The Graphyte» Brief News

Macking

The Graphyte — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:25:53 +0000

Use File System Check

Your Mac seems stable and healthy, and you figure you’ve got it made. Because of this, you’re probably thinking you don’t need to check the file system for errors. Don’t do that though, because there may be problems lurking in the background that you can’t see. Just as it’s a good idea to go to the doctor once a year even if you feel great, you need to give your Mac the once-over every once in a while too.

Although you could purchase expensive third-party utilities

to search your hard disk for errors and repair them, your Mac OS X machine comes with a built-in utility called File System Check that you can use to do the same thing. File system checks are run using Single-User mode by typing in a simple command. You should perform these checks monthly. To run a file system check now, follow these steps:

1. From the Apple menu, choose Restart.

2. As your Mac boots, hold down the Command+S key combination to start the computer in Single-User mode. (Make sure to press this key combination right after the chime; otherwise, you won’t get in.)

3. At the command prompt, type /sbin/fsck –fy. There’s a space before the –fy. This command tells your Mac to run File System Check, force the check (f) and answer yes (y) to any and all questions regarding fixing, repairing, or salvaging information. Apple says this is the optimal approach because answering no to any question causes fsck to stop running.

4. If the File System Check finds errors, run it again until no more errors are found. You’ll know errors were found if you receive the message “FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED.” You’ll know when all errors have been repaired when you see the message “The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.”

5. Type reboot once all of the errors have been found and repaired.

Thanks to Jolie at Bright Hub for this article: http://www.brighthub.com/computing/mac-platform/articles/2308.aspx

I stand corrected

The Graphyte — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:27:44 +0000

We all know and love the ipad, but after spending your hard earned money on it, you deserve a break when it comes to accessorizing. If you need a stand here's a brilliant solution, that will cost you a mere trip to the office. All you need is six pencils, four rubber bands, soft eraser contact points, works in both portrait and landscape. Well done!

Web Dev Tool for Firefox

The Graphyte — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:22:44 +0000

Web devleoper tool bar for Firefox

Every week I highlight a free or inexpensive software product that I like to use as a Web developer. And I realized this week that I'd been leaving off one of the tools I use nearly every day - the Web Developer Toolbar. This is a Firefox Add-on and you can install it in Flock and Seamonkey as well. And as I said, I use it constantly. It has features like:

Disable different actions like JavaScript, refreshes, page colors, CSS, and more
Work with cookies right from the bar, like deleting them, turning them on and off, even adding them
Play with CSS, forms, and images on the page
Get all kinds of information about the page as you're viewing it
Outline specific elements (like tables, headings, links, and frames)
Validate HTML, CSS, accessibility
Even change the viewport size to approximate different resolutions
And so much more

Even if you're a developer who doesn't believe in using add-ons in your browsers, you should consider including this one. It provides so much value in a very small footprint. The only days I don't use it are the days I don't turn on my computer.

Every developer should use the Web Developer Toolbar

Scraped from Source Here

Get Validated

The Graphyte — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:40:04 +0000

Designers listen up, code isnt perfect thats why its poetry, getting your site validated might save you a long night of Redbull and Mountain Dew hyrbrid cocktails. Its always wise to make sure your site isnt a sloppy alphabet soup mess, and there are several sites that can preform the validation process for you at no cost what so ever, the only price of admission is realizing you might have to work longer hours on cleaning up some of the chicken scratch you have add to your site.

Now it generally takes a pretty good coder to clean out the garage of junk code, and I myself wear as many as 6 hats all at once, so I'm constantly covered in post it notes reminding me to validate every so often to make sure your code is clean enough that search engines don't treat your site like the red headed step child. I've used http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ tons of times and its helped out a great deal. Make sure you get that parking ticket validated compadres.

Can't see my shadow

The Graphyte — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:01:26 +0000

Can't seem to find your shadow? Thats because the recent update for Shadowbox JS managed to do more damage then good. If you currently upgraded your shadowbox js plugin to the latest version, which is 3.0. then you might find, your shadow has gone missing. Any previous version will continue to work if you avoid the upgrade, but upgrading isn't necessarily a bad thing.

