Well, I manage to score a copy of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 Design Premium software, which includes a lot of really powerful software including Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, InDesign, and more. Normally, this package runs about $1800 brand new, but thanks to the perks of being on staff at Purdue I was able to grab this bundle for under $300. It’s very exciting for both my wife and I because it opens up a whole host of creative options that we’ve wanted to have available for quite some time now. I’m thrilled to have a version of Photoshop that’s recent and provides more options for creating my webcomics. I also now have some software, like Flash, that I’ve always wanted to learn how to use and now will have the ability to do so. Good stuff, good times, and my inner nerd is positively drooling.
Posts Tagged ‘software’
Knowledge Base Documentation Woes
I have something against Knowledge Base modules. My complaint is this – they’re all crap!
Knowledge Base modules are supposed to be this repository for a given service, and this repository is supposed to provide all kinds of helpful Q&A-type articles to make using the service easier and more efficient. They’re typically intended to be a first-line support item, to be used by the end-user before calling customer support and bugging an operator or a technician with your problem or question. It’s a pretty nice idea – in theory.
The trouble comes in when you actually try to use one of these so-called Knowledge Base modules. I have, as yet, to find a single one that actually provides me with any useful knowledge. The way I figure it, at least half of my queries into a Knowledge Base turn up zero results. The rest of the queries usually only produce a list of ‘related’ articles that have nothing to do whatsoever with what I actually want to know. They reason these articles show up at all is because the search term(s) I entered happened to be mentioned once or twice in the course of explaining how to do something else. Usually after a couple of tries, I just throw my hands up in exasperation and dial the customer support number – only to have them refer me back to the Knowledge Base.1
This all goes along with the problem that documentation for most things also leaves something to be desired. I know, I hate writing documentation, too. It’s a pain in the neck and can often double the time it takes to release the product to the public. But for the end-user, that documentation is a critical part of using the service or software and can be the deal-breaker if it’s poorly done.
- Just for the record, I’ll have none of that. I make them give me my answer and explain that the Knowledge Base didn’t have the answer I needed.[back]
Peripheral Twitter
I just can’t quite get into Twitter. I’ve got Twitterfox installed on my Firefox browser, but I don’t really use it all that much. I don’t really have the time (or window space) to keep a constant monitor on what’s being talked about. It’s much more efficient and effective for me to communicate via chat or email than it is by Twitter. It probably doesn’t help much, either, that very few of my friends use Twitter. Most of my Twitterpeeps are folks I’ve ‘met’ via the Web, and while I find some of the Tweets interesting, very few spark enough interest for me to hop into the discussion and add my two cents.
I think the idea behind Twitter has a lot of potential. The could, ideally, make it really easy for a bunch of people to engage in an ongoing discussion simply by tweeting each other back and forth. Trouble is getting enough like-minded people together to actually do so.
Still, Twitterfox is unobtrusive, so I’ll keep it right it’s at. Interesting notes and links do pop up from time to time, so that’s good, too. But it’s more of a peripheral service for me at this point. Maybe someone will add an account option to Pidgin for Twitter that will let me keep a running dialogue of tweets from folks I follow going at all times that will make it really easy to go back and see what’s been said recently.
Photoshop Portable
You know what I wish for? A way to make Photoshop portable, aside from buying a laptop and installing the software on there.
WP-Stats Problems
I don’t track my blog stats quite as religiously as I did a year ago, so it was a couple of days after I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 before I realized that something very strange was happening with my stats. I switched to WP-Stats awhile back because it’s lightweight and takes some of the load off my own hosted account. The plugin worked very well there for awhile, but with the upgrade to WP2.3, a handful of plugins have exhibited some new behaviors, WP-Stats being one of them.
Everything with WP-Stats works as it should except for the traffic tracked to individual entries. As you can see from the screencapture, the traffic is no longer being logged correctly. Instead of seeing the title of the post in question, what generally shows up is the post ID, though I usually have one entry that shows the title for some reason. This wouldn’t even be so bad, since ordinarily you’d at least be able to click through to the post and check the title that way. Tedious, I know, but at least it’d be something. Instead when I mouse-over the link, here’s what I see:
A useless link that doesn’t actually take me where I want to go. Now, obviously something doesn’t work right, and I haven’t had a chance to jump into the code to see what’s happening. The WordPress support forums have seen a fair bit of traffic about the WP-Stats plugin being broken, though I don’t think I’ve seen my own specific problem appear yet (something which I’m about to remedy). Hopefully a new version will be released soon with a patch to address the various problems users have been reporting.
