Senh Duong's Blog

The Identical Look of Firefox and Chrome Caused Site Shutdown

White Screen of Death

In my previous article, I mention how the latest version of Firefox has a nearly identical look to Google’s Chrome web browser. When I’m working on new features for my sites, I use Firefox for testing and Chrome to see what the results look like to the users.

I knew one of these days, because both browsers look the same now, I would confuse one for the other and put up untested programming code that would cause havoc on my sites.

That happened yesterday, a lot sooner than I had expected.

 

Firefox 29: Looks Just Like Chrome Now

Firefox 29

I just upgraded to Firefox 29, the latest version. Well, it’s more like it upgraded itself. Although I like the newer cleaner look, it’s harder and harder to tell the difference between it and Chrome, except the latter is still seemingly snappier.

Firefox 29 has buttons at the top left for both bookmarking and access to the bookmark list. My bookmarks list has gotten so out of control lately that I rarely use it anymore. It’s probably time to clean it up.

 

Link Removal Part II: I'm Still Not Removing Your Link, But ...

Link Removal

About a year ago, I wrote about getting daily requests/demands/threats to remove links to random sites on Wopular. I didn’t add those external links myself. They’re all done automatically through RSS feeds. If another site’s content is related to a headline on Wopular, then a link to it is generated.

 

Moved SimplePie File Caching to Database

SimplePie

A while back, My ISP told me my backups took half a day to complete, which is too long. If anything goes wrong during that period, the process would have to start all over again, which happened quite often.

The customer rep told me that my server had too many files, and even though they didn’t take up much disk space when added up, the process of copying each one of them takes a lot of time.

 

Pixlr’s Online Image Editor, When All You Want To Do Is Resize An Image

I was looking for a Chrome app that would allow me to resize images and came upon Pixlr’s online image editor. Open up their website on any browser (I’ve only used it on Firefox and Chrome), and you get a fast simpler version of Photoshop online. I only use it to resize images, but a lot of the common features on Photoshop are here - like layers, history, filters, and much more. It’s pretty cool.

 

Bet On HTML 5 Kept Facebook from Entering Mobile Market Early

I was reading an article on BBC about Facebook’s future and came upon the reason why the social network got into the mobile market so late. BBC has the answer from Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg:

 

Looks Like Facebook Home Is Not For Me

There’s been lots of news lately regarding Facebook Home. I use Facebook on a daily basis, but I’m not sure if I want them to take over my phone. I don’t even want Google to take over my phone; the first thing I did with my new phone was get rid of their search bar.

 

Got the Galaxy Note 2

Galaxy Note 2 Drawings

Ever since Samsung came out with the Galaxy Note, I was already interested. It has a 5.3” screen and a pressure-sensitive stylus.

Because I use my phone mostly for web browsing, the larger screen allows me to see more of a website without zooming in and out. I’m also not one who fears big phones. I got HTC’s HD2 a couple years ago when its 4.3” screen was the largest of its time.

 

Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition

After updating the site for seven days a week since the site was started years ago, I will be hands off during the weekends from now on. Because I don’t want the site to look too static, I’ve decided to redesign the “Most Fed Articles” block from the top right area of the site and moving it the top left just for the weekends and calling it “Weekend Edition.”

If you came to the site this past weekend, you may have noticed the change and relocation.

That’s just a start. I’ll try to pre-program other content for the weekends during the weekdays and keeping my weekends free.

 

Sorry, I Don't Have Time to Work on Your SEO: Backlink Removal

Penguins

Ever since Google released its Penguin update last year, which penalizes sites for being linked to by low quality sites, I’ve been getting a regular stream of link removal requests. (Yeah, I know this implies that my site is low quality, but I’ll let that go.)