I’ve been an advocate for Bluehost for several years now, as I’ve been with them for 4 years.  They’ve always provided excellent service in the “super cheap” hosting range. The basic plan is 6.95/mo and has served me well, powering this website as well as a few others.  However, I have reached my frustration point with the limited hosting setup over the last few months and recently undertook the daunting task of searching for another providing and actually making the switch.

Media Temple

I compared several hosting solutions against one another in hopes of finding the cheapest one I could, that would still offer a few of the features I was looking for. I compared Hostforweb, Peer 1, Media Temple & a couple others.  All in all, turns out I wanted aVPS option, so that I could have full control over my “box”. All of these providers offered a solution that met or exceeded those expectations, yet Media Temple offered something that I haven’t found with anyone else – an unmanagedsolution.

An unmanaged server (VPS in this case) means that while I have full control over what software to place on my box, I also don’t benefit from things such as a GUI for server administration (Plesk or cPanel most likely) and even more importantly, will not benefit from automatic updates applied to the server from experienced hosting administrators.  This options offers the most flexibility for the price, yet also places me in the role of security configuration & security.

(ve) VPS

The pricing won my heart in the end. At 30/mo (25/mo if paid yearly) I get a full VPS, albeit unmanaged.  So far, I’ve loved the server – the performance is a huge improvement from the Bluehost server and with full configurability, I can easily tweak any random server setting that I want.

After registering for an account, I received an email in roughly 5 minutes with all login information to get into the accounts center. From there I could transfer/purchase domains, view live server stats, and manage SSH access.  The accounts area provides access to billing information, and that’s about it.  With the (ve) option, you’re on your own to manage and setup your server.

I chose the Ubuntu 10.x setup, but could have went with Fedora, CentOS or Debian as my distro.  After logging in via SSH, I upgraded the box and installed a LAMP server, configured MySQL & PHP, enabled some modules for Apache and such.  Configuring the apache configuration file for virtual hosts was a new experience (for mulitple domains), but I was able to get it going.

The box didn’t come with an FTP server either, so that had to be installed and configured. The included setting up a special user, and making sure the directories were owned by the correct users (took me awhile to figure that one out).  I also installed PHPMyAdmin (via apt-get) and Ruby on Rails was quick to get setup as well.

The only thing I have not successfully got setup and running at this point is my mail services, but I haven’t had that much time to dive into it yet.  I don’t recommend this option for anyone who is not already familiar with configuring a Linux server via SSH, or for anyone who doesn’t have several hours to research and learn the different programs and services that go into actually providing all this functionality.

I think the Media Temple server will be a great option for me going forward and at an affordable price, it was the only one that I could realistically make the move to.

I use and love Mint, from Shaun Inman, for all this analysis (in conjunction with Google Analytics of late) and this one caught me off guard this morning.

A lovely 2200% increase in traffic to this one post reviewing Flow FTP, originally posted on April 4th 2008.  My simple explanation for this trend being the ongoing MacHeist  Nanobundle 2, which offers Flow FTP as part of the 7 applications available ($260 value at $19.95).

If you’re a blogger and have an interesting trend to share, or if you have an alternative explanation for the Flow FTP review being so popular all of a sudden, I’d love to hear it.  Leave me some feedback in the comments.

Be sure to check out all the features of the only application for iPhone and iPod Touch delivering Thats What She Said Jokes to your device on the official site at http://twss.macfanatic.net

For more information about the application and to sign up to be emailed once the application is live on the store, visit the That’s What She Said Jokes site at: http://twss.macfanatic.net/

I’d love to hear some feedback on the site design and can’t wait to get this application into your hands!

From the App Store description:

That’s What She Said Jokes is the perfect companion for your iPhone or iPod Touch. Browse both user submitted and featured scenarios focusing on That’s What She Said! Get involved by submitting your own That’s What She Said funnies and commenting and rating hilarious entries submitted by others just like you!

I’ll be submitting the application for review later today and then the wait is on the App Store review team. Hopefully the app will be for sale later this week, at $0.99USD.

The first iteration of the site debuted in December 2005.  The www.macfanatic.net domain was purchased and running in March 2006.  Sometime that summer I moved from Rapidweaver to WordPress, if I remember correctly.  The site design, quality, and features have all undergone numerous changes over the years.  For a few years (until September 2007) my main focus was podcasting.  All 72 episodes are still available through iTunes, or you can just browse the Podcast posts themselves here.

To highlight just a few of the new features in version 4 of the site:

• Updated Color Pallet – This will most likely be randomized in a few weeks, to go with an orange, green or blue feel to the site.
• Revitalized Search – Have an “Apple-style” search field that quickly shows you related results, grouped together as posts, pages, or comments.
• Better Size – For all those out there on smaller (or rather, standard – read “not macbook”) screens, the site works better
• Improved Features area – You can now page back and forth through my featured posts, instead of waiting on them to change every few seconds
• Improved Twitter Integration – You can now more easily see what I’m tweeting (which is usually quite often) and easily follow me
• Buttons for sharing content on popular social networking sites such as Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more
• Improved Syntax Formatting – Posts containing code, whether it’s PHP, C, Cocoa, jQuery, or anything else, will be nicely formatted
• PRMac Integration – I’m now serving up select press releases distributed through PRMac.com
• Advertising – Now supporting ads! If you’re interested in advertising on the site, let me know and we’ll talk pricing. I’m very flexible.
• Many many other smaller things – stuff you’ll notice when browsing content, posting comments or sharing with friends

I’d love to hear what you think about the new design and anything I could do to further improve it!

I’d welcome any critique of the design!

Any feedback would be great!

Digital Media Graphix

First and foremost, I’ve been hired doing software development with a design firm here in town, called Digital Media Graphix. It has been fairly exciting so far and I’m looking forward to projects that are about to pushed onto my plate here in the next week. So far I dived head first into writing native installers for Windows and Mac, and that was actually a good bit of fun. I’ve done some troubleshooting with Ajax and PHP bugs and meddled with helping the other designers in house organize a project so it will be easier to code and maintain. 

Overall, it seems like a great fit for my personality, as the staff is relaxed and talented. There is one full time programmer specializing in Flash, AIR, Javascript, etc and I’m the apprentice, bringing useful C, C++, and Cocoa skills to the table. It’s a great first time job and I’m loving the experience and the challenge.

MacBook

I sold my trusty first generation black MacBook to a friend after the launch of the newest aluminum ones in mid October and haven’t looked back.  I absolutely love this computer and it is more than I’ve ever expected from a Mac.  The solid and sexy all aluminum enclosure, beautiful and bright glass covered display, and the sexy backlit keyboard all remind me why I love using Macs.  I highly recommend this for anyone debating whether to get a previous generation MacBook for a discounted price.  The newer versions are so much better and worth the extra 300USD.

Podcasting

It hit me today that it has been 14 months since I last produced a podcast episode. I never acknowledged the fact that I was finished with podcasting and I wanted to take the quick moment here to thank everyone who made the podcast such a success. I truly enjoyed working on it and all the listeners are what helped propel this site into the position it is in today.

If you truly miss it that much, get in contact with me. I’m looking at ways of reviving the podcast, and would love to have suggestions, or better yet, a helping hand in the project.

Facade

I’m impatiently awaiting the debut of a new theming application for Leopard, called Facade.  It looks very promising, integrating full theme management and application, along with an innovative “Theme Store” for content delivery (still have some free themes).  Definitely worth taking a look at.