Tumble Shamus
My tumblelog is officially up and in working condition. I’m using the T1 theme, which is built on the wonderful Sandbox, much to my great joy. I did modify the theme somewhat, though, removing the default T1 image in the header and restoring the bloginfo(‘name’) and bloginfo(‘description’) fields to their proper places. I also brought the theme up to 2.3 compatibility with tags and added my webring navigation links to the navbar.
What I like about T1 is the custom styling for each category, giving each type of entry its own special look. I intend to take full advantage of this as this tumblelog will give me a good place to share any all neat videos, photos, links, etc. that I run across in the course of the typical day. Comments are open and welcome – just mouseover any entry for the comment link to appear on the right-hand side. Also feel free to subscribe to my feed, particularly if randomness is your cuppajoe.
WordPress 2.3
I’ve successfully migrated this blog to WordPress 2.3, and I was actually a little surprised at how painless it was. I did turn up a handful of duplication errors with regard to the wp_term_relationship tables, even though I’d made sure I deleted those tables beforehand, but in spite of that, I think everything migrated to 2.3 just fine. The UTW conversion went very smoothly, converting nearly 1200 tags and over 4100 tag-to-post relationships in about 3 seconds. Very slick.
I’ve also just spent the last 45 minutes upgrading plugins, thanks to the nifty little plugin update notifier that’s now built into WordPress, and I’ve also coded this theme to be compliant with WordPress 2.3 tags. I’ll rebundle it tomorrow and distribute it on the download page. All in all, I’m very happy with what I’m seeing.
This is the only one of my WordPress installations that I’ve run tags on, since UTW was, quite frankly, such a pain in the neck to implement. I’ll be converting a couple of my other installations over to tags soon, as well, and I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a Tumblelog but was waiting for 2.3 to come out before doing so. I think I’ll be setting that up in the near future now, as well.
Bad Behavior Behaves Badly
Well, that was fun. I’ve been having some issues recently with a couple of my WordPress installations. In a nutshell, every form that has anything to with communication to the database was choking. Data wasn’t being saved to the database, screens weren’t loading properly, functions weren’t… functioning. It took me a little while of searching (and no little amount of stress and worry) but I finally stumbled across a solution that just felt right. I’ve been using Bad Behavior for awhile now in conjunction with Akismet to catch and filter out spam. Between the two, they’ve done a fabulous job, making it a rare occurrence when even a single spam item slips through the cracks.
Unfortunately, apparently Bad Behavior has failed before, prompting an upgrade from 2.0.7 to the current version of 2.0.10. Trouble is, now 2.0.10 is malfunctioning and it blocking all scripts that had anything to do with communicating with the database. My guess is that something has gone wrong with Bad Behavior servers, potentially causing some sort of “feedback” loop. I – and a couple of others – have left comments notifying the author of the problem, so hopefully we’ll see a new version released in the near future. In the meantime, problem solved and everything seems to be functioning properly again.
openID, dp.SyntaxHighlighter, and LaTeX
As much as I love my hosted version of WordPress and the power I have to customize it however I see fit, there are some drawbacks to the system that I have yet to be able to hurdle.
- openID. I’ve wanted to set up an openID server for my blog for quite awhile now. The idea of being able to use my domain to securely log into other websites that use openID, rather than having to hassle with different usernames and passwords, was very appealing to me. However, the technology was initially so new that it was difficult to incorporate openID into WordPress without some hefty file hacking to make it work. Then plugins started coming out, some of which worked better than others. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get openID to work here, despite a nice little WordPress plugin that’s supposed to take all the hardship right out of installing it. I suspect that problem lies with inadequate support from my webhost, and all my attempts to contact the plugin’s author have been met with the silent treatment. The plugin itself hasn’t even undergone any changes, additions, or revisions since it was first published, so I suspect that it’s probably no longer being supported. This, then, continues to leave me in an openID black hole until something changes either with my webhost or with a plugin developer that can produce an openID plugin that works so well that almost anyone can use it on any hosting package.
