All you need is a USB flashdrive. I use a 1gig LG flash drive, but something as small as 128mb will do. First of all, go to Portable Apps and download the Portable App installer. Install the program onto your flashdrive (it’ll take a while to do this, so go do something else for a while). Once that’s done, you’ll want to start up the portable version of Firefox. This is where a majority of your survival kit will be going.

If you don’t already have one, head over to google and sign up for an account. With this account you’ll have access to Google mail (gmail), Calendar, docs, and many others. With this account, you get 6GB of online storage.

The best way to use that storage is a little Firefox plugin called GSpace. With GSpace, you can upload/download any file you want via Firefox. That means that if you’re finishing up a class and you’ve got some homework you need to finish up, you can upload the word doc, the images, the audio files, or whatever you need to Google and head home, download/complete the assignment and reupload for download at school.

Now you might be saying that you can easily do this with a flash drive. This is true. But if you’re a graphic or web design major (I’m web major), you’ll have MASSIVE files that will very quickly fill up your flashdrive. But with Google + GSpace, you can fill up your 6GB with endless amounts of stuff.

This next one is setting your homepage to http://igoogle.com. Here you can find little widgets and dock them on the page.

Personally, I’ve got Calendar, Gmail, and a few others docked so I can easily view my schedule, email, etc. Also remember to trick out your Firefox.

Even though its portable, this version of Firefox can use plugins and themes just like the full version. The only difference is that Firefox auto-clears the browsing history when you remove the flashdrive (this reduces the amount of space needed to store Firefox).

Lastly, make use of the programs on Portable Apps. There are a ton of smaller versions of popular programs that you can use. There’s graphics editors, text editors, IM clients, and more.

Also, you can easily add your own programs that will show up on the Portable Apps menu on the computer. I’ve got some GBA/SNES emulators on mine, alone with a few smaller games (Conquest, Crayon Physics, etc.).

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Unlike Windows, your get two panels on your desktop: top and bottom. The majority of the bottom panel is given over to the window selector for your running applications. For most users, this leaves the top relatively empty, apart from the Ubuntu system menus on the left and the date and time on the right. So let’s make use of that space.

Applets

If you right-click on the top panel and select ‘Add to panel’, you’ll be presented with a list of cool panel applets. There’s quite a few to play with, but here’s my pick of applets to add.

System Monitor
This displays helpful information such as CPU, dick or network usage. When it appears it’s just a single black rectangle and a tad short for what it displays, so do the following:

1. Right-click on it and select Preferences
2. Tick the Network and ‘Hard disk’ boxes
3. Set ‘System Monitor Width’ to 60.

Now you should find three nicely spaced graphs for CPU, network and disk usage.

Weather Report
To set this up for Australia (wherever your location may be), right-click on it, select Preferences and under Location, drill down to your state and city. Under General, make sure the temperate unit is set to Celsius. Then click Close, right-click it again and select Update. Left-clicking on the applet will give you a detailed report.

Deskbar
This is one of those cleve utilities you can’t do without. Based on the same principles as Apple’s Spotlight, when clicked on, it will provide an input box — whatever you type will be matched against a command, email contacts, local documentation, dictionary search, internet search and more. You can use it to both find information and open or launch the references it finds. Right-click and select Preferences to expand the list of sources used for searching.

Eyes
This is just a bit of fun and actually a very old application from way back when Unix was something you would only find in server rooms. What does it do? Watch the eyes as they follow your mouse around!

Launchers
You’ll note Ubuntu already provides launchers for Firefox, Evolution and the help system; but you can add your own. To add something from the Ubuntu menus, simply scroll through the menus to your application, then left-click and drag it to the panel. If you want to add a program not in the menu system, first right-click on the desktop, select ‘Create Launcher’, fill our the details and then drag it from the desktop to the panel. You can move and arrange them by either left-clicking or middle button-clicking and dragging them. You can prevent certain launchers from being moved by toggling ‘Lock to panel’ when right-clicking.

