Code and Coffee

iTunes has been going downhill, and I can no longer be a part of the sinking ship. These days it seems Apple is only interested in making updates and fixes to iTunes when it has a new product to support, like the latest iTunes update that rolls out support for the new Apple TV product. There are tons of bugs with iTunes, especially on Windows. On top of it all it’s a memory and resource hog, built off of QuickTime that is additionally a hog for resources. yes, it runs better on a Mac, but please do not tell me to “Buy a Mac”. Apple didn’t sell me an iPod that is to be used with iTunes only on a Mac, it sold me an iPod that supports Windows. They even stated that iTunes is the best application written for Windows… not sure that is true anymore.

So I have to find a replacement, and luckily I am not bound to any iTunes music store purchases much like many others are. I have been interviewing Songbird, which shows a lot of potential. Songbird is built off of the Firefox platform, which is my favorite browser… so it wins bonus points right there. It uses the mode of “extensions” or “add ons” much like Firefox, which I have always been a fan of. Extensions allow users to take control of the application, additionally it mans that the application isn’t overloaded with a tone of features you may not use.

So far I have imported my iTunes library, which Songbird makes it easy to do with a simple Import option. I have yet to plug in my iPod and see how well it interacts. I have read some problems with album art and podcasts not being put into the Podcast section.

Non the less, it looks promising and may just be the application to nurse me off of my iTunes addition. It definitely runs a whole lot faster, and not as much lag. The ebst pat, is when my screen saver kicks in and I wake it back up it doesn’t yell at me for an incompatible screen resolution.

I will continue to let you know how the transition goes. If you are a Songbird user, and have any tip, tricks, or suggestions for a newbie… throw them my way.

Google continues to make search better, and one way it has vastly improved searching is with their search shortcuts. Google’s search query is intelligent, don’t believe me? Just ask it how many seconds are in a day. Google has a bunch of these little search shortcuts available for you to use, and GoogleGuide has a great layout with examples on how to use these shortcuts. Let’s take a look at some of the great shortcuts.

Calculator:

Google has a fairly complex calculator built right into the search box. You can do basic calculations like 15 + 85. The same goes for Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Exponentiation, Percent, modulo. More advanced calculations and conversions can be done, I honestly did not even know how extensive the list was until researching for this article.

Phone Numbers and Addresses:

Google gives you one click access to phone numbers and address information, which can be real scary in some cases. Take a look at the results for John Doe in New York (it would be difficult to have that name).

Stock Quotes:

If you follow stocks closely, Google makes it real easy to search for any ticker symbol for Example Google. Simple enough, but effective for quick access to stock information.

Dictionary:

A great way to find the definition of any word is to put “define” before the word you want to get the definition for, for example cat. In some cases Google will give several definitions from multiple sources.

Search By Number:

One of my most favorite and most used features, is searching by numbers. Fed Ex or UPS tracking numbers, Flight tracking, UPC codes, Patent numbers, Vin numbers, Area codes, and more. Just enter them into a Google search query, and the information is right in front of you. The thing I like best about this, is when tracking packages it bypasses the first two annoying screens, Select Your Country, and Accepting the terms.

Google has tons of neat little shortcuts, and as I have found out GoogleGuide is a great tutorial site for a lot of the functionality Google has built into it’s search.

OpenDNS is an excellent service, it has been on my list of things to setup for a while and I finally got around to do so today. It really didn’t take long, which makes me procrastinating on it look that much worse. First things first… what is OpenDNS? Well I will let them explain it, since they seem to do a great job at it.

OpenDNS is a better DNS, free to all. OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.

So why do you need it? Well, need is such a strong word, your would greatly benefit from using the service. OpenDNS will not only speed up your DNS queries for your internet enabled devices, but it will block access to websites that can potentially be harmful. You can setup OpenDNS on your home router, and every computer that connects to the Internet through that router will have the benefits of the service. Meaning if you have kids or friends that constantly are getting your computer in trouble, this is one way to shut them down for good with any computer in the house.

