GrinGod [dot] Com

I’ve created another Foldlet. This one animates the synotic charts which are provided on the Metcheck.com website. Currently the images are reduced down to 300×200 as I didn’t want them taking up the whole of the Fold page but at some time I may make it configurable.

To add this Foldlet to your Fold page simply add a new HTML Container and set its source code to be the following:

<iframe src="http://www.gringod.com/fold/metcheck.html" width="300" height="200" frameborder="0"></iframe>

I’ve finally finished my initial release of a search Foldlet for Fold. To use the Foldlet, add a HTML container to Fold and set the source as the following:

<iframe src="http://www.gringod.com/fold/search.php" width="400" height="200" frameborder="0"></iframe>

For more information about Fold (the Web 2.0 homepage) visit Fold.com, the developers blog is at foldblog.blogspot.com and for the beta of fold head over to beta.fold.com.

Note that Fold does require Firefox or compatible browser. I know that sucks for a web 2.0 web app but thats life.

For another Foldlet have a look at http://foldblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/first-foldlet.html.

Since I moved GrinGod [dot] com to UH Hosting I have no longer had Gallery installed on the server, instead I use Flickr for hosting my images.

To display the images in my website I decided to go with FAlbum, a plugin for WordPress.  This morning I upgraded FAlbum to the latest version (0.6.4).  I also saw in Digg this morning a list of Downloadable AJAX Galleries, Slideshows and Effects.

One thing led to another and I ended up doing a mash-up of FAlbum and Lightbox JS.  Now, when you are viewing an image in my photos, you can click on one of the size links which (if you are using a modern browser) will display the selected image size in a nice Web 2.0 style lightbox.

If you want to use my mash-up I’ve made the modified files available on my download page.  Please note that I am not planning on supporting this mash-up and that I may well make changes to it in the future.  None of my changes have been or will be localised.

Having only had my website hosting service provider changed on Monday evening I am already reaping the benefits.

The things which have impressed me so far include:

• Much faster IMAP mail access
• Faster webpage load times
• PHP modules required for JPGraph library
• More than 3 simultanious FTP connections
• Much improved customer support

If you tried to access my site yesterday afternoon you may have received the message:

I’m in the process of shifting my website to another hosting company. Please bear with me and I’ll get my site back online asap.

This is because yesterday I change my hosting company from hexhost.com to UH-Hosting.co.uk, which is the hosting company that my good friend Phrixus uses.

Luckily I was able to get everything set up on the new servers before I changed the domain name servers. The only reason I put the above message on my old server is so that nobody posted any comments after I had copied the wordpress database over, as that you have been a right royal pain.

But we’re all back online now. Now after months of submitting support requests to hexhost to get TTF support in PHPs GD library I don’t have to worry about it.

I’ve also signed up for a Reseller account, so if anyone wants some PHP hosting space you can drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do (I’ve already got a couple of takers on the cards).

Thanks to Phrixus for pointing me in the direction of the FAlbum plugin for WordPress.

I’ve only just installed it and already I’m really impressed. It was litterally a two second install:

• Upload the files.
• Authorise the plugin with Flickr.
• Create a dummy page that redirects to the plugin.

It ties in really neatly with the site, I didn’t need to make any modification to the plugin… it just uses the current theme. Even the list of tags is using the right theme colours.

So far I have’t uploaded many photos to Flickr but that was because it was such a pain to try and get the images tied into my blog. Now with this plugin I’m sure I’ll be uploading a whole load more pictures.

You check out the photos that i have uploaded here, they’re mostly of my Bandit at the moment.

Having posted an entry yesterday, about googles proof that the moon is made of cheese, I got my first hit from Google today for someone searching for “cheese moon google“.

Hats off to google for such a rapid update of their search index.

According to the logs that are being generated for my website by phpOpenTracker 90% of the visitors to my site are FireFox users.

I should point out that at the moment, until I get a proper WordPress plugin working for phpOpenTracker, I am only recording people viewing articles on my website and that haven’t blocked my webbug. I am therefore not recording search engine crawlers or spammer scripts that don’t pick-up linked files.

My webserver log files seem to think that the balance is 60% IE to 30% Firefox (plus a few others), the difference might be explained by the fact that the spammer scripts send faked IE headers in the hope that websites wont be blocking IE users (apparently 60% of internet users).

Has the world really shifted to Firefox? I don’t think so. The content of my site is mainly of interest to a narrow band of users and they are generally the sort of users that would care about the difference between IE and Firefox. There is still a vast number of internet users out there who don’t know or don’t care about Microsofts (apparent) monopoly on the web browsers and its potential effect of stiffling internet development… but that another story altogether.

I’m sure I posted on this not so long ago but its a subject I enjoy so I’m posting on it again.

I am, it must be said, very vain when it comes to my website. I like to know who is viewing my site, where they’re coming from and what software they’re using. To accomplish this I normally check the log files for my website several times a day.
Continue Reading »

For the last couple of days I have been playing with MathML on my website to allow me to post Mathematical notations in my blog. Those people viewing my site with Mathematica fonts or the MathPlay plugin should have been largely unaffected and would have seen nicely rendered Mathematical notations. Those of you without the above fonts or plugin would have experienced any or all of the following problems:

• XML parsing error messages.
• Warning messages about missing fonts
• Viewing my pages as XML output.

In the absence of any sensible solution to these problems I have removed the MathML from my site until I can find a sensible solution (possibly along the lines of dynmically generated PNGs.