TheOneAndTheOnly.com - Andrew Buckman

Apple iPad

Andrew — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:11:15 +0000

What were they thinking?!

No Flash
No multitasking
No video camera(s)
No iChat

Yes, I’m extremely disappointed that the “ultimate web device” doesn’t have support for Flash. While I hate Flash as much as the next web developer, it’s far too ubiquitous to ignore. Maybe it’s Adobe’s problem, but I find it hard to believe Apple couldn’t get it to work if they really wanted to.

I’m still getting one.

The other problems are mostly non-issues. I did think a video camera would be pretty slick for a mobile video conference device, but oh well, probably in version 2.0 next year to make me upgrade.

Being able to utilize the iPhone apps I’ve already paid for is a nice bonus, though I’m sure many developers will release new versions for additional money that better utilize the screen space of the iPad.

iWork

Interestingly during the keynote this was the feature I was really looking for the most. I don’t give many presentations, but being able to put together a Keynote presentation on a touchscreen device and hook the very portable device up to a display and give the presentation rocks. I hope they make it work with the iPhone remote app as well. Spreadsheets are huge for me too, so I’m pretty excited about being able to have a nice big display for portable spreadsheets.

Multitasking and the OS

The lack of multitasking is actually the biggest downside for me with that big beautiful display, and I suspect it’s a bit of misdirection at this point. There’s a reason it was announced showing off iPhone OS 3.2 and not the major 4.0 update people were expecting. I’m betting that within a few months of a successful launch there will be another announcement presentation for a new and improved iPhone, at which time the more major update to the OS, to 4.0, will be shown off. They’ll save it for then to blow everyone away with the multitasking features that are supported on both the iPad and the new iPhone. When this hits, hopefully an iChat app will follow, but if not, there will always be the AIM app or other equivalents.

The Future

In the end, I think the iPad looks like a pretty slick little device. Hopefully if it proves as popular as expected, it will help catapult the state of Flash and video on the web to the HTML5 future, it’s definitely something I’ll be moving up my research and testing list now. As with the iPhone, I’m confident most of the limitations will be addressed going forward, the latest iPhones (hardware + software) may not seem as revolutionary compared to the first one as it did to devices before it, but they are significantly more advanced than the initial release. So too will be the iPad.

So yes, I’ll be getting one. I think it may serve nicely as a third display for running something like TweetDeck during the day, will be nice to have lying around for access to the web in a better format than my phone, and most importantly for the web developer in me, to keep an eye on the sites I manage and ensure they work as best they can on the device for my clients and their customers.

SFTP and SSH Timeout

Andrew — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:53:22 +0000

I bought a new router the other day, I was having some odd problems with my current one and thought it’d be nice to move to an 802.11n router. I picked up a Netgear WNDR3700, my first foray into Netgear products. Overall I’m pretty happy with the router except for one extremely annoying problem… it’s been timing out on my SFTP and SSH connections after just a 5-10 minutes. I’m regularly working on a file directly off an SFTP connection and I often go more than 10 minutes between saving or interacting with the server. Transmit gets kind of hung up with that happens and if you’re trigger happy on closing a window, you can end up losing your file altogether (not cool). Suffice it to say, that happened yesterday and I had to quickly rewrite the code while I could remember the gist of it, and prompting me to get this annoyance straighted out.

I presume the problem I was having was related to the new router timing out the NAT tables more frequently than my old router and not doing anything with my requests after it timed out the connection. Unfortunately, I could not find any settings in the router configuration to adjust this interval, however it was an extremely easy fix in Mac OS and it solved the problem for me with both SSH and Transmit.

The Fix
To fix the SFTP and SSH timeout problem in Mac OS, go to your home folder and look for a folder with the name .ssh (note it will be hidden in Finder, I just used Terminal). Inside the folder you probably already have a known_hosts file, and you may or may not have a config file, I did not. Create or modify the config file, including the following code, taking care to make certain you indent the second line:
Host * ServerAliveInterval 240

This should tell your computer to keep the ssh connection alive every 240 seconds (4 minutes). You can adjust this number as you see fit, as long as it’s lower than your router’s NAT timeout, it will resolve the problem.

