Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

More site reorganization

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If you’re a regular visitor, you’ve probably noticed by now that I’ve moved things around a bit. Basically, I’m working on simplifying the site, especially the first page that people see when they show up, trying to make things a bit less overwhelming (since I do tend to babble).

In essence, the first page of the site now serves as a table of contents/overview of what’s on the site. The table of contents that used to be on the left hand side of the page now fills the main content area, while the Long Letter blog itself has been moved to its own page. The links listed in the right sidebar have been split between the pages — more general links on the main page, and more blog-related links on the Long Letter page.

Lastly, I was able to set the entry for The Long Letter up so that it will always show a short summary of the most recent five entries in the blog. Clicking on the title of the blog will load the main page, while clicking on the title for the individual posts will jump to that entry on the main page.

Overall I think these will help simplify things. Feel free to e-mail or comment if you’ve got any thoughts on all this, of course.

New e-mail addy

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I’ve always kept three active e-mail accounts. One I only give out to my close friends and family, one I give to friends and contacts, and the third is the one I use publicly, on this page and whenever I sign up for anything via the web (this shuffles most of my spam to the public addy).

Due to changes in Yahoo! Mail‘s terms of service, I need to discontinue using my @yahoo.com address. My new public e-mail address is djwudi@myrealbox.com.

(Incidentally, parents, friends, or anyone who has either of my other two addys — you don’t need to worry, those are staying the same).

Yesterday, Yahoo! Mail sent out a notice to all of its POP3 service users (this allowed you to use an external client — such as the Mac OS X Mail program — to check your Yahoo! Mail account, rather than having to use the web-based client) stating that as of April 24th, they would no longer be providing this service for free — rather, you’d have to purchase a $30/year ‘premium’ account. Since I would much rather use my Mail client than have to use the web client, I decided to find a new public addy.

I found a thread on MetaFilter discussing this, and one of the comments suggested that we take a look at Lycos UK‘s free e-mail, as it has the best free e-mail deal available on the web today (“…15 meg of storage, POP3 access, and importantly — SMTP access with unlimited attachment size for outgoing mail.”).

So, I stopped by this morning and signed up. Now I just have to ferret out all those places on the web that I gave my yahoo.com addy and change them over…(sigh).

Update: For one reason or another, the lycos.co.uk server was incredibly slow, to the point where it proved unuseable. I did end up finding MyRealBox, which is run by the folks at Novell, and looks to be a truly good service. So…that’s the addy I’m at now.

Update: In the end, MyRealBox didn’t cut it either. As with many people, I’ve since moved to Gmail. If you really need to find me and don’t have my e-mail addy already, check the ‘about’ page on this site to track me down.

MovableType 2.0

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I’ve just upgraded the backend for my site to Movable Type 2.0, which was just released today. New toys are always good! :)

Front page changes being the most visible, I’ll address those first.

Of lesser consequence, I’ve taken off the ‘Recently Read’ box for the time being. I’m not reading as much as I was before my ‘puters got down here (something I hope to work on correcting after the hullabloo of moving into my new apartment settles down), and I wanted to open up space for the newest addition.

The newest feature addition is one I’ve been looking forward to being able to do since I started reading that it would be included in the MT 2.0 upgrade. On the right below the archive listings, you’ll now notice a ‘Recently commented on’ section. This lists the ten posts that people have (hrm…let’s work on this….) most recently commented on. Yeah, that was tough to figure out, wasn’t it? ;) Anyway, new comments will pop a post to the top of that list, and if you hover your cursor over the post title, it’ll display a comment telling you how many comments have been made total for that post. Nifty, eh?

The less-visible change I’ve made is to the monthly archive listings, and it’s also a change implemented in MT 2.0 that I’ve been waiting for. While I like the standard of having my newest post at the top of the main index page, ensuring that the newest information is always the first to be seen, it seemed kind of silly to me that this forced my monthly archive pages to also display in reverse chronological order. MT 2.0’s stronger sorting features, however, allow me to keep my main page as is, while sorting my monthly archives so that they can be read in chronological order, top to bottom. Makes much more sense to me.

I think those are the only changes I’m going to make for the moment. I’m sure if I stumble across something else that I feel I just have to add, I’ll babble about it. And, of course, suggestions are welcome, if anyone has any.

Beck’s iPod

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Cool ad from Apple on “…the back page of the Sunday NYT Magazine, which had an ASCII-art sillhouette of Beck’s head made up of the names of all the songs on Beck’s iPod, with some marketing copy explaining that Beck has a ginormous library of MP3s from which he loads 5GB at random onto his iPod every day. Then I opened up Kottke.org and there was a link to a PDF of the ad (minus the marketing copy), which is indeed cool.” The PDF file is here, the quoted text is courtesy of Boing Boing.

iMacs in the movies

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Most of the computers in movies for several years have been Macintoshes, maybe because the Mac is the only computer that doesn’t look like every other computer and therefore benefits from product placement. But this is the first movie in which an entire iMac commercial runs on TV in the background of a shot.

How’s that for random trivia? Thanks to Roger Ebert’s review of Showtime for this little tidbit.