OpenDNS has several services for your home, your work, your mobile devices, and if you are an ISP. For home users, which is what I imagine you are, OpenDNS has a list of common routers, and easy to follow tutorials on how to setup OpenDNS on your home router in minutes.

OpenDNS makes money via advertisments on pages for domains that d not exist. This is not to be confused with advertisements being put on websites and interfering with your regular web surfing. This just means that if you go to www.idonotthinkthisdomainsexistsbuticouldbewrong1498282.com OpenDNS displays a regular page saying the domain does not exist and it will have an advertisement on it. It should be noted that OpenDNS tries to fix mistyped domain names. OpenDNS also states that they will provide additional services that will generate revenue, but reliable DNS will always be free.

Yesterday I wrote about How To Optimize Your Wordpress Themes, in reviewing there are a lot of functions in themes that print out data dynamically while that data may not change that often so it doesn’t need to be dynamic. In a further look on decreasing page load times, and reducing bandwidth with Wordpress and your themes there are several other techniques that once can deploy in order to accomplish these goals.

Whitespace is another way you can reduce the amount of data a user has to download when visiting you site. Whitespace usually plagues HTML code because when writing HTML one enters tabs and spaces to make the code legible. Additionally code comments can litter HTML code, and they are not even viewable in the final result. Each space or tab adds up in the overall scheme of things, and removing these unnecessary characters can reduce bandwidth over time.

I have mentioned it before, that compressing your CSS also will greatly reduce load time sand bandwidth usage. CSS Drive has a great tool for quickly accomplishing this. If you use JavaScript heavily your JavaScript file can be compressed as well.

Lastly, with WordPress you can easily enable GZIP compression for your pages under the Reading Options in the Wordpress administration panel. This will send back a compressed version of you pages if a supported browser requests so. In most cases this will greatly reduce the bandwidth usage on your server. When you reduce the bandwidth, you also in turn can reduce the amount of work your webserver has to do.

In the latest redesign I have employed all of the solutions above, and have already seen a great reduction in bandwidth used and an load times. I will post some solid data once it is available.

WordPress is well written, there is not doubt about it. However, on the other side of things WordPress ca be bogged down with unnecessary function calls in your WordPress themes. WordPress was written to be completely dynamic, meaning you can plug-ins and themes adapt to the settings you have, let’s say you blog title. This is stored in a setting, and theme designers enter a piece of code that calls for this setting making it dynamic to if you change you blog’s name.

When redesigning Code and Coffee, I came across a lot of functions that you replace with hard coded information to reduce some of the work PHP has to do. For example: <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>. This function, as stated above, simple prints out your blogs name. If you search your themes directory, you will probably see this come up several times. You can take it a step further ad search for anything that uses the bloginfo(); function, and hard code that information in as well. You will probably see things like “feed url”, “description”, etc. Each time you replace these functions with hard coded information, you are saving a step for PHP and some computational time. It may not be much, but if you have a blog that has lots of visitors every seconds counts when it comes t page loads. Unless you use a caching plugin like WP-Cache, you blog is calling these functions every time a page is loaded.

Now the only set back is, if you change around this information you will have to update it in the code not just WordPress’s administration panel. But how often does one change the name of their blog? I took it the extra mile, and removed a lot of calculations from the themes, even the page links… I hard coded those in because I do not change around my pages very often.

If one really feels gutsy they can go in and remove the code that loads all of this information into memory, but when you stray outside of themes and plug ins and start modifying the WordPress code base it makes it difficult to do updates.

Let me know how many functions you remove from your themes.