NOTE: You will have to do this on every computer you’re using with the router. I was hoping to fix it on the router itself and not have to deal with it, but this is certainly better than nothing.

Share on Facebook

Andrew — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:08:57 +0000

No doubt you’ve seen the nifty Share this on Facebook links on websites, maybe you even have them on your site already. Did you know that you can also craft titles, descriptions, and a thumbnail for the page to pre-populate in the sharing box? Follow the instructions after the break to get share this links on your site if you don’t already have them, and below that you’ll find some tips on getting titles, descriptions, and thumbnails added.

It’s impressive the number of sites that have been adding “share this on Facebook” links, and it’s a great way to help encourage your loyal viewers to spread the word to their friends. What baffles me is when a site goes to the trouble of setting up the sharing links, but doesn’t set up the page with meta tags to declare a thumbnail, title, or description. Make it easy for me! Just because I can write a title/description myself doesn’t mean I want to or that I’m going to. I find posted links on Facebook profiles so much more enticing with a thumbnail attached, and while I have the ability to write my own title/description in the event you didn’t set something up for me, if you don’t specify a thumbnail and Facebook didn’t find any that fit their automated criteria (which often returns photos totally irrelevant to the link), then there’s nothing I can do. Carefully crafting your title, description, and thumbnail is going to enhance click through rates to help you get as much out of your users thoughtful sharing as you can!

To include a convenient Share this on Facebook button on your page, simply paste the code below into your page code where you want the link to show up.

Share

Link Title

By default, Facebook pulls your Page Title information. You can override this with a meta tag in the event you want the title on a Facebook shared link to be different than your page’s title.

Link Description

It appears that Facebook will try to pull a description from your main content in certain circumstances, however the primary source of a link description is your meta description tag. If you haven’t been good about creating these for SEO reasons (making your links more attractive in search results, not ranking), Facebook utilizing this tag should only add to the importancy for you.

Thumbnail

By default, Facebook looks through all the photos included in your page and builds a list the user can scroll through. While I don’t have exact stats, I have to imagine that most users do not take the time to scroll through the thumbnails available and merely share the link as default. Often the first photo they detect has no real bearing on the link itself, potentially making the shared link less attractive to click on, despite the friend recommending it! Your best bet is to specify a specific thumbnail for Facebook to use, removing the options and making things as easy as can be for the user. As a bonus, a number of other websites will use this code including digg.com and yahoo.com.

One warning on thumbnails, I’ve found that Facebook likes to ignore images that are disproportionately wide or tall and won’t show them, even if specified using the link tag as above. If you’re having problems with it not working, try using an image that is closer to square.

More Information

For more information on Facebook share links and even more advanced meta tags you can utilize if your page includes audio or video content, check out Facebook’s own resource, Share Partners.

Fine Print

Before anybody chirps at me for not having this on my site here, yeah I know. Do as I say, not as I do? To be fair, I do practice what I preach on client’s sites, this blog is getting old and I haven’t gotten around to updating it.

Double Line Stroke in Illustrator

Andrew — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:23:29 +0000

My girlfriend, the darling over at Spleen Chronicles, was lamenting the lack of line styles in Illustrator today, specifically the ability to put a double-line stroke on a path. I being a big fat cheater, gave her a way to get the effect she was looking for at the expense of the inside area between the two lines not being transparent. After the break you’ll find my walkthrough for the double-line stroke, screenshots are from Illustrator CS4, but it is possible to achieve the same effect in CS3 and perhaps earlier.

Step 1

To start off, draw a line with the pencil tool or create a shape.

Step 2

Increase the width of the stroke to accomodate the width of both lines plus the gutter between them, I used 5pt.

Step 3

Next you need to add a second stroke to the line to serve as the gutter. Click the Add New Stroke button (1), then change the color of the stroke to match your background (2), and set the width to the width you want the gutter (3). You should now have the appearance of a double line stroke!

