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Posts Tagged ‘software’

Firefox Lag

August 17, 2007 – 7:56 am

I’ve loved Firefox from the first day I started using it several years ago – tabbed browsing, nearly infinite customizability, and less glitchy than IE. Also, at the time, it was super-lightweight and fast, which was another key point for making the switch away from the Microsoft native browser.

Unfortunately, with each successive iteration of Firefox, the browser seems to grow into a bigger and larger beast. I still love Firefox, even though tabbed browsing is now nearly standard across browsers, if for no other reason than the fact that it’s still the most flexible and customizable browser out there right now. What I’m not loving is the way it seems to inflate its consumption of computer resources with each new version. I’ve started noticing how quickly Firefox starts to lag and temporarily hang up on itself after launching it, even on a newer computer with plenty of resources. And when you give your computer the 3-finger salute and check the Processes tab, Firefox is far and away the heaviest consumer.

I’m something of a power-user when it comes to Firefox, too. On any given day, I run with a minimum of 20 tabs open – and that’s just the way I start. I usually go upwards of 30-50 tabs throughout the day during my regular browsing sequences. And I know I’m not even the biggest power user out there – I know of several folks (web designers especially) who run 100-200 tabs and more at any given time. And for every tab you open, that’s more of your computer’s resources that Firefox sucks away.

One other minor gripe – with the upgrade to Firefox 2.0.0.6, I’ve hit upon more fatal browser crashes and unresponsive script errors than I’m used to seeing with Firefox. If it was just one computer, I’d attribute it to an incompatibility with something on that computer. But I’ve hit this problem with two or three computers now, so it causes me to think that something within Firefox itself is problematic. Of course, it could simply be the fact that Windows itself is buggy and always has been.

I still love Firefox, despite these little problems I’ve pointed out. I’m very loyal to open source software, and Firefox is still far more customizable than just about any other Windows-based browser out there. I would just like to see the developers of Firefox work toward returning it to the light-weight program that it started it as. In that respect, it was a much better browser in its younger days. Of course, maybe light-weight is the trade-off we have to make in order to get more use, functionality, and power out of Firefox. I don’t really know. I just know I’d like to have the best of both worlds.

Posted in Technology | Comments (10)

Notepad++

August 15, 2007 – 9:58 pm

For the longest time, I’ve been a huge fan of Metapad as a replacement text editor for the native Windows Notepad. Just recently, however, the news came across my feed reader that the fine folks over at PortableApps.com released a portable version of Notepad++. Being the PA.com fanboy that I am, I immediately downloaded it and tested it out for my recent work on the BlueSands theme.

I immediately fell in love with the program. For one thing, it has a tabbing feature to allow you to open multiple documents in the same window. For another thing, it has this beautiful styler.xml file that highlights different types of code. It made it much easier to troubleshoot and identify typos in my stylesheet. It also made it very easy for me to do side-by-side comparisons of template files that contained similar bits of code I wanted to emulate from one theme to another. It was definitely a great tool for doing web design work. As always, it’s another great portableapps program that comes highly recommended from me.

Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

Some New WordPress Plugins

July 30, 2007 – 11:21 am

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I wanted to point out a handful of new plugins I’ve started using recently.

Better Comments Manager is another of those plugins that’s been added to my list of essentials for any WordPress installation. It adds a tab to your dashboard that allows you to view your comments with a host of new options. You can edit, delete, or unapprove comments and easily mark comments as spam, if necessary. You can also post a new or threaded reply right from the dashboard with an AJAX-powered interface. A single mouse-click will also filter comments to display only the comments for a given thread. It’s a powerful new comment interface that should be a must-have for any WordPress user.
Wordpress.com users are familiar with the Dashbar that appears on their site whenever they’re logged in that gives them instant access to most of their primary functions in an instant. The Dashbar plugin now gives this same toolbar functionality to self-hosted WordPress installations. It provides access to the dashboard, write panel, and editing ability for the last five entries from your site’s front page.
There’s been some buzz recently about the new wordpress.com application that’s been added to Facebook. Well, the FacePress plugin updates your Facebook news and mini feeds every time you post a new entry to your self-hosted WordPress installation. It’s a pretty slick little plugin and makes it that much easier to integrate Facebook and WordPress.
MyDashboard provides a cleaned-up dashboard interface that lets you pick and choose what elements you see when you log into your admin panel. There’s no documentation yet on how to create custom gadgets to add to this plugin, but as soon as there is, I’ll be looking to further customize this slick little plugin.
The Custom Write Panel provides the power through the use of toggle buttons and custom fields to create a series of customized write panels. It lets you remove some of the clutter and adds the ability to post specialized news items.

These are a great group of plugins. I urge you to give them a try and beef up your WordPress experience.

Posted in Technology | Comments (4)

Theming

July 17, 2007 – 1:30 pm

One of the advantages of being flat on one’s back is I’ve had time to do a little WordPress theme design the last couple of days. I volunteered to host and build a new website for my parents’ church – the one they had before was, quite frankly, a ghastly design and layout and difficult to update and maintain. So, I moved their site to a WordPress installation on my server, and then set about modifying the Sandbox theme to my liking. I started out with something very plain and basic – no frills, just the basic elements in place – and ended up with something a bit nicer looking.

I don’t know if I’ll release this theme publicly or not. I’d have to clean up a couple of the files a bit, since I added some custom coding to make a couple of the plugins work correctly. But it might be worth it.

