Web Development | featured news

Around April, my VPS provider Linode announced that they’ve just finished a major $45M upgrade to their hardware and network, which means free upgrades for their existing users. The new hardware uses SSD RAID drives and faster CPUs. I hadn’t bothered because Wopular and Movies With Butter have been relatively stable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Google first launched Google Chrome, I installed it and give it a test drive. I was fairly impressed. It had a super clean interface and was really fast. Pages rendered noticeably faster than Firefox.

Back then, even though I wanted to take the Chrome plunge, I couldn’t. It didn’t have all, or even half, of the apps I needed for web development and maintaining the content on Wopular.

I just started noticing this recently. It’s a nice touch. Before, you would have to go into a specific comment moderation page to keep track of comments. Now, it’s all tied into your profile page, just like when someone likes or comments on your status updates.

Months ago, I converted my commenting system to Facebook’s. I had my reservations before. Most of it is that because it’s javascript based, the comments will not be crawled by Google. All Google sees is the javascript code, not the actual comments.