Step 4 (optional)

If you’re noticing and annoyed by a faint line at the end, you can change the cap on the gutter stroke to a round cap and it will disappear.

Canonical URLs

Andrew — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:42:02 +0000

Google recently announced support for a new meta tag to designate canonical URLs as an alternative to using 301 Permanent Redirects. For those unaware, a canonical URL is the primary URL you want your content indexed as, often times duplicate content can be found on multiple URLs, especially when using a CMS or eCommerce platform. If a product exists in multiple categories, there may be multiple URLs for that product, all with virtually identical data. In certain situations, such as the product in multiple categories, a redirect to a canonical version may not be ideal, and in other situations, it may not be possible to set up appropriate redirects. For these circumstances, the new meta tag was created. The format for the new tag is as follows:

You would place this in the header of all similar pages. As an example, http://www.mystore.com/books/my-book/ and http://www.mystore.com/authors/andrew/my-book/ should both include the meta tag. This should also help with the myriad of tracking variables that can show up on the end of URLs.

Notes
You can use the meta tag across subdomains, thus http://books.mystore.com/my-book/ can point back to http://www.mystore.com/my-book/, but you cannot use it across domains, so http://www.mybooks.com/my-book/ will not work.

Relative URLs are allowed, however I would strongly recommend specifying an absolute URL, the entire point of the meta tag is to specify a URL that is the definitive canonical version of a page, best to specify it absolutely to reduce the chance of errors.

The meta tag is supported by all the major search engines: Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, and Ask.

For more details, see Google’s excellent writeup on specifying your canonical.

Domain Rewriting

Andrew — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:30:51 +0000

I was recently setting up a subdomain for a URL pointing at a shared IP. The domain itself already had DNS set up for all subdomains to go to the IP, but nothing was being done with them on the server. In a moment of curiosity, I checked out the subdomain’s URL before I set it up on the server and much to my dismay, it pulled up the primary website set up on that IP, a completely different domain than this subdomain was going on. This is obviously not good because of duplicate content issues with the search engines, I certainly don’t want an entire copy of my site reachable on an unlimited number of subdomains on other domains. To combat this, I’ve added an Apache Rewrite directive to my .htaccess file that rewrites anything not on the correct domain over to the proper one using a permanent redirect.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !theoneandtheonly\.com RewriteRule .* http://www.theoneandtheonly.com/ [R=301,L]

Obviously, replace theoneandtheonly.com with your domain of choice. Please be sure to put this after any other subdomain rewriting rules you might be using. I don’t intentionally send subdomains to my main URL, if you do, you may need to tweak this a bit. Also I opted to drop any path information on the rewritten URL, if you’d prefer passing that along, use the version below instead.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !theoneandtheonly\.com RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.theoneandtheonly.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For the record, I encountered this problem on a server running Plesk 8.2.1, it may or may not be an issue under other setups.

How NOT to run a Social Media Promotion

Andrew — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:57:49 +0000

Recently I ran across a Facebook page for a local company running a promotion to encourage people to become a fan. The promotion involved awarding a prize to an unspecified number of people who were a fan on the ending date and asked that you forward the invite on to your friends and anyone else who might be interested in being a fan. If it’s not obvious, the problem with the promotion is that there is a decided disincentive to me telling my friends about the page. Why would I want to decrease my odds of winning the prize(s)?!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for giving away stuff to your loyal fans/subscribers, but when you’re just starting out and trying to encourage the viral spreading of your new marketing tool, a promotion that discourages people from inviting their friends probably isn’t what you’re looking to run.

Now to be fair, yes, it did work to get me to signup as a fan. Did I tell anyone else about it? No. In fact I deleted the story from my news feed so it wouldn’t show up to my friends. Are most people quite as bad as me on that? Doubtful. I’m anxious to see the promotion end to see if they follow it up with another promotion intended to spur the current fans to recruit their friends. If that happens I’ll give them a free pass on this one hoping it was their strategy all along.

Betting on the End of the World

Andrew — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:38:27 +0000

So they fired up the Large Hadron Collider today. Apparently there was quite a buzz of people afraid they’d blow up the world starting it up. One place in England was apparently even taking bets!

