I’ve gained a lot of experience running and working with bulletin boards in my day, although most of my experience has been based on numerous mistakes. In 2004 and 2005, I established a number of communities, but most of them wound up being unsuccessful for a number of reasons, and that’s pretty much how I learned NOT to run a community.

Well, a few weeks ago, Patrick O’Keefe (of phpBBHacks.com fame, as well as a number of other communities and websites), released a brand new book called Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. Patrick was on phpBB Weekly #050 back in February, and in addition to talking about phpBBHacks.com on that episode, he gave us an early preview of his book. Since then, he sent copies to both myself and David Lewis for us to read and review. (Plus, we’ll be giving away an autographed copy on phpBB Weekly #061 on May 10th!) I recently finished the book, and am quite excited to have the opportunity to review it.
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Tags: administrators, book, communities, forums, guide, guidelines, management, Managing Online Forums, marketing, Patrick O'Keefe, phpBB, review, staff, tips

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Well, WordPress 2.5 has been released for about a week now, and I’ve been able to grace Webmacster87.info with its presence after spending some time last night doing an update. I’ve had some opportunities to play around with the new admin interface and some of the other changes, and since this is such a significant update to WordPress, what better time to do a review of the update? So, I’m going to take the time now to discuss some of the things that I like about the update, some of the things that I don’t like, as well as talking about some of the things that I’ve done to Webmacster87.info during last night’s update.
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Tags: 2.5, administration, Dashboard, features, interface, review, update, widgets, WordPress

I recently realized that despite the popular demand from my visitors, I’ve never taken the opportunity to blog about my brand spanking new web host. Well, now I’m going to take the opportunity.

You’ll recall that during the month of December, both Webmacster87.info and phpBB Weekly suffered significant downtime, none of which was my fault. After a series of communication feuds, I found out why. My old webhost, Kazix, had merged with this Fat Network group of people, and so the excellent support that I had remembered having with Kazix was reduced to a very poor support desk “maintained” by Fat Network. My cPanel username/password kept changing under their watch, and they moved to new DNS nameservers without warning me (causing me to lose a handful of posts on here), and they were continuously having downtime. But worse, when I reported to them these problems, they would respond as though I had obviously done something to cause the problem. At the end, I got fed up and gave them a reply that I am not a total idiot and that I know what I’m doing here, thus I should know why these errors are coming up, and furthermore giving it to them about their horrible service and brutal customer support. Their reply was a pretty “we’ll look into the problem” response.

So, even though my hosting with them is supposed to continue into April, I got fed up with having to deal with these people and the continuous stress that I had to deal with in December of trying to keep my websites up somewhat. In particular, I was having to deal with a flurry of outcries from the relentless community of phpBB Weekly listeners. I’ve essentially declared my investment in hosting from Kazix to be a case where I was completely suckered.

However, I did have an alternative option. Back in June or July, Caitlyn Imburgo had pointed me out to Web Hosting Buzz, a link which I had remembered, although, looking at the packages they offer, it seemed like a “too good to be true” offer. However, at the end of December, with Kazix flailing out from under me, I went ahead and purchased their cheapest Silver plan.

For $59.40/year (=$4.95/month), this is one awesome plan. They have no setup fees, and the plan comes with 375 GB (that’s right, gigabyptes) of disk space, along with a whopping 2.5 TB (2500 GB) of bandwidth. Just to put that into perspective, right now, I’m only using about 64 MB of disk space (about 0.017% of my total allotment), and have used 4.54 gigabytes of bandwidth (which, although that’s a lot for most other webhosts, again is only 0.178% of my available total).

It gets better, because this plan has everything. If I had chosen to (I didn’t at the time), this plan would have come with one free .com, .net, or .org domain name, and the domain name would be mine (for free) for life as long as I was still a Web Hosting Buzz customer. But even then, the plan allows not only unlimited subdomains, but also unlimited parked and addon domains as well. (Back when I had Kazix, I had to shell out an extra $15/year for each addon domain I wanted!) They also have all of the major support for e-mail, PHP, MySQL, FTP, multimedia support, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. They run their servers on dual quad-core Xeons with 8 GB of RAM and standard RAID hard drives to protect against data loss. They even support all the fancy stuff like Zend Optimizer, GD, ImageMagick, SSL, and all that jazz.

But the part that I was happiest to see (particularly after my recent debacle) was all the support functionality they offered. As opposed to the phantom e-mail only support of my old host, Web Hosting Buzz not only offers 24/7 e-mail AND online help desk ticket support (they claim that they’re there 24/7 but I haven’t had a reason to find out yet), but they also provide a customer support phone number (9 AM-5 PM M-F), an online wiki for support, and even their own community support forums! (Although nothing is entirely perfect; they use vBulletin.) With all of these support options available, I’m feeling much more secure about being on this webhost. Plus, after my first four weeks of using them, service has been reliable, fast, and perfect, so I haven’t even needed to try their support services yet!

In addition, they guarantee 99.95% uptime, and they even have a section of their website which tracks the uptime of their servers. Their setup was very fast, and I was ready to go with their hosting within a few hours. However, the best part has to be their Price Freeze guarantee, something which I have not seen from any other webhost: they guarantee that they will never raise prices for existing customers. The price you pay when you first sign up, even if you sign up with a discounted coupon code, will be the price you’ll pay to renew for the life of your hosting. Talk about awesome.

