VaultPress is backup solution for users of standalone versions of WordPress. The user interface looks very simple and it has some helpful statistics. It even has security monitoring in Premium and Enterprise editions.
At $15/month for the basic plan (while in beta), it’s a little pricey for the average user. There are plugins available now for automatic backup. But, if you’re a professional blogger or high-traffic site, this is a great solution.
Yeah, it’s a stupid headline, but it’s true. That’s how long I gave the new Firefox beta a try.
I read about how it was ready for the primetime and decided to give it a shot. It started fast and the panorama feature is very cool. The tabs on top seemed fine considering I’ve been using Chrome forever. Everything was great. Then I saw it. Or should I say didn’t? Where did my Firebug go?
I just can’t survive without the Firebug plugin at this point. I’m addicted. So I immediately downgraded to get my fix. I could use Safari or Chrome’s element inspection. But let’s be honest, that’s no where near as user friendly.
Everything is back to normal. I see that a roque line-height is causing that h1 to move down too much. The world is ok again. But as soon as Firebug support it, Firefox 4 will be back on my computer.
Update: Maybe I was a little quick to judge. Firebug for Firefox 4 is in Alpha 9 right now. I’ve heard that it’s pretty stable. So maybe I’ll give this another shot. False alarm, nothing to see here.
I have changed my Twitter handle from @KeiWiDesign to @kevinwnek. It just makes more sense considering all my work is done with Adjacent Concepts. Should be easier for people to find me this way as well.
I was pretty anti-Twitter for a long time. The constant updates by celebrities and the like are useless. I really don’t care what you had for breakfast. But, for news gathering it is fantastic. It’s really just a giant aggregator that has replaced most of my RSS feeds.
While I’d like to think I’m Don Draper, there are times you shouldn’t improvise a pitch. One was today while on a call with a client.
With them struggling with ideas to make a design differ from others, I threw something out of left field. “Move the navigation, make it more about the site.” While these might be good ideas, expecting a client to visualize something like this is ridiculous. Of course he didn’t like it and we moved on to other topics.
I should know better than to do something like this. Improvisational pitching over the phone rarely goes anywhere good. It’s better to ask for goals and return with mockups. Without the visual, there’s no way to control what the client see versus what you mean.
Do as I say, not as I do. If you don’t have a visual, skip the pitch and present later.
I changed my mind regarding choosing Mercurial. Why? Because I’m an indecisive bastard and continued to research Git and Mercurial. After reading countless blog posts, evangelist websites, and forums my mind hurt even more. Then I took a step back and thought about how I really use my tools.
When I program in jQuery, I don’t use .getJSON or any of those shortcuts. I use .ajax with the appropriate options. It’s more efficient and I like being able to use one command to do many things. This is more like Git than Mercurial.
Again, they are both great systems. That’s why I had so much trouble deciding between them. But when it comes down to it, one matches my preferred workflow better. Before Blain kills me, that is my final answer…
No, I don’t mean coffee (though I love that too). Caffeine, the Mac app, adds a little icon in your menu bar. Click on it and your computer won’t automatically go to sleep. Click again and it’s back to normal.
I love this because, for security reasons, I’m required to have my computer auto-lock after 10 minutes of non-activity. That gets annoying when someone comes in the office for a meeting. Every few minutes I’m rushing to move the mouse before it hits auto-lockout.
This app fixes that problem entirely. Just click on the little coffee cup in the menu bar and it won’t sleep. Just need to be sure to unclick after meetings, so it actually does lock if I leave my office.
I love the icon too. There’s something about a hot cup of coffee that is very attractive to the eye.
I’ve been researching versioning software pretty heavily since we do not use any at HSPH. Yes, that’s right, none. I have come to the conclusion that Mercurial works best for us.
First, why don’t we use versioning? Well, there really isn’t any good reason. The previous developer didn’t install anything. As Blain and I started working, we continued to use his processes since most of our projects were individual. So, we never had an issue.
I’ve wanted to move to something for quite a while. We had versioning at my old job. I also used it in my freelancing. We discussed it in the office. Yet, nothing happened: nothing ever broke, we had daily backups, we didn’t have the time.
We’ve since moved to more complex projects and remote employees. It’s obvious that we need to use something before an issue happens. So, with that, I started evaluating our options.
We really wanted to be able to work offline for long periods. This meant we were better suited to a distributed version control system. Bye bye SVN.
The rest feels like a crap shoot. Do a Google search and you’ll see how conflicted opinions are. Mercurial and Git are both very good systems. Both are used by popular open source projects and repositories like GitHub and BitBucket. So how did I choose one over the other? The answer is simplicity and familiarity.
I’ve used Subversion before, as has Blain. Git’s learning curve is a bit steep while Mercurial syntax is very similar to SVN. And the commands are quite simple. You sacrifice some power with this (Git is very fast). But I am fine with that. We’re just doing web development. The majority of our work is in text files.
I have looked over a great tutorial and online book. My next steps are to install on my local machine and test for a bit. Then we’ll get this on our severs.
The only downside I’ve seen is GUI. MacHg looks like a nice app, but I work mostly out of Coda. It would be nice to have a plugin for Mercurial in Coda.
