Hello everyone,

This is just to let you know that I will be having little-to-no activity on my blog over the next few weeks, as I have a very busy couple of weeks coming up, between preparing for two AP tests (along with associated practice tests) and SAT Subject Tests, missing 4-5 days of school for a State PTA Convention that I’m working at, etc. Therefore I will be forcefully diverting my attention away from blogging and many of my frequent internet activities until things calm down for a little bit. I appreciate your understanding.

Tags: announcement, AP exams, Blogging, busy, Convention, hiatus, PTA, SAT, SAT Subject Tests, School, tests

Okay, I’m sure that if you’re looking at Webmacster87.info, you’re wondering, “Whoa, what happened? Where did the great big W go? Where did the beautiful-looking theme go?” (If you’re reading this post in some kind of RSS fead reader, go to Webmacster87.info and start reading this post over again.)

Well, today is the third annual CSS Naked Day, and also the first one that I heard of in time to make the necessary preparations to participate in. The purpose of today is to promote the purpose of web standards and its importance in our everyday use of the internet. In fact, I think that Lorelle VanFossen said it best:

This is the third year of the annual CSS Naked Day which honors web design and designers around the world who help make our websites and blogs look “pretty” to the eye while still being totally functional under the hood. Dustin Diaz wanted to give the web world an opportunity to remind everyone of the benefits of CSS web page design. By removing the stylesheet for the day, the world would see naked web pages, giving a little more appreciation for the skills of web page designers.

Webmacster87.info is one of hundreds of websites going naked today for this cause. My blog will be entirely CSS-free all day today (in my timezone, anyway, as defined by the clock on my website), and since the event is done in honor of designers, I want this to honor my good friend Hans Reikmann (macattacks10), who has graciously volunteered his time to do numerous designs for me over the years, including the artwork for both this version and the previous version of my website, some of my 2005-era forums, and all of my podcasts.

If you want to go naked on your blog or website today, there’s still time, and Lorelle has suggestions for how you can participate. In the meantime, enjoy this low-fi version of Webmacster87.info!

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, today is the 100th Day of 2008! Woo hoo!

Tags: blog, community, CSS, design, event, internet, naked, standards, web design, Webmacster87.info

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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

Hello everyone,

I’m going to be going on a school-related trip in the middle of February which will force me to be completely away from the computer and the internet-at-large for about ten days. Now, I had considered not doing anything on this blog for ten days, but I’ve changed my mind and decided that perhaps something that I should do is take the opportunity to invite folks to write a guest blog article to be featured here on Webmacster87.info during my absence, just to keep the blog going.

So here’s how it works. If you would be interested in guest blogging on Webmacster87.info, please let me know in the comments of this post and I will send you an e-mail with additional information. I’m currently just planning to run the guest blog articles while I am away (February 14-23), but if I get an overwhelming response, I may decide to expand them to cover the month of February.

If you indicate that you are interested in guest blogging, your post will need to be submitted to me no later than Sunday, February 10th. (Earlier than 2/10 will be great too.) I will be scheduling the posts in advance so that they will show up on here while I am gone and nowhere near the computer.

What kind of content? I would be interested in any guest bloggers who want to write an article about technology and/or teenage life. (You do NOT have to be a teenager to participate–in fact, I’ll probably be inviting a few people that I know who aren’t teenagers to contribute.) Note that unlike Lorelle VanFossen’s two months of guest bloggers, I will not be entirely opening up my blog to guest bloggers; I will be reviewing guest blogger articles that are submitted to me primarily for decency before I schedule it in the posting queue. However, if you are interested, I certainly invite you to join in and relieve me while I am away from the computer.

(Incidentally, I will also probably be doing another one of these guest bloggerthons for another long trip that I’m taking in June, so this will not be the only opportunity.)

Anyway, I just wanted to extend the invitation to anyone who’s interested. As for the trip that I’m taking in February, stay tuned for more details coming in the next week or two.

Tags: article, Blogging, guest bloggers, invitation, Technology, teens, trip

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

Hello everyone!

I am really excited to be able to announce that after being down for 18 days, Webmacster87.info is back online!

On December 4th, something happened to my cPanel username/password causing them to change. I’m not sure what happened to cause the change, but I certainly had nothing to do with it.

So why did it take 18 days for the site to come back up? Well, I had bombarded my web host for weeks with support requests, and never got a response. Yesterday, I finally got angry enough about it that I did a WHOIS on my host’s domain name, found a phone number, called them up, and found out that my host strangely still had my old Mac.com e-mail address on file–an e-mail address which expired five months ago. (Their policy–which is a good one–is to only accept support requests from the e-mail address which they have on file, for security reasons.) So, once the guy on the phone updated the e-mail address I had on file, my support request got a response, and my username and password got reset, and now the site is back online.

So, I guess I do kind of owe my web host, Kazix.com, an apology, because I had honestly started telling people that they had packed up shop and left town. That wasn’t the case at all–just a bit of a miscommunication, which caused the outage of the past 18 days.

Unfortunately, I had hoped to spend this month blogging throughout the month about the various apps and tools for decorating for the holidays as kind of a December 2007 blog series, but now that it’s three days until Christmas, those hopes seem to have gone out the window. So, I guess that’s something I’ll have to hold off on until 2008. However, with the holidays here, you can certainly expect some holiday blogging and the other increase in blogging that is possible when I’m out of school.

The point is, that while I won’t be trying to make up for the lost time, I will definitely be picking up where I left off, and this blog will definitely be getting active again.