To there credit developers continue to create and update these free plugins so it aint all bad, especially when it just quits on you randomly. Unless you have a professional license, I wouldn't piss and moan too much, although painfully updating countless pages on your blog could leave you screaming into a pillow. Thankfully you can always do some research before you try to do it the hard way, and according to forums, the problem might be related more closely to the version of PHP your server is up to. So if you needlessly turn off and on all your plugins in a desperate act of trying to reclaim your shadow, have no fear. Chances are you don't have a conflicting plugin interfering with the shadowbox plugin, or the other countless bugs you may think your experiencing.

Fortunately you can install the old version of shadowbox js and just go back to old functionality before the upgrade. I currently don't know how many major differences there are to the latest update, besides stability, but if you find that its too troublesome to move forward here is the last working version of shadowbox js before the upgrade. Simply unpack the zip file and upload to your plugin folder on your server. Then just activate it in your wordpress admin as you would normally and you should be back to normal from there, and old posts will retain there shadowbox functionality. Although Its always wise to save an original copy on the side considering the files sizes are pretty small, it might save you future restful nights.

Below is an image that works with the shadowbox js plugin.

Go Daddy Mail

The Graphyte — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:08:17 +0000

GoDaddy has been my host of choice for the last 8 years and is probably one of the best choices for hosting solutions, but this post isnt a plug, simply a notice for those of you who use go daddy as a mail client. If you have a email account setup on godaddy and have had trouble with using some sort of mail tool, like entourage or outlook this might help you finally get your account working. I've had several work machines and it seems everytime you format or need to setup a new mail program you wanna crack the monitor over your head. Well here's how its done if you use godaddy for your mail accounts. This is a direct scrape from there site in case you might have a different mail program that you need to configure.

Setting up Microsoft Entourage to Access Your Email Account

You can configure Microsoft Entourage 2004 to access the email messages on your email account using POP or IMAP. While the exact steps may differ from version to version, these settings are similar in other versions of Microsoft Entourage.

To Set Up Microsoft Entourage 2004 to Access your Email Account

Open Microsoft Entourage.
From the Tools menu, select Accounts.
Click New.
If the Account Setup Assistant window opens, click Configure account manually.
In the Account Type section, select POP or IMAP, and then click OK.
In the Edit Account window, enter your information as follows:

Account name

Enter a name for your account. For example, My Mail, Work, or Home.

Name

Enter your first and last name.

E-mail address

Enter your email address.

Account ID

Enter your email address, again.

POP/IMAP server

For POP accounts, type pop.secureserver.net, or for IMAP accounts, type imap.secureserver.net for your incoming server.

Password

Enter the password for your email account.

SMTP server

Type smtpout.secureserver.net for your outgoing server.
Click the Click here for more advanced sending options button, under Receiving Mail settings.

NOTE:"smtpout.secureserver.net" is an SMTP relay server. To use this server to send email messages, you must first log in to your Account Manager and activate SMTP relay for your email account. If you do not have SMTP relay set up and your Internet Service Provider (ISP) allows it, you can use the outgoing mail server for your Internet Service Provider. Contact your Internet Service Provider for more information.

Select Override default SMTP port and change the number to 80 under Sending Mail settings.

NOTE: For security purposes, we recommend enabling SSL. To enable SSL, click theSecurity tab and select SMTP server requires secure connection (SSL).

Click OK.

If you have trouble sending mail, try setting your Outgoing mail (SMTP) server port to 25 or 3535.

Select SMTP server requires authentication and use same settings as receiving mail server, and then click OK.

Analyze Me

The Graphyte — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:22:25 +0000

Google has clearly become the data giant for good reason and thats because they continue to innovate and astonishingly remain as a a free for all to the public. Google Analytics though not recently new only new to this post, is an amazing online application that generates stats for your website or blog.

Procedure for setting up an account is fairly easy and if you have a blog its even easier. What GA does is monitor traffic on your site with very indepth possibilities. Not only can you now have a clear assesment of how many people are visiting your site, but also where they came on on the globe, how long they visited your site, which pages they visited, what resolution there at, what OS they are on and so on and so on. I have only begun to tamper with the available options that GA provides, as a free service most importantly.

The amount of raw data that google can track and accumulate is astounding, and it manages it well. all the information is compiled and very easy to access and organize even for the most novice of users. at first it could be jarring to make some sense of all the data that they shove in your face, but nothing that cant be cured after a few moments. there are various categories on the left of the menu and thats where your bread and butter is at. Each one will open new possibilities and several options on how to arrange you data from the main window. It was really built with the general user in mind displaying pie charts and estetically pleasing graphics to help sooth the eye in order of making you go blind trying to organize the data. One of the most amazing features is that GA will allow you to save your data in PDF's in real time.