Cappuccino

I can’t stress enough how amazing this framework is.  Seriously, I put my full weight behind Cappuccino and I’m working hard on a few demo applications and tutorials to hopefully publish before New Years.  I think SproutCore is certainly a viable competitor and love the competition between the two.  However, Cappuccino has changed how I approach large web development projects.

Certainly take a look at my introductory article on Cappuccino here (June 2008).

Obama

I’m both relieved and disappointed that the presidential elections are over.  I rather enjoyed the useless news coverage, and later in the campaign, the wonderfully amusing Palin.  However, I hope the American people can unite behind Obama and ultimately bring change.  Rather cliche´, but I’m okay with it.

If you find any bugs throughout the site, which will most likely happen, please send me a quick email so I can get it sorted out. Thanks!

It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Someone is referred to the site because of a Google search every couple minutes. I spend time looking at the stats to see what you are searching for and where you end up once you are on the site. All important information.

Any thoughts?

Now in the sidebar, are three more boxes with interesting data. First, there is a “What’s Hot” box that shows 5 posts, with the date of the last comment. Hopefully this will help everyone see where people are discussing posts on the site.

There is a box below that which shows the Top 10 Pages. This simply pulls data from my Mint installation and shows the 10 pages (right now also including the homepage and the blog itself). Once again, this is meant as a way to for everyone to see where most people are going on the site.

Finally, there is a box below that which shows the top 5 commented posts of all time.

If you have any other suggestions for the site, I’d love to hear them. Also, if you are interested in implementing something similar on your site, post a comment and we’ll follow up with that!

Simply put, using the Spotlight-like search on the site always worked, whether you were on the main page or viewing a post. But clicking the “View More Results…” link to get more than 6 results as well as excerpts, post timestamps, and the number of comments….well, that only worked if you were on the main page. That has now been fixed, so search away!

In a post from Knoxify, a site dedicated to building a community and “better everyone’s life” in Knoxville, Mac Fanatic was listed as one of seven blogs chosen for being “rich in content and color”.

I’m honored to be listed on that list!

However, the time came to renew and I figured that if nothing else, I at least wanted my own place to develop and test apps on the web, so here we are. Not exactly the brightest outlook for the site, and one that I don’t like when reviewing just how much time and effort I, and others, have put into this project.

However, someone was thinking at Apple and created an easy way for site administrators to set a custom icon to appear when users bookmark their page. You can read more into the details here, but basically you create a png image (some sources say 158×158 is much crisper and still works) at 57×57 and upload it to your root directory (of the web documents, not of the server itself) with the name “apple-touch-icon.png”.

So now if you add a bookmark to your home screen for MacFanatic.net (or any other page), there will be a distinctive glassy logo (the rounded corners and glassy effect are applied by the phone, so the image above isn’t exactly what it will look like) to help you out!

I think it’s a pretty cool accomplishment and something that I’m proud of. For someone who doesn’t have that much time to pour into this project anymore and started this as an experiment and a hobby anyway, I’m happy.

My question to everyone is, do you still find the site useful and in what direction would you like the site to take?

The site started as a personal blog that slowly evolved into what it is today. That process has taken lots of my time and I just don’t have the time needed to keep the site moving forward at the current pace. Therefore, I’d love to have some help. If you know of anyone that would like to help in providing content for Mac Fanatic, send me an email.

Help can come in a variety of forms. I’m interested in Mac application reviews for web publication, Mac news to be posted on the blog, general help in site moderation, and of course, content for podcasts.
There are a lot of options here, so if you think you have something to offer the site, please let me know. I’d obviously prefer someone who has a bit of experience, but I’m completely open to a new blogger or writer. Everyone has to start out somewhere and it’d be awesome to have more talent on board.

Hope to hear from some people soon. By all means, share this post with others.

Changes include:

• New logo from aspiring graphic artist, Jimmy Xander.
• Cooler ‘banner’ images that take up less space in the window
• AJAX Searching – Super cool. It’s like Spotlight, try it out now and leave some comments
• New Comment System – AJAX-goodness. Instantly preview your comment before you post, quickly reply to another comment, Gravatar support for custom avatars on comments and improved styling overall
• Other minor tweaks, security fixes, and optimizations

I’m really proud of the work I’ve done, especially the overall feel and style. The banner images turned out pretty cool and I like the intense color and sexiness. The colored ‘candy-bars’ for the search results and comments turned out better than I had hoped as well.

If you find any bugs with the new theme, a quick comment would be appreciated!

What I’m trying to accomplish is a row of tabs, but the current selected one being a different color. There are all kinds of ways to accomplish this, but here is one developer’s beautiful solution for static pages. Just wrap each page in a different div. Example being, homepage has <div id=”home”>, the Help page has <div id=”help”> and so forth. On the links that make up the navigation, assign each link a class, such as “navigation-link”. Then in the stylesheet, just add something such as

#home .navigation-link, #help .navigation-link { //stuff to make it stand out }

That works wonders. However, in my case, I’m trying to accomplish the same thing on dynamic pages, created through a WordPress theme. I have a dirty solution written in Javascript, but I’m going to work on writing it in PHP if at all possible so that it doesn’t have that momentary lag that the page has right now. You can preview the work at http://www.macfanatic.net/testing/

Javascript Code for changing the class of a link to reflect it’s currently selected:

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<script type="text/javascript" src="mootools.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.addEvent('domready', function() {
	var a_list = $$('#nav li a');    // Array of nav link elements
	var i = 0;
	while ( i &lt; a_list.length ) {
		if ( (window.location.pathname).search(a_list[i].getProperty('href')) != -1 ){
			//alert("Match found at location " + i +" with name " + a_list[i]);
			a_list[i].addClass('current');
		}
		i++;
	}
});
</script>

Also note that this uses the MooTools library, which you can download here.

I have emailed the winners using the emails they provided on the entry form. Please check that email account and reply to the email from the site by June 11th to confirm your winning status. If I don’t hear back from you by then, I’ll have to replace you with another eligible winner.

Once I have heard back from all those who won for each application, I’ll be in further contact with the developer to get your license to you. The developer will be contacting the winner(s) directly.

If you have any questions, send me an email.

Thanks again for participating!

Tune in later this month for an interview with someone from the Parallels team as we talk about the newest features and direction of Parallels on the Mac platform.

Expect an email from me by June 6 if you are a winner. Winners will also be posted on the site. Thanks to all who entered and many thanks to all developers who contributed.

I just had to throw this out there because I find myself doing it all the time. I check my mint stats just about anytime I’m on the computer. It’s just part of my routine. Facebook, Mint, some message boards, my current debt….

When I find a site that I haven’t seen before show up in my referrers list, I check it out. I want to see who has sent me traffic! So occasionally the referring site is someone else’s mint installation. The instance that triggered this post was the good guys over at the Icon Factory for Frenzic. Looks like I had a few people leave the site and show up in their mint list and they checked the site out in return.

Just funny how everything is interconnected like that.

In case you’ve never listened in, it’s a great Mac podcast that crams several application reviews into one episode. You’ll come away with so much Mac knowledge, ready to impress your friends.

Listen in to the MacReview Cast here.

Please go forth and register on the boards. Pick out an avatar from the gallery or upload one of your own. Then start some discussions and let me know what you think about past/upcoming episodes and more. I hope this is a way for everyone to get involved in a little way and make the site more than just my ramblings and build up a community atmosophere.