- dp.SyntaxHighlighter. I work enough with CSS in the occasional WordPress or bbPress theming project that I do like to share snippets of code when the situation demands it. There’s a host of good code sharing plugins out there for WordPress, but the WordPress.com developers have incorporated a syntax highlighting package into the .com blogs that’s really slick. The thing that I like so much about it is that it has a little button that will automatically copy all the code to your clipboard for easy pasting into a text editor. Gone is the need to highlight and copy and then have to manually remove the numbers from the beginning of each line. Unfortunately, dp.SyntaxHighlighter has not yet been bundled as a WordPress plugin, and not being terribly adept yet at coding in PHP, I’m not sure where I’d even start to create a plugin to incorporate it into hosted versions of WordPress. I may try tackling the project here at some point and learn much more, I’m sure, about PHP in the process, but that will have to wait for another time when I don’t have quite so much on my plate. I suspect, though, it’s only a matter of time before else beats me to it.
- LaTeX. The WordPress.com blogs also have LaTeX installed on them for the uber math geeks. I had a brief introduction to LaTeX when I took Calculus from my father-in-law during my undergraduate education (though I hadn’t yet then met his daughter). I’ve always been somewhat intrigued by coding and markup languages, and LaTeX seemed similar in many ways to HTML and C. The beauty of LaTeX, though, lies in its ability to allow you to easily and attractively put complex mathematical formulas and diagrams on a page. The downside to LaTeX, though, is that the software necessary to make it work is rather complicated to install and somewhat less complicated to use. It’s gotten better in recent iterations, of course, but it’s still somewhat cumbersome to set up. The brains over at WordPress.com actually took the time and effort to make LaTeX work with their blogs and to allow anyone who wants to do so to render LaTeX formulas on their WP.com blogs. There are a couple of plugins that allow you to use LaTeX on hosted versions of WordPress, as well, but they depend heavily on all the LaTeX software being installed on your server. Most webhosts do not have these software packages installed, and it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to install these packages yourself or to get tech support to install them for you. So, unfortunately, I have yet to get LaTeX installed on this blog. This does, however, providing a major driving motivation for me to use my WordPress.com blog a bit more, especially since I intend to spend some time working my way through my old Calculus textbook (yes, I did keep it) in an attempt to learn Calculus again and learn it better this time. So, I may end up referring you back and forth between the two blogs, at least until I can find a way to get LaTeX installed here.
Safari
I think I finally tracked down the memory leak in Firefox. I’m still waiting to see if anything goes completely haywire, and I do need to double-check it on my PC at home to be sure, but I think the problem may have been the Firebug addon. While it is a very useful tool for web development, when it’s looking at every single one of your tabs to check for errors and such, it does have a way of making Firefox very, very big. It’s a much better policy to just disable the entire thing and then enable on a site-by-site basis, and then for only as long as it takes to troubleshoot any code you’re working on.
In the meantime before I figured this out, I popped open Safari for Windows again this morning. I really, really like that browser. In a lot of ways, it makes most websites look a lot better. Safari seems to render websites with a cleaner, sharper look overall. Plus, the browser just fired right up and responded instantly to every command I gave it. It seems to be pretty lightweight, much the way Firefox was in its earlier days. The only trouble with Safari is that it doesn’t have the addon and plugin support yet that Firefox does, which still makes Safari my second choice for a browser. If it ever gets the kind of open source addon support that Firefox has, it will certainly give Firefox a run for its money.
I did run a brief Google search this morning for websites that have plugins for Safari. I didn’t really find much, aside from Safari’s version of Adblock and a couple of developer tools. I’m kind of hoping that more plugins will open up, but I don’t even know if Safari’s API is open. It’d certainly be good if it was, but Apple might be playing things close to the vest.
If anyone knows anything about good plugins and addons for Safari, do please let me know. I think there’s a lot of potential for Safari yet, and probably most of it is still untapped as yet. I’d like to see that change.