I have spent the greater part of the day reworking Code and Coffee. This has been an upgrade that I have wanted to do for a while, and it is finally completed. I have put together a minimalist theme, that I feel make it much easier to read. I have removed a lot of the unnecessary plug ins and add ons that you see on many blogs. These new “web 2.0″ add ons are great little trinkets and I love trying new things, but after a while I had to start asking myself if it was adding something to the blog other than clutter. After all, if someone really wants to add an article to Digg, they probably know how to cut and paste.

My time has been short lately with my job, and the relaunch of BlueCrestStudios coming soon; and I found myself drifting away from quality content and focusing more on news. I have been cleaning my RSS feed out lately, because a lot of them were regurgitating the same thing. My morning email and RSS routine was taking two plus hours.

So why does all of this matter? Well don’t hit the unsubscribe button yet, I am refocusing Code and Coffee back to technology related matters. Posts from here on out will be longer, more in depth, and focus on tips, tricks, ideas, and other things I have picked up over the years. I am hoping that Code and Coffee serves as an open dialog, so if you see something I write where you feel it could be done better or have something to add. Please leave a comment, send me an email. There are always two ways to accomplish something.

I have a stack of articles and topics I am preparing to write about. Code and Coffee will be updated every weekday, and I will be focusing on quality over quantity. I am excited about the new direction, and hope you are still on board. See you shortly.

With the refocus, redesign, an relaunch I would love a link back. I’m not afraid to ask.

David Ichioka has a series of time lapsed photos of people sleeping. You can view them as a slideshow, which gives you a very creepy look into someones sleeping habits.

If you spend 8 hours a day sleeping, that would mean that one third of your entire life you’re asleep. Many of us who are living our lives right spend even more time in the sack. But how well documented is this single activity that we spend more of our lives doing than any other? Not well, until now. Photographer and renowned late-sleeper David Ichioka has concentrated on this important part of everyone’s life in his series of Sleep Pictures. These are time-lapse series of pictures which document one whole night’s sleep. Each picture is taken 20-30 minutes after the last.

The Wayback Machine is a great thing, take a look at Google circa 1998 at the very beginning of the road to search domination. The best part is the beta.

• Main Google homepage
• About Google
• Company information

With the relaunch of BlueCrestStudios coming very soon, the question on if we should have a newsletter has been thrown on the table. Obviously a blog with RSS is in the works, but is there a need for a newsletter? Have we reached the point where newsletters are pointless?

• With newsletters you have to worry about your message being caught up in spam filters, and there will always be a percentage that never reach the end user; not a problem with RSS.
• With newsletters you have to worry about formatting issues and how your message is displayed on different mail clients.
• Newsletter software and outsourcing services are expensive and can take heavy tolls on your servers if you have a large subscriber list.
• Services like Feedburner allow your subscribers to get email notifications for your RSS articles.
• RSS feeds can be picked up by different indexing services, which is a great exposure that newsletters do not have.

I do not believe we will be offering a newsletter. Our audience is tech-savvy enough to know what an RSS feed is and how to use it. I think the time we save in not having to manage a newsletter can be put toward bettering our products.

In a previous article I described on how you can reduce comment spam on your block with a two filter approach. Another frustrating tactic used by spammers is to use trackbacks on blogs to link to spam blogs. There are several ways to combat this type of spam, but the most effective is to use .htaccess to block all referring traffic from spam blogs. .htaccess is a way of telling Apache servers how to handle requests to the server. You can use .htaccess to completely shutoff access to your site from spam bloggers. One should brush up on some basic .htaccess and Apache knowledge before continuing, as one can cause errors on a web server if not careful. So lets take a look at a sample .htaccess file blocking certain domains.

The first line is simply turning the rewrite engine on. The second line acts as sort of an “if” condition, matching the domain of a spamblogger abusing the trackback functionality of your blog. The last line, tells the web server to not send the request through so the trackback will never make it. You can add as many of the “RewriteCond” lines as you need, one for every spam blog domain.
The one down side to this tactic is you have to stay on top of spam bloggers as they come in, but over time it will reduce the amount of spam trackbacks that make it through.