So, starting today, I’ve begun the process of migrating my websites out of my apartment and onto the server. In another 3 hours, the data transfer should be complete and at that point I can begin testing to make sure I’ve remembered to install all the software and have the server configured correctly. Once I’m satisfied that everything is ready, I’ll update DNS to reflect the address of the new server and everyone should (hopefully) see a seamless transition as I’ll implement redirects while the new DNS settings propagate.

For those of you using Linode, do you have any suggestions for me? Nifty tips and tricks? Things to watch out for? If so, please, let me know.

UPDATE:

And the transition to Linode is complete. If you notice any problems, please let me know.

Feature List:

They’ve tied it into Gmail, when an email mentions an event and time, click a couple of times and it shows up on your calendar. They aren’t providing a whole lot more that’s new besides that if you’re a user of iCal and some sort of publishing software like phpicalendar. (I do mine this way, you can check it out if you want.)

There are a couple things I don’t like however.

1) Google still isn’t supporting Safari. This has been an issue for me with Gmail as well, but things mostly work there. Google Calendar though? I get an message saying Safari isn’t supported every time I visit. Secondly, every time I click on a different page (week view, month, etc.) I get a huge error message that flows off the screen and I have to blindly hit enter on the message.

2) Funny… the Google Calendar thing doesn’t show up in Gmail for me (even when using Firefox, a supported browser.)

3) I can’t publish from iCal to Google Calendar. Sure, I can export from iCal and then import into Google Calendar, but that’s a pain every time I change an event. With phpiCalendar, everytime I make a change, it’s uploaded to the server via webDAV.

4) The imported calendar isn’t even correct. Events that I delete in iCal still show up in Google Calendar. This doesn’t happen when I publish to my calendar. Look: Google Calendar (well, you could look if I could figure out how to get a link to that day) and phpiCalendar.

So, what am I going to do? I’ll probably upload my calendars just to play around with it. To have a timely and updated version of my schedule on the web though, phpiCalendar is still the solution I’m going to stick with.

I didn’t get too many clicks until December rolled around. Through today, Adsense has earned me about $15. That’s 39 ads clicked and I’m paid an average of $0.84 per click. While I’m not earning as much money as some of those people who actually live off of their Adsense revenue, it might pay the bill for my new cell phone this month, which isn’t bad in my eyes.

Adsense was pretty easy to set up too. It took about 10 minutes to register an account and about a day later, I got a test debit to my checking account (though you can also opt for a check in the mail). Actually implement the ads on the website was pretty easy too. On this site, I just dropped a chunk of javascript into a CSS file and poof!, Google ads. On my Foamy mirror, I did have to go through and put the javascript on each page (I just mirror it for a guy, so I’m not redesigning it to use CSS, which I don’t know well enough for that task). If anyone is interested in setting it up on their site and has trouble, let me know.

For the rest of you, have a heart, click the occassional ad and make some money for me at no cost to you.

Coming soon: email from my webserver.

There’s also a nifty project called Internet Explorer Destroyer that displays a nice little page recommending you switch when you visit this page. For those of you using IE, I’m sure you’ve already seen it.

The Gallery project moved to a database driven system and the administration console is a lot more accessible and easier to configure and mantain. It seems more resonsive and has a plethora of new features.

EXIF data is displayed with images, it has a crisper look and the layouts are easier to manage.

Go ahead, take a look at the new gallery.

Over the same time period though, I’ve been playing around with OS X Tiger’s Safari RSS, and I must say that I’m quite impressed. It lets you view feeds individually, or will aggregate them into one large, searchable and categorizable feed. It’s really pretty slick.

But, I digress, I ended up setting up a number of Planet feeds, a couple for MTU LUG and a couple for myself.

All in all, Planet is pretty cool… it has some rough edges, but it’s pretty easy to figure out once you realize where the templates are that the config files are pointing at. Now I just need to learn some CSS stuff so I can make it look better.

On that note, last night I set up flickr-gallery on here, check it out at blog.aragirn.net/photos. It pulls the galleries off of my flickr site and displays them through the blog. It even pulls the exif data and allows you to view the albums as slideshows.

Unfortunately, the flickr-gallery project isn’t very well maintained or documented, so it took a bit of work to get it set up. Hopefully the coming revisions of the plugin address the install difficulties.

So, last week, I set up a wiki on my page(no longer available14 May 2005) (to keep track of my personal projects).

This weekend, I set one up for the MTU LUG. I’m using Mediawiki, which was a pretty easy setup. You can download an install from that page, and it’s available in apt for Ubuntu. Install directions are also available.

The really nice thing is that you can edit the mysql database to do things that you can’t through the wiki’s web interface. (It’d be nicer if you could simply do it through the interface though). What you have to do in the database are things like:

If you’re interested in setting up a wiki, and the install docs aren’t enough, or you need help with something, let me know.

mandolux | desktops | firefox | always use protection

Awesome Firefox wallpaper. I’m using it on the desktop and laptop.