This is great for having references available to display and carry your traffic with you if it needs to be reviewed further. Google has certainly pushed the bar extremely high, and in the last ten years I've never seen a web app like this to display all your data for web trafficking. Its an essential tool is you are intersted in communicating with your audience.

It's all About Meebo

The Graphyte — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:26:36 +0000

For all those of you users working at corporate, cut off from outside friends and neighbors along comes Meebo. Many companies protect servers and machines by preventing online computers from logging onto AIM, Yahoo, or MSN, while Meebo is a new communications and media company that's re-writing the way people have conversations and communicate on the Web. They provide instant messaging and group chat to over 35 million people at meebo.com and via partner sites across the Web. By visiting the site you are greeted with multiple logins for different chat applications.

Any computer, any IM network Just go to meebo.com to chat with your buddies on every major IM network in a single buddylist. Login with the IM account you already have, there's nothing to download or install, and it's totally free. learn more

WordPress alignment problem

The Graphyte — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:47:59 +0000

So like all the other word press and coding fanatics I upgrade word press every time there's an upgrade available, thinking I'm going to improve user ability. WP has definitely improved in many areas, although some areas were cut with a fucking meat cleaver. The image icon in your tool bar is now gone, and you have to rely on the image uploader gallery to manage your images. Some of the features in the new gallery are pretty nice to have, for example testing the path of outside images being called from another source other then uploading it through WP. The resizing and aligning options which would be a great tool if it actually worked. I initially assumed that the problems that resulted in using the image tool was to bad coding. So for those of you that have driven your head through your monitors while spending an hour trying to align your post perfectly, here's that actual reasoning for the issue.

After some hyper googling, I found many people had the same issues, but no one could answer the problem. The alignment issue was probably not problematic if you had WP 3 upgrades ago, or even 2 upgrades ago but now WP is using styles to govern your images, and though they might align right when your in the admin, once you preview or publish it goes to shit, thats because of your personal CSS styles in your theme. I suffered for a few months with alignment and it was definitely enough to make me not even want to use images in posts, but whats the fun in that. I have a lush and long post for God of War, telling the story through all of the games since conception and could use no images due to this alignment nightmare. I managed to find a forum which lead me to this page, in issue number 9 you will see theres this snippet of code, which is I believe to be the original snippet of code from a Basic WP theme.

What you do is take this code and paste it and possibly revise it based on your code. In my style sheet I labeled that area with "POST FORMATTING" so it was easy to mange later. I took the code below and pasted it along with what was there just as test to see what it would do and it definitely helped. Images are aligning with little difficulty and now the image tool wich seemed like a conscented kick to the balls everytime I used it, is now worth its weight in wood, but still not gold, could use some improvments still, im sure 3.0 is close by.

Remeber to save your original style sheet for safe keeping, so you don't butcher your site overnight. Visit the instructions page if you need some assistance. Here's another good follow up link to formatting your images in posts once it works.

img.centered { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }

img.alignright { padding: 4px; margin: 0 0 2px 7px; display: inline; }

img.alignleft { padding: 4px; margin: 0 7px 2px 0; display: inline; }

.alignright { float: right; }

.alignleft { float: left; }

Painless WP Upgrade

The Graphyte — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:59:18 +0000

For those developers or designers that are currently using WordPress as a site solution or just blogging all over the place, this is something I came across a few months back. Its an automated WordPress Updater that helps you upgrade your current expired Wp version to the newest version currently available. Simply put its a plugin you install like any other WP plugin and has a routine process to upgrade your site. Though not necessary to backup your entire site its definitely recommended as well as your WP info. Posts and pages will not be affected after the update, you will retain everything on your site including passed themes and info. I am not a CSS pro so its developers like these that make these transitions possible and accommodating. Below is a quick sum of what you will see in your plugin directory once you upload the plugin into your plugins folder in the WP directory, links and forums to better explain the procedure can be found through the developers site.

Note: Be mindful of which plugins you have currently working when upgrading, they will be turned off during the upgrade and then need to be manually turned on again after upgrade. If your a plugin junky then make sure you take notice of which ones are on.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to WordPress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode. By Keith Dsouza.