Technology, 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.

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.

I just launched a new movie site with my Rotten Tomatoes buddy Binh Ngo. It’s called MoviesWithButter.com, a website that tracks upcoming movies through various stages of development by aggregating scoops from the top movie sites on the web.

I just installed Read It Later and Screengrab for Firefox and Firebug Lite for Chrome. All three add-ons/extensions are really helpful in my day-to-day management of Wopular.