/dev/random

You can now subscribe to MacMegasite on your Kindle for $0.99/month.

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One reason I use Google Reader is to share interesting articles in my shared items page. However, I find that I’m more productive when I use NetNewsWire, since I’m in control of how & when it fetches new items, so I spend less time reading news.
I’ve been looking for a way to share items in [...]

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A lot of developers don’t like having their sites loaded into a frame with Digg’s new DiggBar, inspiring several scripts to get rid of the bar. John Gruber came up with a short PHP script that prevents the page from loading with a nasty message if it detects that it’s being loaded in DiggBar’s frame. [...]

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I’ve changed MacMegasite’s theme to a more mac-like theme with a single sidebar. I think two sidebars looked too cluttered, although I had a commitment to display those ads. I was able to fit all of the necessary items into one sidebar, which I think seems a bit less cluttered. This probably won’t be the [...]

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Divvyshot is a very promising new photo sharing site, still in beta. It’s based on public events. Members can create an event such as Macworld Expo, and other people who attended the same event can add their pictures to the event.

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Aaron Swartz notes that the stimulus bill requires that each government agency report the money they give out with Atom or RSS.
For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content [...]

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Last week I added Google Friend Connect to MacMegasite, with a member widget in the sidebar and rating/comment widgets for each article. Today I added Friend Connect to WorldBeatPlanet with a social bar at the top of the page.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
Unlike the sidebar widgets, the social bar won’t work when placed in a block. [...]

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I’ve added a new

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I’ve been locked out of my Twitter account all night due to “too many unsuccessful login attempts”, thanks to Yoono. I haven’t used Firefox in several months, and before that I was using 3.1 betas, which aren’t compatible with Yoono, I had changed my Twitter password since the last time I had used Yoono, so [...]

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The new whitehouse.gov web site embodies the openness and accessibility of Obama’s administration. There’s now an official white house blog, displayed prominently on the home page. The blog doesn’t allow comments, but that’s understandable, since it would be a huge target for comment spammers and would require constant monitoring.
In addition to the blog RSS feed, [...]

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According to Federal Computer Week, at 12:01PM Tuesday when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president, Obama’s change.gov site will become the new whitehouse.gov.
This is huge. Until now whitehouse.gov has been a one-way static site for dispensing information, announcements, and press releases with little or no interaction and no way to get involved. [...]

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I’ve decided to remove the annoying IntelliTXT popup ads from MacMegasite. It was one of our best sources of income, so I will be investigating less obtrusive advertising.

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It looks like I’m about to have my first GPU usage overage charge since I switched to MediaTemple due to a large usage spike during my switch from Drupal to WordPress.
Most of the heavy usage occurred during the actual switch and soon after the switch. Although WordPress has a reputation as a CPU hog, I [...]

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Although Flock has some nice features for integrating your social networks and media, it also has some very significant drawbacks. It always lags behind the current Firefox version for security updates & other fixes, and bookmarks work very differently (which I personally dislike).
Yoono is a Firefox plugin that gives you the best of both worlds. [...]

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Thanks to Google’s 2001 search index, I was able to find my original weblog and worldbeatplanet.
In 2001 I was using Radio Userland for my blog, which I hosted at editthispage.com.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
WorldBeatPlanet was a static page, long before I switched first to PHPNuke and finally to Drupal.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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Pixelpipe is a new service that lets you upload your photos & videos to multiple services at the same time. You set up all of your photo & video sharing sites with Pixelpipe. You can then either email a photo or video to a personal address at Pixelpipe or use their free software to upload [...]

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Google released their new browser today, but only for Windows. The Mac version is supposed to be available soon, so I tried the Windows version under VMware. Even in a VM it’s blazingly fast. Despite the speed, Chrome is ugly. The tabs are much too big. It lacks a menu bar and it isn’t too [...]

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I noticed something very unexpected in my MediaTemple account GPU usage report: an unusually high number of hits for /user/register and /user/login, which I would expect to account for little or no usage. The only explanation I can figure is spambots attempting automated logins & registrations.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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Until I started poking around in Flickr’s Objective C code, I didn’t realize that Zooomr supported a variant of Flickr’s API. I found that it’s fairly easy to port code which uses Flickr to Zooomr. In less than an hour, I had LOLCats working with Zooomr. I plan to include Zooomr support in the other [...]

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If you have a web site, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is not owning your domain name. This week, Daniel Brusilovsky learned that the hard way when his new Teens in Tech site went public.
I was providing hosting for the site on my DreamNightmareHost virtual server, which proved unable to handle [...]

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