Meanwhile, William Hill celebrated Man’s continued existence. It had taken £119 from punters willing to bet that September 10 2008 would see the end of the world.

A spokesman said: “Our standard odds are 1,000,000/1, but anyone wanting longer or shorter odds is at liberty to take them. A number of customers took us up; on our offer and have bet that the world will end as a result of the Large Hadron Collider experiment.”

To anyone else I say, never fear, you haven’t missed your chance. If the LHC experiment is going to cause the end of the world, it surely won’t be until they start colliding sub-atomic particles. Today they merely let them race around the track. There’s still time for you to bet it will end the world, and I too am willing to take your bet and let you name your odds. Leave a comment with the amount you wish to bet and your desired odds and be sure to enter your email address when posting. I’ll get back to you with my PayPal address for you to send your payment over.

source: Large Hadron Collider doesn’t cause the end of the world – yet

Comparative Advertising

Andrew — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:24:00 +0000

The people over at Cuil.com should read this newsletter issue on comparative advertising. I’d like to add one more thing to their email and that is: if you’re going to compare yourself, be certain you get your facts in order first. Sure it got them some quick press, even prompting Google to release an idea of how big their index is now, something they haven’t done in awhile, but how long will the buzz last now that their claim to fame (world’s biggest search engine, 3x as many pages as Google) turns out to be merely one tenth the size of Google’s?

I do think the name is pretty clever though.

Urchin 5 Stats Stopping

Andrew — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:23:20 +0000

So it seems there’s something wrong with Urchin 5 that is preventing my web stats from being compiled out of the logs files and into Urchin’s reporting interface. This began happening a year after I switched to the current server (running Plesk 7.5) and I noticed it on a few more important domains and found a fix at that time. Meanwhile I wrote myself a post-it note to go back and fix it on the rest of the domains, which of course I never did. Today I was curious about some stats for one of the domains I hadn’t fixed and thankfully was still able to find my note. I’ve decided to blog the solution so that I don’t have to worry about losing that note any longer and hopefully it will help someone else in the future as well.

If you try processing your log by clicking the “Run Now” button in Urchin Admin and see the following message come up, these instructions should help with your problem.
WARNING: (7063-54-63) Unable to open database for writing since it has been archived

The official solution to this problem exists on the Urchin Help site (now owned by google) at this location:
http://www.google.com/support/urchin45/bin/answer.py?answer=28527&topic=7393

My more detailed walkthrough follows…

The problem has to do with the archiving feature on a per domain basis. If you login to the Urchin Admin interface and configure the profile for that domain, there is a Storage/DB tab. On the tab you’ll see “Archive DB Options” with options for on/off and a timeframe for archiving if you leave it on. Change the setting for “Archive DB” to off and click “Update” to save your change.

The second half of the fix is a bit trickier and will require shell access to your server with an appropriate permissions level that grants you access to urchin’s installation directory. I logged in via ssh and switched to the superuser account to perform the following tasks (obviously you do so at your own risk, remember when you’re the superuser you have the power to break many things you don’t want to break). First, find where urchin is storing its reports for the domain you’re fixing (/usr/local/urchin/data/reports/theoneandtheonly.com/ for this domain). Change to that directory and look at the contents. You should see a variety of zip files named with the following format: YYYYMM-archive.zip. You should unzip these files to restore the data from the archives and remove the archive.zip files after they’ve been unzipped. This is important, you MUST remove the archive files, or at least move them to another directory so Urchin doesn’t see them.

UPDATE: By request, here is a list of the commands I ran for step 2…
cd /usr/local/urchin/data/reports/theoneandtheonly.com/ unzip *-archive.zip mkdir archive-backup mv *-archive.zip archive-backup

After both steps above are complete, go back to your Urchin Admin interface and run the stats report. You should see it processing your log files again and your missing data should fill in. Depending on the log file rotation schedule for your webserver you may or may not have gaps. If you keep backups on your server of all the logs, you should be able to reconfigure urchin to process the old files if you don’t have it setup that it does so already.