Oh, and the message boards look damn good thanks to Tim Kimberl from Aqua-Soft.org.

Be sure to read more about each application, listen to reviews and enter here. Consider downloading trial versions of the other applications as there is a great variety.

Digg the story here.

The contest will being on April 23 (next Monday) and last until June 1. There are a lot of software titles signed on so far and I’m very excited to offer all of this to my loyal listeners and take the time to welcome some new people as well.

If you’re interested in blogging the contest or submitting to digg or whatever way you feel to share the news with the world, go right ahead. I’ll have some nice images put up a little later in the week that everyone can use to stick on their blogs if they wish. And now for the list of software:

• Tangerine (1 copy)
• Rapidweaver (1 copy 3 copies)
• Frenzic (3 copies)
• Typinator, PopCharX, and KeyCue (1 copy each)
• Journler (1 copy)
• CSSEdit (1 copy)
• SmartBackup (1 copy)
• Cha-Ching (3 copies) 1.0 released on 4/20!
• Billings (1 copy)
• Parallels Desktop for Mac (2 copies)
• Delicious Library (1 copy)
• Disco (3 copies)
• Overflow (1 copy)

That’s a grand total of 723.23 USD of free and awesome Mac software! And there is one more surprise I’ll save for later….

Dan from Rapidweaver pledged two more copies of Rapidweaver to bring the number up to 3.  And that makes the grand total 803.13  now.

Currently, the stats for the podcast come in at 49,292 for those episodes that have been downloaded by subscribers. The number is a few thousand higher at 55,681 for those that have been downloaded individually as well. So since 50,000 is a good number to celebrate, that’s what we’ll use here.

This certainly seems like a good time to give away something. So, if you have any ideas, requests, comments, now is the time to write in. I’ll leave the post open to suggestions for another week or two. Hopefully someone will write in with something good that is doable and I will be able to setup some sort of contest/giveaway again, similar to the iTunes Giveaway earlier this year. I might be able to coerce some developers into a free license, so if you have specific requests for some shareware, send them on in.

Keep the comments and emails coming!

UPDATE: I’ve heard back from Ged over at IconFactory, the great guys that gave us Frenzic. Turns out he’s excited about the giveaway too, enough to provide us with 3 full Guru copies (24.95 value each)! Many thanks to Ged from IconFactory and the rest of the team!

UPDATE 2: I’ve heard back from Andy from the Potion Factory. Turns out that the Potion Factory is willing to donate a license for Tangerine, a 24.95 value. Very awesome! The turnout of great Mac apps is very encouraging as I’ve only sent out three emails at this point.

UPDATE 3: There will be a copy of Rapidweaver available too, many thanks to Dan from RealMac Software!

UPDATE 4: I have received confirmation from the developers of CSSEdit, Typinator, PopCharX, SmartBackup, Journler, and ChaChing. If you have any special requests, please send them in soon.

Turns out, no real surprise, that the site is pretty much unusable in IE7. Yep, the latest and greatest IE and my site is broke. The text is extremely small and the javascript I have at the top of the page doesn’t work. Other than that, the site looks almost as one would expect. Except that you can’t read anything.

Looking in IE 6 is better/worse, depending how you look at it. You can at least read the text in the posts now, but the layout is extremely screwed up. JS still doesn’t work.

So, I should feel bad. I’m an aspiring developer. Granted I’m not as excited about web technologies and such, but I should strive for perfection. I wrote this theme for wordpress from the ground-up using standards, because I simply didn’t know what I was doing in CSS and such and just read the docs online. So it’s such a shame that IE can’t display all my work properly.

If this site was geared for another audience, this would certainly matter more. But, as there is only an extremely small percentage of people that use IE to view (it can be argued that the reason the percentage is so small directly relates to the fact that you can’t view the site in IE), I just don’t have the time and motivation to work out the bugs. Rant done.

• Podpress, my plugin for podcast management, is having issues. So far, the only one I see is that you can’t directly play, download, or see the download count of an individual episode on that post’s page. If you are subscribed, this doesn’t affect you.
• The links area in the sidebar isn’t working. I’m assuming that some function calls have changed since I created the theme, so I’ll have to make those changes and update the site to allow compatibility there later as well.

If you run across something other than what is mentioned here, I’d love for you to leave me a comment on this post or drop me an email at support@macfanatic.net

UPDATE: I have fixed the links/blogroll in the sidebar. Just as I figured, the function calls in 2.1 changed since I made my theme for 2.0.x series. Anyway, if anyone else is experiencing problems with their PHP functions, it’s worth checking out the WordPress Codex. There have been several template tags deprecated and added for 2.1, so it’s worth checking out. In my case, the ‘get_links()’ function was deprecated and replaced with a ‘wp_get_bookmarks()’ function. The newer function takes arguments that are much easier to read too, a very nice touch. By default, however, this new bookmark function sorts by categories and lists those names. Would be fine for an unstyled blog, but had nasty <h2> tags thrown in and more <ul> tags than I wanted.

UPDATE 2: I fixed the problem with Podpress after searching around in the WordPress Codex and the support forums for Podress for about an hour. Turns out that all that Podpress wanted, was an ‘action hook’. You can read more about those here, but I just had to add ‘<?php wp_head(); ?>’ between the <head></head> tags in my theme and I’m all set. Yay!

A lot has happened with the Mac community in the last month or so, I don’t have the time or memory to accurately recall everything that has transpired. Of note, however, is that the AppleTVs have shipped and Leopard should be ready for a release within the next few months. Something worth getting excited over!

School and just life in general has been pretty insane these last few weeks. Everything is starting to die down a bit, but I’m trying to take some more personal time to just enjoy life than I have in the past, and that tends to be very time consuming in itself. I have had some time to tie up a lot of loose ends and get started in a few other areas, and I’d like to share that.

Photos
I’m working through a basic photography book and looking to book a class this summer on photography. I have also been using Aperture for several months now and it has been in the queue for a review. Since it will still be several weeks before I get around to reviewing it, I just thought I would say that it is an incredible piece of software and I especially love the vaults feature. More to come on that topic later. I have posted a gallery of my favorite pictures from my trip to Charleston, SC as well as some other general photos I like online. You can view those here. Paul, I’d especially like any comments as you have a photography blog of your own.

Software
Let me just start out by saying that my current computer class has been a real challenge. Computer Organization is the name of the game and the class focuses on digital logic, processor performance and pipelining, memory management, and the ARM assembly language. Just to say up front, I despise writing in assembly. Read in between the lines. HATE it. However, I have learned a lot and the class has been a real challenge.

Also of note here is that I have stopped development on Viewer and removed it from the site. I put a lot of work into the project, but in the end it was very sloppy and poorly written. Without the time or motivation to rework my previous work and with a lack of general interest, I’ve put it on the back burner and left it to die. On a rainy day with time on my hands and an interest in revising and revisiting past projects, I might take it up again, but I doubt it.

So the good news here, I’ve started a new project! I’ve worked through the general game-play logic and written my base code or a Phase 10-like game. I love the card game and just went through and realized that I could create almost everything needed on my own, except for the interface. So, in a few weeks I should have basic Terminal-based game play down and then I will embark on an adventure of learning all about custom drawing in Cocoa!