Top Tip

Size it up
You don’t have to stick with the default panel sizes Ubuntu provides. On larger monitors the text and icons can be smaller, so enlarging them can help. Simply right-click on a panel and select Properties and then adjust size in pixels. It will happily expand to 120 pixels in height, but you’ll probably find a setting of 30-40 to be more amiable. The top and bottom panel can be sized independently, so you can keep the bottom task window smaller while making your program launchers and applets on the top bar larger.

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First I touched on the topic in my first impressions of WordPress 2.5. Then I whined a little about the tickets relating to them, and eventually I released my Google Maps Plugin that uses them. In the end, WordPress’s new shortcodes are really nice.

What are they?

First of all, a shortcode called “mycode” can look like any of these:
[mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123" color="red" something="data"]
[mycode]Some Content[/mycode]
[mycode]<p><a href="http://example.com/">HTML Content</a></p>[/mycode]
[mycode]Content [another-shotcode] more content[/mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123"]Some Content[/mycode]

As you can see, shortcodes allow a user to put a code into a post or page, and a plugin can then easily handle those codes. They can be nested, contain content (including HTML), attributes, etc.

How can I use them?

First of all, you need to add your shortcode:
add_shortcode('mycode', 'yourFunction');
Your function should take two arguments and return the content that you want to replace the shortcode with. The first argument will be an associative array of attributes (keys will be the attribute names, and the value will be the corresponding attribute value), and the second will be the content between the tags.

To handle default attributes, you can use shortcode_atts($defaultsArray, $attributesArray):

function yourFunction ($attr, $content) {
    $attr = shortcode_atts(array('foo' => 'bar', 'id' => '','color' => 'blue'), $attr);
    return '<h2>Attributes</h2><pre>' . print_r($attr, true) . '</pre><h2>content</h2>' . $content;
}

That’s it! That’s why they are so great, it takes next to nothing to handle! However, maybe you’re thinking about a relatively complex way to use these, and you want to take it to the next level.

The Next Level

Maybe you’re worried that you’re users won’t grasp the intricacies of your shortcodes, or will be plagued by typos. It’s a valid concern. For example, I don’t want to assume that my users will be able to create a Google map by flawlessly entering:
[googleMap width="100%" height="400" name="Aero Rental - Phoenix" directions_to="true" directions_from="true"]3432 W. Clarendon, 85017[/googleMap]

The solution is to create a way for your users to generate the shortcodes and have them sent to the editor, but where to start? First, you need to add a meta box to the writing/editing pages (these are the dropdown boxes below the editor, such as Tags, Categories, etc). To do this, create a function that you will use to display the form used to generate your shortcode. Then you need to hook into the admin_menu action, and use it to create the metaboxes.

View the complete solution to complex shortcodes in WordPress 2.5.

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While there are thousands of tutorials on web development, most of them assume the reader already knows a bit, or already has a website. Very few address the total novice. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, it is not expensive to maintain a site. For instance, it costs me less than $50 a year to maintain my own site and blog, and the site related to my books.

So, where do you start? I have put together a few basic steps that should hopefully get anyone started, even if your web design skills are zero. Once you have that web presence, you can do more about making it work better. And you don’t have to be development guru to achieve it.

Step 1: Register your domain name

This is the “whatever.com” the user types to get to your site. Remember that the usual .com, .org and .net are not the only extentions you can have. You could go for .tv, .info, .biz, .name, and of course, the country-specific extensions. For example: .in (India), .cn (China), de (Germany), .eu (Europe), .us (USA), etc. It all depends on what your site is about.

A domain usually costs less than $10 a year, depending on what sort of extension you choose. It is advisable to choose a reliable company to register your domain with. If you’re unsure, go with one of the big names, like GoDaddy, Network Solutions or Yahoo! Domains.

Step 2: Figure out what sort of site you want

It doesn’t matter whether you knit sweaters for charity, have a multi-million dollar business, or just want to share your Doctor Who fanfiction—in this day and age you have every right to need or want a website of your very own. However, it will make your job far easier if you know what your site will be like. Take a look at other similar web sites for ideas, though this could possibly prove counter-productive, as the millions of ideas out there might be more confusing than helpful!

To make this easier, open a blank document (or take a piece of paper) and list out your site’s contents. What pages will you have? Will there be a photo gallery? Will there be a contact form? From this you should get a pretty good idea of your layout.

