern hemisphere latitudes are negative. There are several places on the web to do this and the easiest one I found to use was at Maporama.

Copy and paste the following code into the head section of your page after you change enter your co-ordinates and the name of your blog:

<meta name="ICBM" content="xxx.xxxxx, xxx.xxxxx">
<meta name="DC.title" content="Your weblog title">

Tell the GeoURL server your page needs to be indexed by going to the ping form and entering the URL to your site. In a few minutes they'll index your page and you'll be able to see your neighbours in the blogosphere.

Finally, after you've added your url, GeoURL will give you the code to place a link on your site. There's a few designs to choose from. This code created the link on my sidebar:

<a href="http://geourl.org/near?p=http://www.bestoday.com.au/playground/" title="check out my neighbors in the blogosphere"><img src="http://i.geourl.org/80x15/geourl-tiles.png" alt="GeoURL" border="0" width="80" height="15" /></a>

This is a map indicating where I live in Junee, generated by Maporama when I entered my location details. Using the map you can get directions to anywhere.

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Posted by Toni at 11:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1) |

Use this online tool to easily create a favicon (favourites icon) for your site. A favicon is a small, 16x16 image that is shown inside the browser's location bar and bookmark menu when your site is called up. It is a good way to brand your site and increase it's prominence in your visitor's bookmark menu.

Posted by Toni at 10:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1) |