Thanks to all of the regular listeners and contributers to the site. It’s great to get emails from everyone and feedback, so keep that coming. I also hope to be posting a few articles from listeners that have wrote in with awesome ideas, applescripts, automator actions, etc. Those will be going up once I type and edit some more, asking for approval of my changes, etc.

Of further note, if anyone is a member of a student organzation on any campus that is Mac oriented or if you have been involved in any MUG (Mac User Group) before, please send me an email so we can talk. I have contacted my campus’s Apple Representative and finally receieved a response that there is no such group available on my campus and we’ve been talking a bit, with the possibility of me heading one up. I’d just like to get some feedback and ideas from anyone else if they have went through anything similar before.

Lionsgate has released several movies on iTunes this week. Some pretty popular titles such as “Terminator 2″ and “Basic Instinct” are now available. Read more here.

Interesting article about crashing an in-flight Tetris game. Very funny read. Basically the guy noticed that there were 4 levels to Tetris, he was able to set it to 5 by using another button pad and because of bad coding techniques (explained in the article), he was able to increment the level number to 127 and beyond, crashing the app because of some basic number representation theory ( adding one to 127 will go to -128 in a one bit signed char ). Read here.

A 66 year-old man freed his grandson from an anaconda. Wow. Read here.

Steve Jobs in deeper trouble because of back-dating stock options at Pixar, when he was still involved with that company. He was working at two separate companies and both are now involved in SEC investigations dealing with the stock options. Read here.

I found a widget this week that allows you to easily create torrent files. Basically, you just drag a folder, file, or group of files onto the widget and it will place a torrent on your Desktop for you. Extremely easy! Read here.

Once again, sorry for the lack of an episode this week, but be sure to check back next week when I plan on talking about several applications to enhance your iTunes experience on the Mac.

Learn More about WordPress 2.1

Basically, the images in the “Hall of Fame” (that’s what the div container is called, for the stylesheet people out there) now move around a bit, so I can show a lot more articles and let the content grow more. It’s an easy way to see what I’ve been working on and I’ll try to keep it trimmed down, so you don’t have to sit and stare at the images for a whole minute to see all of the entries. It looks pretty cool and I’ve tested it in a few different Mac browsers, so I feel like I have all the bugs out and everything should run pretty smoothly. If you do encounter a bug or have a suggestion, feel free to email me or talk with me on iChat.

You can grab the code, with nice comments, here. Great start for those unsure of JavaScript. Uses arrays, element IDs, custom objects, and setInterval().

The iTunes Promotion last week brought in a record number of visitors. There were more unique hits on the site the week the contest was going on than any other month since the site has been online. Traffic continues to increase on an almost weekly basis and topping previous stats is really cool. It’s also apparent that several of the people that came to the site for the contest have stuck around, so here is a big welcome to everyone that has just joined! Be sure to check out my About page to learn more about me. I’m pretty easy to contact on iChat and I answer all emails. Also tune into the podcast. There are several episodes available with reviews on tons of Mac software.

Welcome one and all!

Links 4 Mac.com

For those that are interested in how I determined the winner, you can view the code to a simple application I whipped up here. A nice tutorial on using srandom() and random(), if you are into that sort of thing. There were 2 pingbacks and 5 comments that were invalid, and then my last comment at the end for the closing comment. Therefore, there were 32 valid comments and the winner was number 14, Lindsey.

Thanks to everyone who left comments. I enjoyed reading over those and looking at everyone’s websites. Really cool to see what kind of people are reading the site, so thanks again everyone!

Original Site Post

UPDATE:  There are now 24 entries.  Hurry up and enter now!  – 9:30pm Jan 10 

Enter here.

Here are the rules:

• You must leave a comment on this post
• You must leave a first and last name, as well as a valid email address when you post the comment (so I can reach you)
• The comment may be about anything, but comments concerning Macworld, the site, the podcast, or Macs in general would be great.
• Comments must be submitted no later than January 14th 2007 at 11:59pm EST. Contest opens at time of posting, today. That’s 8 days of commenting.

The winner will be chosen by a random number. As a short explanation, I have a short app that I wrote that takes a random number, then divides that number by the total of valid comments. I take the remainder for that division and will look at that comment. If that comment isn’t valid, I look at the next, until I find a valid one. If I reach the end of the comments, I will start at the beginning. It’s basically a hash function, for those that are more technically inclined to that stuff.

The prize is a $30 dollar (USD) iTunes Gift Certificate that will be delivered via email. I will contact the winner shortly after the deadline to make sure everything is all set, then send the gift certificate on its way.

Let’s make this a fun experience so I may be inclined to do future promotions!

Contest Closed and Winner Contacted

The contest is over and the winner was Lindsey Hardegree. Congratulations Lindsey!

For those that were interested in the way I found the winner, I wrote a simple application to find the winner. I have the code online to view here.

First off, the site has been online for one year now. We haven’t been with this domain for a year yet, that’s in February if I’m not mistaken, but I’ve been working on the site for a year. That’s a big accomplishment, I was excited and enthusiastic, but never quite thought that I would be renewing my hosting and domain name with such success and a loyal following as everyone has allowed. I truly appreciate it.

I have finally torn myself away from a few other ongoing projects, as well as my vacation, to finish the last of the site changes that I started at the beginning of December. The site has an updated favicon, new podcast icon, and the Downloads page is once again in business. I believe that about wraps up all of the stuff that I needed to get accomplished.

I am working on a podcast shortly, I should have lots of announcements and cool stuff this week, if everything pans out as I hope, so stay tuned. Of note is this next podcast I will be reviewing the first product that I haven’t personally purchased. I will be reviewing a piece of software because the company contacted me and requested that I review it, so this is a very big step for us!

Apple filed a bunch of financial reports because it’s the end of the year and it still looks like Jobs is in the clear. I have to wonder who is going down for this, surely there will have to be some criminal charges brought against someone, it wasn’t an accident that this was allowed to continue for nine years.

iTunes and iPods did very well this holiday season. My brother had several friends which received iPods this year and I know several others as well. This is easily confirmed by the fact that there were millions of hits on the Apple site on Christmas day because people were trying to download iTunes and setup their iPods. The iTunes store is still feeling the effects as downloads are downright slow as of this writing.

For those that remember, my Macbook battery issue has been resolved with a replacement. I bought this black Macbook within a week of the initial launch and started having issues about two months ago with a four month old battery. The computer would die with about one hour of battery life remaining (according to the OS), making me curse several times as I lost data on the shutdowns. There was a discussion in the Apple Discussions about this issue and several other users reported receiving a new battery fixed the issue. This was true for me as well.

Finally, I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays and have a very safe New Years Eve as we look forward to 2007. May 2007 see the safe return of our troops.

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The problem I was trying to fix was simple. When you are on the main page of the site with all the posts, you want to be able to see the area under the post that displays information like “There are (some #) comments for (post name)”. You don’t need to see that when you are on the actual post’s page to read the full post and look at comments. You also don’t need to see a date and tag info for pages in WordPress, such as the new About and Downloads pages. Just of note, I have left Rapidweaver for this site. It’s on a sad note since Rapidweaver is what spawned this site almost a year ago this week. It’s been a great year and I’ll more about that later, but I’m no longer using Rapidweaver on the site.

To put it simply, the issue I was having was with the PHP if() statement, by trying to have the HTML code on the page only if it met that condition. The solution my my problem came with the realization of a colon operator in PHP that allowed me to write the above code. Just out there for anyone else that might be having issues as well.