Step 3: Find a suitable template

Since this article assumes you cannot design one yourself, there are two options here. Either pay someone to design one for you or use one of the thousands of great free templates available on the Net. I highly recommend the OpenDesigns site for free templates. Not only are there almost a thousand (including my own! *shameless plug*) available, it has a vibrant and friendly community that will help you out should you get stuck at any stage. If you like a template and want to use it, but are not sure what to do, mail the designer for help. Most people will get back to you. I have helped out a number of people who have downloaded and used my templates for free.

Step 4: Get hosting

Now this is slightly trickier, as for every reasonable and reliable host out there, there exists an equally scary horror story of disappearing acts and clients being left high and dry. Webhostingtalk is a good place to find out about people’s experiences of various hosts. What sort of hosting you will want will depend on what sort of site you have, what you envisage your traffic to be like, and what your budget is. Free hosts are also available too, but remember that they’re likely to have caveats associated with them.

Step 5: Put it all together

And finally, you need to transfer the contents of your site into the template you are using, and then upload everything—images included—to your host’s server. Let’s take it one by one.

If the thought of looking at code makes your heart rate go up, don’t worry, it’s not at all hard! Get a text editor like Notepad++ that highlights code, and it is easy to see where your text will go. If you really feel you cannot handle it, you could use a WYSIWYG editor like NVU.

Once you have everything in place, you will need to transfer the files to the server space you bought from your web host. You will need a program known as an FTP client (for example, FileZilla). Your hosts will have given you a username and password for FTP-ing, and you will need these settings to access your server space. Upload all the files associated with your site—by copying-and-pasting, dragging-and-dropping, etc.—to the public_html folder of your website. Before you upload, do remember to check locally on your computer to see that all links are intact.

If you’ve done this right, typing in your domain name should show up your site. If you’ve messed up somewhere, head over to OpenDesigns and ask for help!

Good luck!

(Originally posted at Writeside.net.)

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It’s taken a while for browsers to catch up with the delights of undo. Of course, the need for an undo command only really became pressing once tabbed browsing appeared on the scene.

Before that, you could always return to a site during a session using the Back button, or from session to session by using the browser’s history cache.

Once we gained the ability to view multiple sites concurrently using tabs, the Back button was no longer sufficient. With multiple sites open, it’s all too easy to close one of those tabs and then realize you need that site open after all.

Opera, not surprisingly, was the first to bring the undo concept to the browser. It gave us the ability to undo a closed tab by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Z.

Then it went further and added a multilevel undo in the form of the Trash Can. The Trash Can stores each tab you close during a session, plus every closed popup window. Click the Trash Can at the far right of the Tab Bar and you can open any of these closed items.

Firefox has had tabs all along, but no undo. Due to its support for extensions, though, third-party developers were happy to remedy that omission.

A number of extensions provided basic undo functions, all the way from the single-minded Undo Close Tab to the spectacularly all-inclusive Tab Mix Plus.

The folks at Mozilla have since seen the list and in Firefox 2 you can undo a closed tab by pressing Ctrl-Shift-T. If you already used the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-T to open a new tab, that’s particularly easy to remember.

If you close a series of tabs, you can reopen each of them by pressing Ctrl-Shift-T repeatedly. It’s a LIFO stack (Last In, First Out), so Firefox will open the most recently closed tab first, then the next most recently closed and so on.

Firefox also includes a (less elegantly implemented) version of Opera’s Trash Can: to select from a list of closed tabs, click History —> ‘Recently Closed Tabs’.

Reopening a closed tab also restores that tab’s history, in both Opera and Firefox, so you can browse back though the sites you viewed on that tab.

So where’s the undo closed tab feature in Internet Explorer 7? It’s not there. Microsoft is still playing catch-up with it’s browser.

Up A Notch

Reopening a closed tab is handy, but wouldn’t it be great if you could undo a browser crash or re-display a bunch of sites after you’ve accidentally closed your browser? That’s where crash recovery comes in.

Once again, where Opera leads, the others have followed.