Anyway, so far, I’m really satisfied with my new web host. Not only have they been super-reliable, but at an unbeatable price, they’ve opened up so much more stretching room which will make it possible for me to easily expand my online presence should I choose to. If you’re interested, be sure to check them out.

Tags: bandwidth, disk space, features, hosting, Kazix, new, web host, Web Hosting Buzz, website

As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: Apple, features, innovations, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, operating system, recap, release, review

Sorry folks, but try as hard as I might, I was unable to get my hands on an external hard drive or on any friends who have a Leopard laptop with an external hard drive that has Time Machine set up. I even postponed the Leopard Feature Presentation on Time Machine to be the penultimate post for the month of November in the hopes that I could use it before then! Therefore, I have not been able to get my hands on Time Machine, and therefore, I cannot honestly review it. I could regurgitate how it works, but what’s the point of doing that? We ALL know how it works! I want to talk about my opinions based on using it, and how can I do that unless I get a chance to use it.

Therefore, although it’s kind of awkward, this post shall serve as an IOU. I promise, at my earliest possible convenience, to update this post with a full-fledged Leopard Feature Presentation for Time Machine as soon as I have been able to set it up, use it, and feel like I’ve worn out my back up lights. So, whenever that is, I will finish up the last little bit of this blog series. I promise.

Feature Satisfaction Rating: *insert random repetitive excusing explanation here*

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: backup, hard drive, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, portal, Quick Look, restore, review, safety, Time Machine

Automator premiered in Mac OS X Tiger, dubbed as “AppleScript for the rest of us.” Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it hasn’t really seemed to have caught on for me. Maybe it was because some of the aspects of the UI were quirky, or maybe I just don’t do enough repetitive tasks on my computer.

Leopard only brings a few changes to Automator, which mostly acts the same as it did before. Now, one would pretty obviously guess that there’s now new Automator actions out of the box, which is nice, considering that Tiger’s Automator always seemed to leave certain actions out. Automator also now gives you access to variables, so you can easily drag in today’s date, or your short username, or a random number, for example, and these variables will automatically reflect the status when you run the action. And, like practically everything else in Leopard, you have an iLife media browser. (You know, I find it weird that practically all of Leopard has access to your iLife apps, but you STILL have to buy iLife separately!!!)

Probably the most notable new feature in Automator is the ability to record actions. When you click the new Record button in Automator, Automator is hidden and a floating window appears to let you know that Automator is recording. Then, you do your action, and when you’re done doing your action, you hit Stop. Automator creates a new action called Watch Me Do which lists your actions.

However, I repeatedly tried recording different actions, and found Automator to be VERY unreliable. Automator actually records your mouse movements, so when you play back these actions, it actually moves your mouse around. However, Automator doesn’t check to see if the mouse is doing the same thing to the same window, and almost always gets screwed up. (One action that I played back ended up selecting and deleting the text in a document, and then saving it, even though that’s NOT what I told it to do!) And sometimes, Automator completely ignored various actions that I did with my mouse. In short, this feature is horribly unreliable and I wouldn’t trust anything to it.

So Automator has a few new features, but other than for having access to some new actions, Leopard’s Automator is not going to be a reason for Automator-lovers to upgrade. And as for that Record button, Apple’s going to need to order some boxes of bug spray direct from the warehouse.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: actions, AppleScript, Automator, bugs, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, recording, review

Preview, Mac OS X’s PDF/image viewer, has always been kind of an iffy subject and its fate has been uncertain. When Panther was released, Preview was hailed as the fastest PDF reader on the market, but it still was a bit clunky, and for me, personally, the relatively recent release of Adobe Reader 8 persuaded me to make that my default PDF reader.

However, Preview in Mac OS X Leopard has been greatly enhanced with a significant number of new and enhanced features which really define it as a serious PDF reader, and also brings a few tricks up its sleeve that formerly have only been available to PDF consumers after the purchase of Adobe Acrobat Pro. So what’s new? Let’s take a look.
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Tags: editing, features, images, iWork, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, PDFs, preview, review, viewing

One of Leopard’s “big new features” is a feature for those .Mac members who got suckered into spending $100/year for Apple’s suite of services which probably are only worth about $50/year, if that much. It has to do with the Finder’s improved sharing features (file sharing, screen sharing, etc.), and it’s called Back to My Mac.
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Tags: Back to My Mac, file sharing, Finder, iDisk, internet, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, network, review, Screen Sharing

On Apple’s 300+ Leopard Features List, iChat earns the recognition of having the most new features in the list–24 to be exact. Although iChat 4 includes a nice series of new features for the AV crowd and some other new ideas, is the new iChat any better at just plain, old-fashioned text chatting? I spent a couple of weeks with iChat to find out.
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Tags: Adium, AIM, audio, chat, Chax, collaboration, features, Google Talk, iChat, iChat Theater, Jabber, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, preview, Quick Look, recording, review, Screen Sharing, sharing, text, Video

Mac OS X Tiger was the first version of OS X to bring what could be considered a comprehensive set of parental controls to the Mac platform, but at last, Leopard goes all out to provide a wide array of parental controls in order to control what parents can do on the computer. Err, um, I mean to control what kids can do on the computer.
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Tags: accounts, feature, Leopard Feature Presentation, limits, Mac OS X Leopard, Parental Controls, review, System Preferences, users