I’m sure there will be some bugs in my code, as I spent some time working through PHP for the first time, but hopefully it will work itself out okay and there won’t be any major problems. That being said, if anyone finds anything repulsive or any weird oddities, please drop me a line or post a comment for this post. I already see a couple things that I’ll be working on over the next few days, but a few more sets of eyes never hurt.

Just of note, this theme was created almost entirely from scratch. I used the javascript I had left over from the previous one for the changing images as well as reused most of the template layout code. I also slightly modified the CSS styling for the comments. After that, everything was started from a clean slate. That might not seem like a lot to someone, but starting with nothing and coming from the ground up was a major accomplishment. The site is inspired by the Pro pages from Apple too, for the curious. A lot of the grey combinations came from there. I however love the green I added.

Please provide feedback. The final decision is still up to me and the artwork is subject to evolve a bit before I hit the final version of the code. However, I’d like to hear everyone’s thoughts on the artwork. My major concern is whether or not the pom-pom really looks like one….

The Version I’m most serious about is directly below.

This last image is one that I played around with before adding the pennant to the image. Just looking for thoughts.

Part of this overall change will incorporate a bit of layout changes on the main page as well as a new logo for the site. I was hoping to get a pro to do this and contacted several people in the community. However, I was only able to get one company to come back and tell me that they could indeed take on new clients, while everyone else I contacted said they wouldn’t be available for new clients until Spring 2007. There was one listener that contacted me about this issue and I emailed him back, but I have since lost your email (my Macbook’s hard drive failed a bit ago) and I haven’t received another email from you, so if you’re reading, email me again if you’re interested please.

All that being said, here is a draft that I have been working on so far. I originally wanted something super aqua and realistic and still wouldn’t mind having that, but it’s simply out of my ability to create something like that, so I thought that I would go with something flat looking, while still stylish. Just some things that come to my mind when I think of “fanatic” are a lot of sports stuff like megaphones, pom-poms, and mainly the big #1 foam finger. Here is my initial mockup so far.

Please send me some comments, especially if you are coming from a designer perspective and could contribute useful tips. Feel free to email me some suggestions as well, maybe I’ve missed a very cool idea and you have it, that’d be great. Keep the suggestions and thoughts coming people!

All that being said I’ve got an episode about 1/2 way recorded when I find time to polish and release it. I’m having issues getting up with the Cha-Ching developer, Juan Alvarez and getting him to talk with me, so I’m not sure if that interview will be pulled off or not. I’m hoping to get that interview out to everyone this upcoming weekend, but I’ll have to play it by ear. Once again, sorry for the lack of everything and I’ll try to make a few posts a bit later in the week after I get some school stuff done. Thanks for bearing with me.

Download your free 21 day demo of PathFinder 4 here.

Let me just say that the Universal build flies whereas the PPC build was so slow under Rosetta that I was using the WordPress editor more and more. A great addition to hold me over until Ecto 3 is released some day.

Download Ecto 2.4.1 as a Universal Binary released Oct 3, 2006.

I’m not sure how many readers and listeners are Cocoa programmers, but just in case there are a few of you out there that haven’t heard of this, I’ll make it my personal mission to introduce you to the best way to have your Cocoa programs update themselves automatically, the way it should be done. A lot less hassle and a better user experience as well. Several applications already use the framework, so rest assured that it works well.

Read more here.

So, basically I have this 200Gb external USB disk that I couldn’t use because I couldn’t format it from Disk Utility on my Macbook. Disk Utility would just hang and never get a thing accomplished. So, I found a very good tip here from the great people over at MacOSXHints and that got me started in the right direction.

The basics of this tip was that you would need a Windows machine to just write the partitions out. You didn’t need to format them with Windows, but just initiliaze the disk and then create your partitions. Wasn’t that tricky, you use the built-in disk management that is located in the “Manage” contextual menu after you right-click on “My Computer”, at least on XP. So, I got that setup with no probs.

Hooking the drive backup to my Mac is where it got tricky. Disk Utility still wouldn’t play well at all, so I went with the Terminal approach. NOTE: diskutil from the Terminal has the same probs, don’t even try it.

newfs_msdos -v FAT_VOLUME_NAME -F 32 /dev/rdisk3s2

The above command formatted the second partition on my external disk as FAT32 so that I could easily share some stuff between Windows, Linux, and Mac. Great. Now to getting the majority of my disk as a Journaled HFS+ volume so I wouldn’t have to worry about filenames getting corrupted and would be able to enjoy all the great stuff with the filesystem. Hard to do my friends.

In the tip, there was another command to format the first volume. I ran that and got “Initialized HFS+ volume…” Sounds promising. In the tip the author also mentioned that his system picked up the FAT32 one, but he had to manually mount the HFS+ volume. Tried that with no sucsess, got an IOKit timeout error.

From here I went back to the drawing boards. I had heard of issues with Firewire drives and Oxford chipsets. This is a USB drive, so that ruled FW out and the chipset didn’t seem to be the problem for Windows, so I ruled that one out as well. Next, I’d heard reports that booting from your installation disk might work. I tried that with my Macbook’s DVD and got the same results (with Disk Utility and diskutil from a Terminal window).

I had heard that it was possibly related to an Intel issue, so I set off with a retail copy (10.4.2) of Tiger and tried doing the same things on my brothers older eMac. No luck with that either. The last thing I had left to try was the tip I’d read somewhere that Panther was the only thing some people could use to get it working. I didn’t have a Mac with Panther on it, so I had disregarded this tip earlier in the process. However, it just hit me that I did have a Panther CD lying around and that if I booted from that I would have a Terminal and Disk Utility as well. Guess what! Using Disk Utility from the Panther CD, I was able to easily format my HFS disk and all went as you would expect. The caveat of this approach is that evidently Panther won’t format FAT32 volumes, so you would still need to format this via a Windows machine, of back in Tiger (via the Terminal, still couldn’t get it working with Disk Utility at all).

A very long process for something that should be very easy to do.  I’m filing a bug report right now to see what the deal is, but hopefully this will help get someone else off on the right foot if you are having issues as well.

However, I wanted to format the drive to get two partions and just get rid of all the junk that was on it.  This is where the problem comes in.  The mac wouldn’t even recognize the disk, so I had to “initialize” it in Windows.  Then Disk Utility sees the disk and it just needs to be partitioned.  Leaving that alone, it will hang up in about 5 seconds and never does a thing, and I’ve left it alone for about 12 hours at the longest stretch.  Nothing.

I’ve read all over the net about problems like this with Firewire enclousures and can’t find a firmware update or anything to my case (Vantec NexStar GX).  So, just wondering if anyone has any suggestions, possibly another partitioning program available for the Mac?  I want an HFS+ partition, but just can’t get it.  Also, I read that a couple people got it working simply by using the version of Disk Utility that comes with Panther instead of Tiger.  Any truth to that?

So, for those that don’t know what this site is about, I’m mainly focused on providing interesting tips and reviews for Mac users. Sometimes this varies from slightly more technical stuff (see this post) to more common things, such as an RSS Tutorial, but I like to think that I keep everyone happy by jumping around a bit in coverage. I produce the Mac Fanatic podcast which airs weekly, usually up on Sunday afternoons at the lastest. There is also a video feed that I just posted, as our video and audio episodes were in the same podcast for the last few months.

