Ennovy.org

I’ve made a minor update to my Show Entry View extension for ExpressionEngine. The newest version adds a new option to display the total of all entry views.

Download Version 1.1.0 here.

I somehow got into the the Yahoo Mail Beta. The new interface is completely different from the normal Yahoo mail, using a lot of Ajax. You can get more detailed reviews elsewhere, but here are my thoughts. I will start with the good things.

Ajax Goodness

No more refreshing! It looks and acts like a desktop application. You can move emails around by selecting them and dragging them into another folder. You can easily sort messages. There are tabs – when you double click to read an email, the email opens in its own tab. You don’t have to view, say 50 emails at a time and then click next to go to the next 50 emais.

RSS Feeds

You can read RSS feeds from within Yahoo mail. It displays the feeds that are on my My Yahoo page, which was nice. I find it more useful than Gmail’s Web Clips, which shows items from RSS feeds one at a time. If you select an item on an RSS feed, you can choose to post it to your Yahoo 360 blog or your MyWeb account. However I use del.icio.us, another Yahoo service – they should add that as an option too!

Now for the bad things.

Speed

I’m used to seeing this image a lot.

The soccer guy is animated and it’s kind of cute, given that the World Cup is being held right now. I don’t want to watch him though, I want to read my mail!

Once I actually get logged in, sometimes everything runs sluggish, and sometimes it runs fine.

Huge Ads

There are big banner ads that take up a large part of the screen. People with a small resolution (say 800×600) wouldn’t like that very much. Plus, every time I click to read an email, or go to compose a new email, or click on a folder, the ad frame on the right refreshes – it’s very distracting.

Overall, I do like the new Yahoo Mail. It’s pretty neat once you get past the huge ads and can deal with it being slow sometimes. (Hello, Adblock!)

• Newspaper :: Article
• Crucify :: Cross
• Sausage :: Eggs
• Handy :: Helper
• Cloak :: Dagger
• Drunk :: Ground
• Fuel :: Environment
• Caress :: Shudder
• Itch :: Seven Year
• Vehicle :: License

(from Unconscious Mutterings)

Ha! All of this month I’ve only been updating this weblog on the weekends.

Anyway, there are some old memes on the Internet where people list

• The applications on their dock
• Their top 10 mac apps

It’s been fun going through everyone’s lists to see if there’s something that I’d like too. I’m probably going to do this meme soon. But right now I want to single out one mac app that I’ve found really useful these past few days.

As I mentioned in a previous post, being new to Macs and the OSX operating system, I had trouble with using the Home and End keys on the Mac because they work differently than on Windows. Thankfully people told me what to do. But I’ve been trying to finish up my EE extension, and I’ve come to realize that I really don’t like how it works. To get to the end of a line, you have to hold down the Command key and then press the right arrow key, or sometimes you can use Cmd+E. When I was coding away, I would hit the End key expecting to go to the end of the line and then suddenly I would find myself looking at the bottom of the screen, and my cursor is nowhere to be found. To get back to where I was, I have to press the backspace key and then Undo that. I found that having to type two keys instead of just one was slowing me down.

The other major adjustment was the location of the Ctrl and the Cmd keys. I actually managed to adjust to this one pretty easily. Instead of using my pinky finger, I use my thumb. But at work, I have to use Windows and go back to using the pinky finger.

I did a search on Google and found this article, which tells you how to change the key bindings on your computer. It worked, except only on certain applications – it didn’t work in Firefox for example. After more searching, I found an application called DoubleCommand. It provides a user interface for changing the key binding. With it, I was able to get Home and End keys to work like it does on Windows. I LOVE this. There are a whole lot of other options you can configure as well, such as swapping the Cmd and Ctrl keys (I’m not going to do that just yet though). And it’s free, too!

I’m using the brilliant ExpressionEngine Wiki Module to jot down some links and notes as I’m trying to learn about my new iMac and exploring its features. I just noticed this – the wiki titles are case insensitive! Coming from MediaWiki, where the titles are case sensitive, I’ve been following this rule of making only the first letter in the title of a page Upper case, and then any other letter in the title all lower case, so as not to confuse myself. Now I don’t have to do that any more!

I feel tempted to go and rename all of my existing wiki titles. In keeping with my naming convention I have titles like Pmachine and Itunes and Htaccess and they all look weird.

I might just put all my notes in a new wiki and make it public. (My main wiki is private – sorry.) It may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Anyway, there are already wikis devoted to this topic already – for example, this Mac Beginner’s Guide from Mac Rumors.

Now. I’ve finished writing up yet another reason I love EE. Back to playing.