Opera will automatically load your last session exactly as it was – all the tabs and all the windows – if you click Tools —> Preferences —> General and from the Startup menu select ‘Continue from last time’. You’ll no longer have to worry about accidentally closing a bunch of tabs.

Firefox has a similar options: go to Tools —> Options —> Main and in the ‘When Firefox starts’ box, select ‘Show my windows from last time’.

Once again, IE 7 doesn’t quite get it right. There is an options to re-display the currently open tabs, but there’s no way to set this to occur automatically. Instead, you have to remember to do it each time.

1. Open at least two tabs.
2. Click IE’s close button. A dialog will appear, asking whether you wish to close all tabs.
3. Click the ‘Show Options’ button.
4. Tick the ‘Open these the next time I use Internet Explorer’ options and then click ‘Close tabs’.

Firefox and Opera have the ability to recover from a crash. Should your computer or browser crash, the browsers will automatically offer to reload your last session. It’s not fool-proof, but it usually works.

Matching Opera

To match Opera’s graceful undo handling, Firefox and IE 7 both need the help of add-ons. For Firefox, you should install Tab Mix Plus, one of the all-time great Firefox extensions.

Tab Mix Plus provides a huge array of tab options, including a right-click ‘closed tabs list’, as well as it’s own highly flexible crash recovery and sessions saver.

Once installed, navigate to Tools —> ‘Tab Mix Plus Options’ —> Session to find settings to suit your needs.

For Internet Explorer, there’s IE7Pro. This add-on provides a whole bunch of enhancements for IE, including crash recovery and advanced tab management.

Tips

Tweak Firefox
If you like fiddling under your browser’s bonnet, you can manually tweak Firefox’s session restore and crash recovery settings.

Type about:config in the address bar and set the Filter to session.

You’ll see all of Firefox’s session-related settings. Double-click a setting to change it.

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After all, I had the hosting in place, web hosts offer so much nowadays that you can’t use more than a small percent of it. Not to mention he had a chance to make some real money off his own hard work.

It sounded rather simple in my mind:

1. Buy domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Install WordPress on the new site
4. Configure settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Export WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog
7. Import into the new setup

Looking back, that was a rather nice fantasy. If only it was that easy, I’d not be posting this right now.

What happened in summary was this:

1. Bought domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Installed WordPress on the new site
4. Configured settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Exported WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog

And then the fun nightmare started.

Let’s see what all issues cropped up as I intended to simply Import the XML file into the fresh install of WordPress on my host, keeping in mind, this is an XML generated by WordPress.com in their own special layout and destined for import into their own WordPress product, the only difference being its not hosted by them.

• Opened Import page within new WordPress Dashboard, Manage–>Import–>WordPress (there are a nice selection of Import choices)
• My host seems to have configured the php.ini file on their end to max the upload file size to 2MB, whereas WordPress had generated a 4.7MB file for me to upload. Normally this file wouldn’t be so big, but the blog had many, many images that were uploaded to WordPress.com
• That started my search on how to change the limit in PHP. I ended up contacting my host and starting a thread on WordPress.org’s support forum. After much back and forth and a lot of reading on my own, I had worked out I needed a script to fetch the web hosts php.ini file, make changes to it via that script and write it to my /home/ directory. In my case I’d need to only do this once as all I wanted was a temporary increase in the upload limit, whereas those wanting that limit to remain would need to create a cron job running the script daily, so as to keep abreast of any changes made to the web hosts php.ini file pre-adding their own changes.
• With that done, I was finally able to upload the XML file into the new WordPress installation…yay! NOT.
• This is where it got really bad, because the file was so large, after uploading the file it would import all the posts, comments, pages, etc into the new setup, and this was done in real time displaying the details on the web page, coincidentally if a php process takes more than 30seconds, my web hosts php.ini file says that it should kill the process, ding…Houtson we have a problem!
• So I go back, remake my new php.ini file to make sure the time limit is raised to a decent 300seconds and re-do the upload/import process. By now I have 5% of the posts and pages in the blog and it’s looking a right mess. That’s ok really, because after about half a dozen tries, and the import process not stopping half-way it finally reached the end. Breathe.
• What WordPress decides to do is tag every image that was ever uploaded into the WordPress.com blog (Note: The images would have to be moved over manually…more work, eh) was tagged with an ID and placed in the Manage–>Upload section (pic). It also decides to link to the now non-existent image files all on its own (pic).
• Not content having to re-upload every image from the WordPress.com blog over to the new host, editing every page and post for image links, we now had a huge amount of ‘dead’ files under the Upload section, which as I said, didn’t exist. I also think this is why the exported XML file was so big to begin with.