I’m a 19 year old college student working a couple of jobs and attending WWDC 2006 in less than 2 weeks! I’ll be throwing in an intro article for the macCompanion production in the August issue and will have WWDC coverage in the September issue. Check back on this website for some thoughts and experiences throughout the conference itself as well.

Let me know what you want to hear reviewed or covered! I’m only one person and while what may strike me as immensely interesting, others assure me that not everyone enjoys looking through lines of code and having a “Hey, that’s how you do that!” moment. So, welcome to the site and I hope you’ll be back. There are feeds on the left of the page so you can stay up to date, including with comments, Atom, RSS, the podcast feed, and a link to the podcast on the Music Store.

Long live the Mac!

I have some big news to share with everyone. I was asked to join the staff over at macCompanion a few days ago and the process is pretty much complete. So, it looks like I’ll be writing a techy-column for the monthly web based magazine, with the occasional review thrown in. I should have my first appearance in the September issue. If you haven’t heard of the site, it’s a pretty big deal. Head on over here and check it out for yourself. The articles are great and you might actually laugh of learn something.

It’s not really any nasty code at all when you think of it, just some basic PHP. Since I found the code off of a tutorial, I’ll save everyone the time and just post it here. You’ll need to change your domain name to match yours, but other than that is should come ready to work right out of the box. I chose to use an image instead of a regular text because I found a new font that I liked and wanted to spice the site up a bit. So the image below is used in place of just a regular text link.

The Code

<a href=“http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php echo urlencode(“http://www.macfanatic.net” . $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]); ?>”>Digg This Article</a>

If you’re going to use this with WordPress, you’ll want to add this in your “comments.php” file in your theme. The advantage to this is that the little script actually works, but the link won’t show up when people subscribe via RSS, only when the fully read your article at it’s specific permalink address. Hey, life’s not perfect, I’m up for suggestions.

You have been able to subscribe to the comments feed for the site for awhile now, letting you know the moment that anyone posts a comment on any article. However, today I added the functionality where you can not only do that, but be notified via email of follow-up comments on a specific article that you commented on. So, when you make comments (and please do!) check that little box and you’ll start receiving emails when someone else posts a comment on just that one article.

I also encourage my regular readers to sign up and register for an account on the site. I have a few friends that have made the plunge, but if you comment enough and would like to join, go right ahead. Saves you from entering more information the next time you comment. Also, if anyone would be interested in joining me here at Mac Fanatic as a co-author, feel free to shoot me an email. I dedicate a lot of my time to this site, but I’m only one person. Having another hand on board, especially someone with different opinions and interests, would only diversify the content offered here and make the site a more resourceful place for everyone.

You can read more about the comments plugin for WordPress here.

Therefore the site is now up to version 1.1, with the addition of the grey boxes in the sidebar on the left hand side of the page. There are also links up for the archives as well, so enjoy those if you wish. As always, give me feedback on the site, content, or podcast!

So, my question to everyone out there is simple. Is there something I’ve missed here recently? I’m guessing that I’m just not talking about interesting stuff for all to hear coupled with the fact that it is summer and it makes it harder, at least for me, to stay on the computer and keep up with this kinda thing.

Just any comments on the matter would be welcome. I’m always looking for more ideas for episodes and welcome feedback, whether it’s harsh and critical or the pleasant hello.

With that in mind, head on over to the updated info to learn a bit more about me, and if you would like to hire me, let me know! You can view my resume here.

With that in mind, I’ve been creating images to go in the top right hand corner of the pages on the site. Every time you reload or load a page, you get a new image. It’s not magic, but lovely javascript. It’s not that hard to implement, and can even be done in Rapidweaver, so if you want some advice, be sure to ask.

You can view the lovely showcase of images I’ve put up over here. Not only can you see all the banners I’ve put along with the witty phrases that accompany them, but if you click on an image, you will be directed to the appropriate site. It’s a nice way for me to give back to the community since I can let everyone know what I feel are the best and most important Mac OS X technologies and applications.

If you have an idea for a new image to be placed on the site, contact me and I’d love to talk with you about it. I don’t run any ads on the site and I don’t get paid from anyone for making these, just thought I’d throw that in for everyone.

The kernel extension lets other programs, such as CoreDuoTemp or the iStat Nano Widget, see just how hot your Intel Mac is running. Without this little piece of software, there isn’t any software currently available that can give you this information.

Grab it from our Downloads page.

Changelog v1.2
Updated speedit extension v.50 – Caution: This update seems to have problems on my system, don’t recommend the update as of yet.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macbook, SpeedIt

Thanks for everyone’s support! The podcast continues to grow, the site’s traffic increases every month and I get more feedback from listeners and loyal readers all the time. Don’t hesitate to shoot me an email, I love to talk.

Technorati Tags: SpeedIt

I would have really liked to share the “Doncha Wish” skit, but it’s not going to work. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

So, I grab the applications image (like if you’re changing it’s icon) and save it as a file. But this is 128×128, and a little big for most web uses. For the longest time the only way I knew of shrinking the image down to use it on the site was to use Photoshop, which is overkill.

However, I ran across a nice tip from MacOSXHints.com the other day and love it. I modified it just a tad for use with the site, but that’s it. Works wonderfully. You can see the code if you “Read More…”

There’s also a download for it on the Downloads page. You just drag an image onto the icon and it creates a copy that is resized to 64×64 on your desktop. Very nice, huh?

–Found this from MacOSXHints.com
–Modified slightly to make a 64×64 image for uses on Mac Fanatic.net site

– save in Script Editor as Application
– drag files to its icon in Finder

on open some_items

repeat with this_item in some_items

try

rescale_and_save(this_item)

end try

end repeat

end open

to rescale_and_save(this_item)

tell application “Image Events”

launch
set the target_width to 64
– open the image file
set this_image to open this_item

set typ to this_image‘s file type

copy dimensions of this_image to {current_width, current_height}
if current_width is greater than current_height then

scale this_image to size target_width

else

– figure out new height
– y2 = (y1 * x2) / x1
set the new_height to (current_height * target_width) / current_width
scale this_image to size new_height

end if

tell application “Finder” to set new_item to ¬

(container of this_item as string) & “scaled.” & (name of this_item)

save this_image in new_item as typ

end tell

end rescale_and_save

I have some super news to report, everyone. I just received an email from Apple saying that I’d been selected as a recipient of a 2006 Student E-ticket to the WWDC this summer!

I applied never thinking that I’d get the opportunity to go to this event, but it seems that luck is on my side. I’m really excited about this and looking forward to it so much. I have to raise money for the flight (think $500 round trip) and then cash for food, a motel, etc, so I’m going to be in a very tight squeeze.

Ultimately I think I’ll end up going (I have yet to accept, can wait until June 26) but I have to have money for tuition first.

If anyone wants to send a penny my way, I’d greatly appreciate it. If not, then just think of me, I’ll be having a blast at a major Apple event getting experience that will benefit me for a lifetime.

This disturbed me for awhile and after reading through the RW forums just the other day, someone proposed a solution that worked.

All you do is copy over the “functions.js” file from a functioning theme (I used Magnesium) and overwrite the one that is in your theme already. I highly recommend making a backup of your current functions.js in case something turns up later and you need to revert. However, for the moment it seems to have fixed my problem and I have some photos up online again.

To edit a theme like this, the easiest way is to just open up Rapidweaver and show the Theme Drawer. Ctrl-Click on the theme and use the “Show Contents” option. In the Finder window that pops up, just copy the “functions.js”. Repeat for the theme you’re wanting to fix, except you’ll paste instead of copying for the last step. Preview your page in your ‘new’ theme and you should see the fruits of your labor!