Again, I’m very sorry for the outage and tried everything I could to get it out of the way ASAP. Thanks for continuing to stick around with Webmacster87.info!
–Douglas Bell

Tags: cPanel, December, Kazix, outage, password, status, webhost, Webmacster87.info

So, now I have Leopard, and I’ve been playing around with it for a day or two now. However, I’ve really been wondering about how I can share my take on Leopard’s “over 300 features” here on my blog. Some of the features in Leopard I really like, some of them I don’t like, and some of them I’m indifferent to, but if you’ve seen any of the reviews of Leopard on the web, they’re all pretty much the same lavishes of praise and love for all of Leopard except the new menu bar. But I’ve got different opinions of Leopard, and this is my blog, so don’t I get to share some of my opinions?

Therefore, I’m going to be committing myself to another month-long blogging series. You may recall my Webmacster87.info Month of Reviews, where for 35 days straight I posted full, in-depth reviews of various apps and websites, etc. Well, the month of November will be the month of my second month-long blogging series, which I’ll be calling the Leopard Feature Presentation.

The Leopard Feature Presentation will NOT be as long-winded or in-depth as the Month of Reviews was. Instead, each day for 30 days (November 1-30), I will point out one of Leopard’s “over 300 features,” briefly describe it, and then share my opinions on it. Obviously, I won’t hit all 300, but considering that Creating Analysis Instruments with DTrace and Portuguese (Portugal) Localization are among those 300, I think I’ll be okay. Again, some of the features I post about will probably get rave reviews from me, and some of them probably won’t be seen by me as being so hot, but you get the idea. Nevertheless, the posts will NOT be as long (I promise) as those from the Month of Reviews.

Finally, on Saturday, December 1st, I will culminate the whole month with a comprehensive review of Mac OS X Leopard, which will wrap up Webmacster87.info’s coverage of Leopard’s release. (The November 2007 W87.info Best Of will be posted a day later.)

So then, Leopard, start leaping! The Feature Presentation begins this Thursday, November 1st!

Tags: announcement, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, November, review, Webmacster87.info

There’s something familiar about the new background to the X logo, but I just can’t get my head around it…

Tags: Apple, background, color, logo, Mac OS X Leopard, strange, Webmacster87.info

Phew! At last, I’m done! Oh, and Happy Labor Day, by the way.

Back in July, I announced on my blog that I would be challenging myself to post a “Month of Reviews” on Webmacster87.info. One review a day for 35 days, starting on Monday, July 30th and ending yesterday, Sunday, September 2nd. I actually took advantage of WordPress’ scheduling function so that I could write and schedule the posts ahead of time–which is why you saw reviews popping up while I was away in Los Angeles. Even then, I did end up perilously close to not finishing a review in time, and I’m just so glad that I was able to keep up. I mean, those reviews weren’t short to write–most of them took 45-90 minutes apiece to complete so thoroughly. I do hope that you enjoyed them and that they introduced you to some new services and applications that I’ve dived into this past summer.

Although I will not be pressuring myself to make them appear on a daily basis anymore, I do hope to continue to occasionally post new reviews on Webmacster87.info, similar in format to the ones I’ve done this past month, although with the luxury of doing them during my free time. You’ll see them pop up in the Reviews category when I get back to them, although that won’t be for awhile as I need to recover from this past month.

Anyway, in case you missed any of them, I thought I’d quickly link to each of the 35 reviews that I’ve posted over the last 5 weeks, along with their rating, so that you can check them out. So without further ado…
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Tags: Best Of, review, Webmacster87.info

Well, if you know me, you know that I enter various stuff at the San Mateo County Fair every year, and if I recall correctly, this is my 10th year to enter. However, this is the first time where I actually found out what I won before I went to go see it for myself, but sure enough, the San Jose Mercury News apparently reported on one of the brand new divisions this year: Website Design. There were three award-winning entries in the new division, two of which were mine. At least someone else did enter, when I had called the County Fair office a month ago to ask for entry details for websites, I got a “That’s the first time that question has been asked!” response, which got me worried that I would be the only one entering.

Anyway, congratulations to Taylor Hansford who does the website for Pacifica 4-H (it’s the county fair, after all!) and won 1st place. My own Webmacster87.info won the red ribbon, and the 17th District PTA Website, which I maintain and entered under the class “Website for a Business or Organization”, took third.

Thanks, by the way, goes to Larry and Anthony who sent me the link and asked me “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I haven’t been to the fair yet, so honestly, I had no idea that I’d won until they sent me the link.

There are some things slightly ironic about the San Jose Mercury News article. For one thing, San Jose isn’t part of San Mateo County, but I’ll let that slide since our fair is open to all the neighboring counties as well. However, they said that “Neither boys were available for interviews.” Besides that being bad grammar, I wasn’t even at the fair today, so of course I wasn’t “available” for an interview! The article also claims that they were looking for me and the other kid in the livestock section. I can’t speak for Taylor, but I’m not part of 4-H and don’t spend very much time in the livestock section. I might spend 5-10 minutes in there during the fair to look, but I don’t exactly hang around there waiting to be interviewed, if you know what I mean. Now, I did get a phone call today from the fair saying that the San Mateo County Times wanted to interview me, albeit about my being a judge for a contest in the Culinary Arts division, but they have setup a time to meet me there at 4:30 PM on Monday. So, San Jose Mercury News, if you’d like to say hi to me, I’ll be there on Monday willing to answer questions.

Anyway, I am glad that my websites received the recognition from the judges (hopefully they didn’t try to view this website in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t work that well), and I’m glad to have helped the San Mateo County Fair get their technology entries going. Who knows? Maybe next year they’ll have a division for best podcast. Stay tuned next week when I’ll post a full list of everything I entered this year and how well I did!

Tags: Awards, Bay Area, Blogging, event, interview, News, Personal, PTA, San Mateo County Fair, Technology, web design