After much debate, we’ve decided to either ask the kind people at WordPress.com to delete all the images off the original blog and thus save us the hassle of exporting it incorrectly.

Either that or follow a very good idea by muhtar on WordPress.org’s support forum, where his suggestion is simple, yet ingenious.
Run a php/db server on your home machine, easy and free.

1. Import the XML file into a fresh WordPress install (again on the home machine acting like a server, running Windows XP if you like), this is way better than to a hosted server, because at home its all instant and no lag to a far off server.
2. Export it to a common format, i.e. SQL and import it into your self-hosted WordPress install (the new domain).

OK, so it’s not easy…but way less error-prone and hair-pulling this way. I guess many have had no issues, the moral here is, don’t assume it’s gonna be so easy to move over.

Better yet, make a good choice to begin with

Originally posted at techzonline.net

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Just a quick note before beginning: this guide has been written for Windows XP (my operating system) and therefore the names of certain options or menus might be different.

Almost every single USB flash drive comes formatted with the FAT file system by default, which allows them to be used by virtually any version of Windows that supports USB.

Although Microsoft doesn’t make it either intuitive or straightforward, you can format a flash drive with the NTFS file system. This gives you the added benefit of a robust file system and a smaller allocation unit, which makes smaller files occupy less space on large flash drives (why NTFS is better than FAT).

In addition, you can take advantage of NTFS compression to create additional effective space on the flash drive or enable the Encrypting File System for added security.

Unfortunately, all good things come at a price and this statement is no different for the NTFS file system. The price you will pay for NTFS features is slower copying times (about 1.5x for USB 1.1 and 2x for USB 2.0), even without encryption or compression enabled.

To enable compression for the entire flash drive:

1. Open My Computer, right-click the flash drive and select ‘Properties’.
2. Tick the box that says ‘Compress drive to save disk space’ in the bottom box and click OK
3. In the ‘Confirm Attribute Changes’ dialog box, keep the default ‘Apply changes to [drive letter]:\, subfolder and files’ and click OK.

You can also enable or disable compression for single files and/or folders, which is the only option for encryption.

To start either procedure:

• Right-click the file or folder and select ‘Properties’ and then click the ‘Advanced’ tab
• You can now tick either Compression or Encryption. Make your choice, click OK and see step 3 above.

Although you can’t enable both compression and encryption on the same file or folder, you could compress one set of files or folders and encrypt a different set.

With Windows XP’s default settings, NTFS isn’t included on the Windows format tool’s list of file systems, but you can add the option by changing the default on the ‘Policy’ tab for the flash drive from ‘Optimize for quick removal’ to ‘Optimize for performance’, as illustrated here.

Although you must have ‘Optimize for performance’ ticked to add the ‘NTFS format’ option, if you wish you can change back to the default after formatting. However, either policy gives the same time for copying files to the flash drive because apparently XP only enables the write cache for fixed USB drives.

If you frequently swap files on and off your flash drive(s), you should check out Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager. This freeware program requires the .NET Framework 1.1, but won’t install if you have .NET Framework 2.0 or later (weird, eh?).

The solution/workaround to this problem is to temporarily uninstall the later version of .NET Framework, install version 1.1, install USB Flash Drive manager and then reinstall the later .NET Framework.

And so ends this article on Fine-tuning your flash drive.

If you have any questions, comments or something was unclear, leave a comment or contact me on my site.

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It has been my experience and that of several of my clients who use WordPress that this visual editor can really mess your post up.

It can screw up your perfectly valid code and there is a better way to view your posts prior to publishing.

First, you will want to disable the visual editor. Log into your WordPress admin area. Click on Users.

Next, click on Your Profile. Under Personal Options, make sure the box in front of “Use the visual editor when writing” is un-checked.