Get your copy here

You can subscribe to the feed at the below address or just use the handy little purple feed icon in the sidebar to the left.

http://www.macfanatic.net/blog/comments/rss/

I downloaded another clip just earlier today that I liked from the Firefox Flicks site, and this one wouldn’t convert either. If anyone has any suggestions about converting (QT won’t let me export, share, etc) maybe some type of saved/protected file, let me know. It’s just a regular .mp4 from what I can tell, but there’s something different about it.

Can grab the download at:

http://www.macfanatic.net/downloads/temp-loader-v10.dmg

read more | digg story

After doing research and a few hours of tinkering before I realized what I needed to do, I was able to get the kernel extension working that allowed programs like Temperature Monitor to read the CPU temperature from my new Intel Mac.

However, this was really tedious to do every time I started my computer and I’d always thought about trying to learn some simple shell scripting and AppleScript, so I dove in for the past 8 hours or so and have created my scripts, images, installers, and disk image to get everyone else with an Intel Mac up and running in no time.

You can download the Temp Monitor Loader here. Basically, the installer that I included correctly installs the SpeedIt kernel extension and places the Temperature Monitor apps along with my custom AppleScript app in a folder in your Applications folder.

If you put the AppleScript application that I created in your startup items list, then it prompts you for an admin password, loads the extension in the background, and then starts up the Lite version of Temp Monitor for you. Only have to configure the Temp apps once and you’re all set. Instructions and pictures included in the disk image, along with my AppleScript source.

This is just my way of having a good time and giving back to the community. Let me know if you run into any problems with this. I’ve tested it on a few new Macbooks and it worked just fine on all of them. It should also work fine on PPC Macs if you use the custom install option and just install the Temperature Monitor applications themselves.

EDIT: I contacted the developers of both the SpeedIt Extension and Temperature Monitor. While I’m waiting to hear back from the developer of SpeedIt Extension, the developer of the Temperature Monitor apps has clearly expressed that he doesn’t want his producted distributed/associated with this application. So, in compliance with his requests, I have modified the installer and disk image. Now the installer doesn’t distribute/install the Temp Monitor apps and the disk image has a quick link so that you can download and use them yourselves. Sorry about the confusion, but laws are laws, even though I don’t quite understand the dramatic ramifications that were supposed to come from this one.

Yep, I like to keep it safe, so this is .9b. I’m not sure how much of a demand there is for this, since I would think that most people would subscribe in an aggregator, but heck, I learned a lot during the way and it was fun, so at least download it and give me some feedback on the design and implementation.

Features:
.9b Widget

Like I said, I’d love to hear some feedback!

You can grab the widget here

I’ll have to investigate this a little more.

Come to find out, the site had been hit with several lovely “pingbacks” that show up in the comments of the posts. I have it setup to send me an email whenever we get a comment and therefore I got all of these. However, it took me a little while to delete them and more were appearing. It looks like putting the word “credit” in the comment blacklist was able to curb them, but still, this is pretty pathetic if you as me.

For the record, all the comment titles had the word “credit” in them, as in refinancing, etc…so I’m not crazy.

So, I thought that I would see just how well we’re turning up on Google nowadays with a very simple search string “Mac Fanatic”.  For the longest time the site was buried down in the 6th and 7th page region, even though that was our domain name.  (I have read up on Google though, I learn more about search algorithms everyday).

However, searching for just “Mac Fanatic” last night got me a ranking of 7 on the page.  Quite a nice jump up from the ranks at the bottom.  If you search for far more specific stuff that I’ve written about, or had podcast episodes on, the site turns up much higher at the top, sometimes number 1 or 2 (though I don’t recall what those were).

So, I’m very proud of how the site is growing and think that I’ve found something I really enjoy doing and sharing my opinions and experiences with people.  It’s definitely a rewarding experience to get feedback and comments, it encourages me to know that there are indeed some people out there!

I glanced over an article earlier today about directing more traffic to your blog and I plan on looking that over more closely in the next few days, paying especially close attention to technorati tags.  If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, I’m all ears.

What this means?  If you click on the little “RSS” blue button in Safari, you’ll get all the posts instead of just the ones in the “podcast” category.

Edit: I had posted this, but have since then had to reenable the redirect due to causes beyond my control….Nope, just because iTunes isn’t picking up the last episode that I just added. Evidently it was never permanently directed over, so I’m going to try something different. Sorry to get everyone’s hopes up.

If you run into any problems or weirdness, please let me know, as I’m always bored and have nothing to do (gotcha!  But I do enjoy working on the site). 

-Matt

Although, users of IE 6 still have some problems since I love to use PNG images and not just JPEG, so IE has some problems rendering the transparencies that I have setup for everything.

The only thing that really needs to be fixed with these is the navigation bar, as it looks very different. However, I have a lot of other stuff working, such as the random image script and the new logo and such, so I feel like I deserve a pat on the back for diving it and editing a RW theme so thoroughly when I’ve only tweaked a tad of CSS with one before.

I’ve done my best to try and make this major transition as smooth as possible for everyone, but it doesn’t seem to be working out as best as I’d hoped. I have set the old RSS feed as a redirect to the new one. The lovely music store has picked up on the change in the feed, showing all the episodes as well as our new artwork.

If you subscribed to the old feed via a news reader, it seems to work just fine. However, iTunes is being stubborn about taking over the new feed (at least for me). If anyone gets it working, please let me know. I’m fine if it’s only me with the issue, but I hate to think that there are people out there that have just been cut off, especially after I went through great lengths to get it all working.

Speaking of that, I also added a javascript that randomly selects images to display. Therefore, reloading the page a few times should at least give you a different image up in the top right hand corner at least once. Right now there are only two images, but I’ll be working to put together some more in the next bit. The excitement is the fact that it actually works as I wanted it all too!

However, when I got up this morning some 10 hours later, it was still running. Seems that isearch2 has problems indexing the forum part of the site as it was showing some 235,000 pages to be indexed, with no sign of stopping. There has to be some fundamental problem here, but I don’t understand it. I included a screenshot below for everyone’s enjoyment.

You can catch the full rss feed at:

feed://www.macfanatic.net/blog/feed/atom/

There is also a feed that is specifically podcast related that’s located at:

feed://www.macfanatic.net/blog/?feed=rss2&category_name=podcasts

The only thing that I have left to tackle is the borders that show up around images. I don’t think that it is a problem with Safari, but it’s a major problem with IE and Firefox.

If anyone has any sites they’d like to suggest, I’m all ears.

So, I will shortly be moving the main page over to the new engine. The only thing holding me back right now is setting up a proper navigation menu to that it integrates well with the rest of the site. Right now though, I’m really interested in people’s feedback!

Once the change is made, the podcast feed will be moving also, but I’ll do all the dirty work so it should just happen for you (if you’re using iTunes).

You can check out the labor of my efforts here.

You can read the article from the RW forums here.

Check that out here.

Anyway, I found it hilarious that the site’s user base is mostly Mac (that’s not exciting, just predictable) but that there are more “other” OS’s than Windows, presumably Linux. A screenshot is available below:

We had some RSS issues late this week, due to me making some site structure changes, skipping out on a podcast, and family stuff, and therefore it took me awhile to see that I even had a problem. However, we’re all up and set now, so sync your feeds, because we’re back in business.

