Whew! I’m really excited to announce that I’ve finally completed this project. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do all summer, and I finally got it done in stages this past weekend.

So what exactly did I do that warranted the “Please pardon the dust” warning to be posted on top of my blog all weekend? Well, for awhile now, I have been somewhat unsatisfied with my blog’s categories, which have remained relatively unchanged since the last time I relaunched this blog back in October 2006. Back then, the scope of my blog was much more limited, and so was the scope of my categories. I didn’t know I’d be frequently posting videos here from YouTube or Comedy Central, or that I’d occasionally be writing reviews of things or blogging about non-techy stuff, or things like that. The concept of “tags” hadn’t made its way to WordPress yet, and I didn’t even start using tags on my blog until about a year ago.

So for this project, I went back through all of my blog posts, deleted the 25 posts that preceded January 2007 (they weren’t that good anyway, very out of date, and there were very few of them), and then set about making changes to my categories to better reflect my blog content, and to differentiate them from tags. For the most part, tags will be more topical, while categories will be more, well, categorical. (Which is the whole point of “categories” vs. “tags” in the first place, for any blog.) Then, I went through every single one of my 359 posts and manually edited the categories for them to fit into the new structure, since I still value most of my older content on this blog.

You can now see my refurbished set of categories on the left. You’ll notice one thing that I’ve done is I’ve organized some related topics into subcategories. There are also a few new categories on here. The “Going to College” category is going to be focusing on my efforts through the next school year to apply to and get into college–anything major that I do to enter college (or any tips that I discover along the way) will be blogged about this year and appearing in that category. I’m also hoping to feature more guest bloggers on Webmacster87.info from time to time, and the new “Guest Bloggers” category will help those stand out. The “In My Opinion” category will be for the longer blog posts that I make from time to time in which I express opinions about various things, and Tips ‘n Tricks will be for posts where I give tips about a particular subject. Since I found that I do blog a bit about issues that affect my state/country/the world, there’s a new “National/World Issues” category for those posts. Videos that I post now finally have their own subcategory under “On The Internets” (a clearer and more satirical name than “On The Intarweb”) along with a few other new subcategories. And under the Personal category, there’s a new “My Travels” category to cover my itineraries and recaps of my various expeditions, and a new “Feedback Requested” category for posts where I ask for feedback, assistance, or advice from you, my readers for various reasons.

So I’m glad that I’ve finally accomplished this tedious task and can cross yet another item off of my summertime to-do list!

Tags: categories, project, Webmacster87.info

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

Well, just when you think that you’ve just closed out with the year 2007, the first month of 2008 ends, and suddenly 8% of the year has flown right by. Scary thought. However, January has come and gone for me, and so it’s time for another Webmacster87.info Best Of, for lack of my usual idiotic clever titles. By normal standards, January would be written down as a busy month for me, but by 2008 standards, knowing what’s on the other end of the tunnel this year, January has been mostly a drop in the bucket. Anyway, here we go with my monthly self-reflection.
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Tags: Articles, Best Of, January, Personal, Podcasts, Webmacster87.info

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

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

November on Webmacster87.info mostly focused on the Leopard Feature Presentation, which was my own way of reviewing the new features in Mac OS X Leopard, and since it takes time to write those articles, that was pretty much what I was doing on this blog for the month. However, there were a number of other things that happened elsewhere in my life, so let’s take a look at the past month on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: article, Best Of, Mac OS X Leopard, Personal, Webmacster87.info

Happy Halloween! Although these Webmacster87.info Best Ofs are traditionally for the first of the following month, October’s comes early to avoid conflicting with the Leopard Feature Presentation, which begins tomorrow. October was a slower month of Webmacster87.info until Apple announced details on the Leopard release–only five posts were made here on Webmacster87.info during the first half of the month. However, the Leopard announcement brought along the beginning of my extensive Leopard coverage, including a week-long Tiger-to-Leopard blogging series. In my personal life, October was a very long, drawn-out month that was primarily about trying to catch up on a long to-do list which I still haven’t conquered yet. And so, without further ado, I begin my spooky look back on the last month here on Webmacster87.info…
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Tags: article, Best Of, Google, 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