Category Archives: Featured

VPS.net Review

I signed up for an account with VPS.net at the beginning of September, installed Ubuntu, and I’ve been slowly migrating my various websites over since.

What exactly is VPS.net? They are a provider of Cloud Virtual Private Servers. You can affordably purchase as much hosting firepower as you need, and have full control over the management of it. VPS.net isn’t like other providers though. Their unique “cloud” twist makes things a bit more interesting…

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Saving Bandwidth and Speeding Up Your Site With GZIP and Browser Caching

There are a couple of easy adjustments you can make to your web server in order to decrease page loading times, save bandwidth, and reduce load on the server. All you have to do is add a couple of code snippets to either your…

Tweetie Retweet URL Replacer

As you may know, my favorite desktop client is Tweetie for Mac. If you use Twitter through a desktop client (whether it’s Tweetie or some other), you probably wish you could click those green retweet buttons and have them open in your client instead…

EasyList Blocks Me: Yet Another AdBlock Rant

In the past 30 days, this blog pulled in about 37,000 pageviews. While that’s not an astronomical figure, it’s more than the 30 days before. This blog is slowly, but steadily, growing. To my dismay, my ad impressions are lower than ever. Only fifteen…

PHP stdClass: Storing Data in an Object Instead of an Array

Have you ever seen a scenario where you’re accessing data as an object, such as when you’re using WordPress’s database interface or when you’re parsing XML files with SimpleXML? You have something like echo $result->name. Have you ever wondered how that was done? Using…

Getting RSS and Twitter Subscriber Counts in WordPress

I previously wrote a post about how some blogs are displaying their RSS subscriber and Twitter follower counts. Mac AppStorm is combining their Twitter and RSS counts into one number, and FreelanceSwitch has a section in their footer with separate readouts for RSS, Twitter,…

Parse a WordPress Plugin’s README.txt With Regular Expressions

I’ve been working on a neat enhancement for my Tweetable WordPress plugin. Already I have a handy “Documentation” link on the plugin’s pages in the WordPress admin. When clicked, it opens a ThickBox dialog pointing to the README.txt file. Not bad, but it had…

Nielsen Wants Your Passwords to Be Visible to the World

Usability authority Jakob Nielsen recently published a new article suggesting that developers “abandon legacy design” and stop masking password fields with bullets or asterisks, because of “reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.” Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type…

Ow.ly: What’s You’re Take?

Ow.ly is a URL shortener that has gained a measure of popularity of late. It ties in with the HootSuite service, which allows you to schedule tweets, manage multiple Twitter profiles, and track link statistics. Ow.ly and HootSuite together are sort of like an…

Tweetie for Mac: OSX-Native Twitter Client

I’ve been trying out Tweetie for Mac lately. It’s a Mac OSX-native Twitter client with a very nice, polished interface. It has many of the features of Nambu, but it lacks the instability that Nambu tends to have from its current “beta” status. Tweetie…