Now, when you write a post you will see an editor with just a minimum of tags to use. You can add any XHTML code manually.

After writing your post click “Save and Continue Editing“. Now you will see a “Preview” link to the right of the allowable tags.

That’s right, even though you haven’t clicked “Publish” yet, WordPress creates a draft of your post, but it won’t be saved completely until you actually click “Save“.

You can click “Save” when you want to save your draft permanently to work on it later, and then click “Publish” when you are satisfied with your post.

Happy posting!

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Keep in mind, this is my opinion about iPhone’s and email, so your mileage may very.

I know, we all want the cool iPhone icons, look and feel but don’t want to spend a ton of cash for a fancy video iPod with internet and phone capabilities.

Have no fear, you can now theme your BlackBerry to look like an iPhone just like me:

Just head over to BlackBerry Theme Central and grab your “iBerry” theme.

So far the Research In Motion BlackBerry 7100, 8700 and 8800 are supported.

Depending on which model of BlackBerry you own, the full “iBerry” theme will cost you between $5.00-$7.00 USD, which is a lot nicer then $600.00.

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Disclaimer: I do not take responsibility for anything you do to your router. If you brick it or something else goes wrong, it’s not my fault. I’ve documented everything I’ve done in flashing my own routers however your mileage may very. Proceed at your own risk.

It takes only a few minutes to flash the router with a new firmware but you must note these key steps.

Keep in mind that you can only flash a Linksys WRT54G Router version 1-4. Look on the bottom of your router. There should be a label with the version number on it.

You can also tell from the serial number by checking the first 4 letters:

• Version 1.0: CDF0, CDF1
• Version 1.1: CDF2, CDF3
• Version 2.0: CDF5
• Version 2.1: CDF6
• Version 2.2: CDF7
• Version 3.0: CDF8
• Version 3.1: CDF9
• Version 4.0: CDFA

I’m going to assume you’ve already downloaded your choice of DD-WRT firmware. If not, go download it now. I recommend dd-wrt.v23 SP2.

Flashing Your Router:

1. Connect your PC with the .bin file to the router via Ethernet cable. Do not try to flash the firmware through a wireless link, which could be unstable and lead to a brick.

2. Reset your router’s current firmware to factory defaults. You can do this through the current firmware’s configuration pages €“ Administration/Factory Defaults/Yes/Save Settings.

As an alternative, you can physically reset the factory defaults by pressing and holding the reset button on the back of the router for 30 seconds.

3. Now you can flash the new firmware. Connect to the router’s configuration pages with your browser and navigate to Administration/Firmware Upgrade. Open the browse dialog to select your .bin firmware file.

4. Once you start the firmware upgrade €“ do nothing! Have a drink, go for a walk. Just don’t touch your computer or the router. Leave them alone for this intimate moment. Interrupting this process will only produce a new baby brick.

5. After a minute or so you’ll see the upgrade progress bar complete. The router will now reset itself and assuming everything worked, you’ll see a new page with a button marked Continue.

6. Wait at least two more minutes before clicking the Continue button. Sometimes the router presents the continue screen before it has truly cleaned up from its upgrade and you’re better safe than sorry. Have another drink or walk around the block again.

7. Now click Continue. You should be forwarded to the main configuration page for your router. In the case of DD-WRT, it looks much like Linksys’ own page, except with DD-WRT markings and a whole lot more features to explore.

That’s it. You’re done. Congratulations. From here you’ll want to explore the configuration pages and follow any guides or documentation available for the firmware you’ve installed.

Possible Issues:

What if you didn’t make it this far? What if something terrible has happened and the router did not come back to life?

This is a rare but possible event. It is very unlikely if you’ve followed steps one through six. Your router may be bricked, which is somewhat like being dead, except with the possibility of resurrection.

First, try to reset the router to factory defaults by pressing and holding the reset button on its rear for 30 seconds.

When and if it relights, try to connect to it with your browser. You may be lucky and have a chance to start the process over again.

There are various other tricks you can try to revive a bricked router, also known as recovering from a bad flash. In this case, you want to consult the WRT54G Revival Guide.

Originally posted on Planet Sean.

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