Until I get around to updating the whole site (export is soooo slow) you can check the message boards out at:

http://www.macfanatic.net/forum

Just thought that everyone would want to know that .

This means that if you find any dead links, please let me know, and I’ll be sure to get them fixed. I’ve moved several pages over to the “Columns” style from Your Head Software (a plugin for RW) and added a lot of icons that I’ve found on the net, to spice the site up a bit.

I’m trying to finish adding the content at the moment, and I’ll have to go through and figure out what old pages need to be taken down, since RW doesn’t get rid of those (I’m not looking forward to this part).

Because of this, any old links might not work in some older pages (because I was using HTML pages and not the built-in link maker of RW) but just bare with me as I spend the rest of my afternoon getting the site up to tip-top shape.

Thanks everyone, and be sure to let me know how you like everything!

UPDATE: Our counter is now working…I simply copied over the folder containing the .cgi file from our old host and posted it on our new server. While I can’t figure out how to reset it or anything else, at least it’s working

New features to employ:

Moving to the new hosting company gave me many new features that I hope to make use of. First, we now have custom MIME types. This simply means that when I link to a podcast episode, for instance, that you’ll be able to listen to it directly in the browser. This also applies to disk image (.dmg) files as well.

We now have several easily installable content systems, chat rooms, forums, project management software, and the list goes on. As I slowly implement these into the site, I’ll let everyone know.

Our bandwidth and storage spaces have more than doubled. Even though we weren’t in threat of going over our bandwidth with our old host, paying half price and getting so much more is nice.

For anyone that is interested in the switch, you can check out our new host here. I just also want to mention that Network Solutions (our old host) was a good company that had awesome tech support. They just didn’t provide a high level of customizations that I wanted. (And I found something cheaper).

I’ll be posting more about this company in the meantime, but I’m really excited about it so far. Right now I’ll be posting the site to both servers until I see that the transition is complete (or Network Solutions pulls the plug).

After some reading, I thought I had it all figured out and was just going to edit the .htaccess file and add the .m4a as a MIME type. However…..Network Solutions doesn’t allow custom .htaccess or MIME type settings.

That brings me to this. I’m now in hunt of another hosting company. I’ve been hanging out in the RW forums and seem to like GoDaddy.com for this. However, I’m a bit confused on just what switching servers entails. I’ve made the switch once before, but I didn’t keep the domain name. I don’t want the site to be down at all during our transition.

Basically, if anyone has any comments on hosting companies or the process of switching DNS entries to point to our new host, be sure to drop me a line!

Just want to thank everyone for their support. Any suggestions for the podcast or the site, email me and I’ll be glad to oblige.

Just also wanted to mention that we’re getting some good traffic from search engines now too, the reviews (podcasts) are really drawing people in, as well as a lot of traffic this month has came from the Motorola and V557 area.

Thanks everyone!

Check out the photos here.

Anyway, I zipped the disk image, and put that up on the server, and it seems to work just fine. So you can grab the zip archive here.

So, the “Blog” page, “Garageband Blog” and the “Photoshop Blog” have all been deleted. I’m thinking about pruning back the video section too, since those files that are there for the SNL skits are really large, and I had overlooked that (think 80MB). And for the couple other videos there, I might incorporate those into the podcast here shortly, so those will probably come down, I’m not sure. I might just link to the files when I put them on the podcast, so a least they won’t be on the site twice…

You can check all of that out here.

I saw a site called Orloffilm that used a modified version of a RW theme, and I fell in love with the un-modified version. So, for the seven dollars, we’re up and running using a new theme. I plan on modding this one some too. I want different color buttons and some other tiny things, but that will happen gradually with time. And a new logo banner, that too

Lastly, Google has made it’s way off of the site for now. I was putting code in the sidebar (which has also dissappeared from most pages now) for ads, but they are ugly and cheap looking, so I’ve removed all ads from the site. If you happen to find one, email me to let me know.

I won’t go over a lot of features here because I plan to do a podcast episode on this soon (or an actual online review if I get the time, *cough, cough*), but check this out in the mean time. It integrates really well with Flickr, blogging services, etc. It just looks really awesome and handles the extra stuff besides basic browsing really well. I would switch to this in a second if it just had better RSS support. This is another good example of building a product on top of the mozilla codebase.

As a quick side note, I got motivated when playing with all the extras in the browser and setup a blog API (WordPress) on my server, to try out the browser. Works very well and you can check out the resulting effort here.

I’m also posting some screenshots of using Flock here, so check those out to view the cool features I’m talking about.

Just to get everyone in the two month anniversary spirit I’ve put up my very first attempt at creating a comic! Hope that everyone enjoys.

You can view the page here.

posted here a few days back saying that my brother was excited about my web expereince and wanted to get his own chance to design a webpage. Unfortunately, he’s a Windows user and can’t utilize this great program, Rapid Weaver, to make his pages. So, I spent about 2.5 hours tonight getting custom graphics up for him. Read more about all of the that in Discovering Photoshop. Anyway, we just have a placeholder up for the site right now, but it is up for those that are interested. It just says what my brother plans to do with his webspace. Head on over and check out what a 14 year old can do with an open-soure HTML editor and some help from his older bro.

The address for those die-hards is http://teen.macfanatic.net

LInus Torvalds (the father of Linux) posted in the kernel changelog today that it was 15 years as of Jan 2 since he bought the first PC to start developing linux on it. Where would we be without that PC?

However, the cheap Netgear doesn’t support this functionality. So, just for fun I ran an ethernet cable from one of the ports on the back of the Belkin router (which is hooked up to the net) and put that into the WAN port on the Netgear. Voila! I now have two entirely different wireless networks, each with internet access. I don’t know what purpose this serves (especially since the signal on the Netgear has always sucked and I can barely get reception in my room, and the Belkin gives me a perfect signal), but I have it working. I just wish that I had a print server configured some way so that I wouldn’t have to hook up my printer every-time I wanted to print.

I’m itching to buy an old iMac or something to set up as a file, print, mail, and at some later date when I have money for a domain name, web server. Maybe I just have too much time on my hands on break. We’ll see. If I can justify 100 bucks on eBay here soon, an old iMac might be mine. I’d just have to hook it up via wired ethernet…..ah, I love technology.

What makes this Macworld exciting? Here is a brief list of rumors that float around on the internet. First, the switch from PPC processors to Intel is expected in some shape or form at Macworld. I won’t argue over which machine will be the first to get Intel, but it’s agreed that one will.

New iLife ’06 and possible spreadsheet application of iWorks. This is exciting especially for me for a few reasons. First, the iLife is rumored to bring Apple’s Frontrow interface (like a Media Center done better) to all computers, not just the iMac. Even though I have an iBook, I use it as my DVD player and hook it up to my TV for watching movies, etc. I would love to have Frontrow and a remote to make my life easier. Any addidition to iWork would be good. Keynote is the best presentation app out there, but the others need help.

Mac Mini. An updated Mac Mini with possible Intel chips and Frontrow with other advanced media capabilities. Ponder on that one.

I’m sure there are other rumors out there, but I don’t know which ones are really that credible. I would bet that we’ll get some kind of Intel Mac and maybe the iLife, but I don’t know about a media center Mac just yet. But then, the rumors for the video iPod were unbelievable until it happened this last fall, so anything is possible with Apple. Just look forward to January 9!