Posted in Design | Comments (0)

WP-Cache

June 19, 2007 – 1:51 pm

You may have noticed that periodically my site goes down due to a CPU Exceeded error from my server. It’s been a constant annoyance the last two or three weeks, and research into the problem has not revealed the specific cause. It may well be that I’m simply running too many sites from my server.

In an effort to rectify the problem, however, I’ve just installed and activated WP-Cache to see if I can take some of the load off my server. I don’t know if it will work or not, but I’m certainly going to give it a go. If it appears to be working, then I’ll probably load it up onto most of the other WP modules I have running and see if that prevents that CPU server error from appearing again.

If something looks like it’s ‘off’ or not functioning properly, do please let me know.

Posted in thoughts | Comments (0)

Code Geek

June 13, 2007 – 9:09 am

I am a WordPress god! Ok, not really, but I am enjoying the fact that I can now manipulate a WP theme pretty easily. It’s true – the more you use CSS, the more you play around with web design, the better you get at it.

I host a number of different websites for myself and for friends on my shared account, and I’ve been helping a guy who maintains one of those sites tweak a WP theme to force it to behave. He’s done most of the actual template work, taking an existing one and hacking it pretty heavily to change it to a very different look and feel. I spent a couple of hours IMing with him last night adding additional tweaks to the theme – like adding a navbar at the top of the header, dropping the sidebar completely from the theme (since it’s going to be essentially a static CMS once everything’s in place), and changing a number of other small elements. It was fun to realize once all that was done that it was a lot easier now than it had been the first time I tried to change and manipulate a WP theme back a year or so ago. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable both with how individual WordPress elements function as well as with CSS itself in being able to position and affect various things on the page.

From the first time I started teaching myself HMTL about 10 years ago until now, I’ve always enjoyed playing around with web page design. I’m pretty much self-taught, which is also why I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like to. I’m pretty well-versed in HTML and CSS now, and I know enough about PHP to be able to hack the code, though I don’t know enough PHP to write pages from scratch, much to my chagrin. But sometimes I don’t wonder if I shouldn’t go into the information technology business. I love playing with server-side utilities, I love hosting websites, and I love just building things out of code. It’s a hobby that I’m pretty passionate about. I’m just afraid that if I ever turned such into a business, I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

I don’t know if I’ll ever actually step into the IT business – it would probably require me to find both the time and the money to pick up formal training to finish filling in the gaps of my coding knowledge, and that’s not something I’m sure I’ll ever be able to do. But the prospect of being able to go freelance sure is appealing to me. I’ve always wanted to be self-employed. There’s plenty of time, though, so it’s an option that I’ve not completely ruled out yet.

I’m starting to think, though, that it might be time for me to create another WordPress theme. Anyone have any suggestions for layout and features?

Posted in thoughts | Comments (2)

WP 2.2

May 15, 2007 – 10:43 pm

Just updated with the latest version of WordPress again (2.2). Painless as always and I like the new features. I played with the RC1 version last week and enjoyed having widget support built in and automatic disabling of plugins that’ll generate fatal errors. It’s also a bit faster, but that’s something you might not notice. If you haven’t already upgraded, go do it. You won’t be sorry.

Posted in thoughts | Comments (0)

WP 2.2 RC1

May 9, 2007 – 10:47 am

I ran WordPress 2.2 RC1 through a quick test-drive this morning. Most of the changes in this version are all but invisible – or for the most aggressive WordPress users. The biggest thing that users will likely notice and care about is the widgets.php now being included in the core. Also, folks coming over from the New Blogger can now import their stuff. Apparently, comment editing is improved, but I’m not really sure what’s so improved about it. I also like that WP has now switched to a lighter, faster JS library. That should make things really slick in the long-run and provide less wear-and-tear on server usage. The important thing, though, is that nothing broke, so it should be a simple matter to upgrade all my blogs once the final release is issued.

Posted in thoughts | Comments (0)

Tagging Fears in WP 2.3

April 19, 2007 – 3:44 pm

Tags are coming to WordPress soon as part of the core. This, to me, is both a good thing and a potential complication. It’s good because suddenly WP users won’t have to rely on plugins to tag their entries. The potential complication that could make things a bit more… sticky is whether or not the native WP tagging system will accommodate an import of tags from other plugins. For instance, I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag my entries and make a pseudo-site index from the resultant tag cloud. I spent a number of hours cataloguing my entire blog with UTW and the last thing I want to do is have to repeat the process with the native tag system in WP. And believe me, I’ll likely prefer the WP tag system exactly because it’s native. My philosophy has always been that the more you can do natively, the better, easier, and more efficient things will be because there will be less likelihood of coding conflicts to break functionality. I’m really, truly hoping that WP will allow for some sort of tagging import for the most popular tag plugins because otherwise things are likely to become a bit of a headache again for a while as I transfer things over and manually go through and tag every single entry again. We’ll just have to wait and see how the WP developers handle this new feature. I’m always excited by new toys being added to the core WP files, but there’s always a bit of trepidation to go along with it, since there’s always the risk that many of my favorite plugins will break. I’ve already lost one with the upgrade to 2.1.3; I hate to lose too many more.

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Trimmed

April 8, 2007 – 8:57 pm

I’m not sure how long it will stay, but I’ve got a new theme up. It’s hopefully a bit simpler to look at, and the way it’s built, it forced me to turn off a number of plugins. This should, in theory, allow the site to load quite a bit more quickly and hopefully eliminate my server overload problems.

And now that the weather is beginning to warm up again (hence, my depression going away) and my site looks a little less chaotic, I’ll see what I can do to get a few things written here this week.

Posted in thoughts | Comments (2)