Edit: By the way, I’d better clarify something. You can’t really make the wiki itself private. What you can do is create a new template, put the wiki display tag in that template, and then restrict access to that template.

I got an iMac today! I’m using it right now to make this entry. It’s the first time I’ve used an Apple computer, ever (unless you count me playing with it at the Apple Store)! I got the 17 inch iMac. It looks huge here on my desk.

I’d always considered myself to be a PC user. Last year the first Apple Store in Canada opened in Toronto and when I visited it I fell in love with the look of the Macs. But I never seriously considered getting one. Today’s purchase was mostly on impulse.

There’s a promotion on right now – if you’re a college student and you buy a Mac, you get a “free” iPod nano. You have to purchase it, and then apply for a rebate that covers the cost of the iPod. Since my brother is in university, he took advantage of it (although I paid for it – and anyway he has no interest in Macs). The 2GB iPod nano costs $229 CAD, and the student discount is $24, which takes the price down to $205. And the rebate itself is for $205 – so essentially I only have to pay the tax on it and have to wait a few weeks for the rebate. Wasn’t intending to get an iPod of any kind at all – but I thought, since there is the promotion, I might as well, seeing as it’d be the only time I could see myself getting one other than winning it or something. There’s also a student discount on the iMac itself.

First thoughts on the iMac? It’s so pretty! It’s quiet! And it’s so easy to set up! I had some trouble with getting the wireless encryption setting to work with my existing linksys router. But I got my brother to turn off the encryption, did a search on Google, and found the solution right away (you have to type a $ sign before entering the encryption key). Other than that, I had no other problems, and I didn’t have to look at any advanced network/system settings or anything – I am impressed!

The biggest adjustment I have to make right now is the using the Command key instead of the Control key. They are two keys apart and it’s going to take a while to get used to. For some reason the “end” key on the keyboard doesn’t work. And I miss the right click – although I’m sure that there’s an option to change that, I just have to find it.

Right now it’s downloading and installing updates. I’ll probably be posting more about my experience with the iMac later. Right now I want to look through the manual and so on. It’s my new expensive toy and I’m loving it!

This is a poll post!

If you own your own computer, do you shut it down whenever you’re asleep or you’re not using it? I shut mine down every night, because the fan on my laptop is really noisy. Since my laptop is in my bedroom, I can’t sleep if I leave the computer on. Lately though, I’ve only put it on standby so it doesn’t take as long to start up the next day.

• Band :: Aid
• Tan :: Bronze
• Mount :: St Helens
• Arcade :: Fire
• Customize :: LiveJournal
• Hamburger :: Barbeque
• Solid :: Frozen
• Forbidden :: Fruit
• Deter :: Police
• Torment :: Many years of

(from Unconscious Mutterings)

I’ve been using Mint on my site for a while now. Mint is a statistics script, powered using javascript, php and mysql. It costs $30 USD. It provides basic stats, and you can then get even more stats by installing plugins called Peppers.

My favourite Peppers are:

• XXX Strong Mint
• Session Tracker
• Fresh View
• Outclicks

The license allows for only one domain for one installation of Mint. I haven’t been able to get it working on subdomains though.

The reasons why I decided to buy it was:

• I was curious – I wanted to try it for myself.
• I get to host it on my own host. So I don’t need to wait for things to load from some third party site.
• In the beginning when Google Analytics was released, it was really really slow, and I didn’t want to use it.
• It shows more detailed stats than say, Measure Map.
• You can set it to ignore hits from yourself, using cookies. I know I am my own site’s most frequent visitor, and I don’t need to track myself!

Because it uses javascript, it filters out all of the referrer/trackback spammers, bots and other crawlers. This is great because I’ve been getting a ton of trackback spam lately. For example, here’s a screenshot from my Awstats installation showing pages viewed:

It’s annoying to have to weed through that to look at page views from actual people.

Today I went shopping and stopped by The Body Shop. I got a huge shock when I saw that they were selling this Strawberry Body Polish. I loooovvveee this stuff! I first used this about 10 years ago – it was called Strawberry Exfoliating Body Wash. They discontinued it in 2000-2001 or so. Anyway, I opened up the tester in the store and smelled it – it smelled exactly like the old product! The salesperson said a lot of people were requesting it.

I bought it immediately of course. I’m so ecstatic. Just the smell of it brings back memories. It made my day.

There’s a matching Strawberry body butter, lotion, and shower gel. The salesperson tried to get me to buy 3 – because there’s a promotion – but I declined. I love the smell but if I used 3 of them all at once it would be a bit much, wouldn’t it?