Monday, October 25, 2004

PhotoBooth: Select iPhoto images and crop as needed for transient printing

Stunt Software - PhotoBooth

I need this software! Too bad it's going to cost me $20, but it's not like there's much competition. I'd hoped Portraits and Prints would do this -- but they missed the boat. (Too bad, it would have been an easy add for them).

Lets one browse the iPhoto library, choose images to print, then crop as needed for printing.

Update 1/05: Portraits & Prints apparently does something similar, but as of 10/04 they didn't ship wtih the right template. I'll have to check back and see if they've bundled the template.

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Hosting things to watch out for!

Top 10 Web Hosting Reviews: Personal and Business
Call your webhost, simply having only a email address is a sign of a fly-by-night operation.

Nice list of things to watch out for! MyHosting.com doesn't provide phone access. Hmmm.

Here's the full list (nice site - hosting-review.com)
In order to help you avoid getting scammed by the unscrupulous hosts that do exist, we have tried to put together the 'tricks' used by such companies to try to grad your cash:

Unlimited bandwidth or Unlimited Webspace - it is simply impossible for a company to offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited webspace or both. The economics do not add up to any sort of profitable business. The scammers ar trying it. As hosting companies and their associated technologies are themselves limited (i.e. bandwidth or hard disk space), unlimited offerings are a marketing ploy. Often you will find clauses embedded deep within the company's terms of service contract that negate the unlimited offering.

No Contact (telephone, email, etc.) - some hosts simply make it impossible to contact them by any means possible. Call your webhost, simply having only a email address is a sign of a fly-by-night operation.

Long term contracts only - while cheaper plans may warrant an annual only plan, some hosts provide annual service exclusively. There is no guarantee that even though you have paid them for 12 months that you will get 12 months of service. Please avoid long term contracts greater than 12 months of service.

Domain Name Registration in the webhost's Name - some hosts offer to register your domain for you, legally register the domain in their own name! Therefore, if you try moving off, you will lose the domain because it was done in their name. This is a scam that we hope is quickly going away, but watch out for it.

No Money Back Guarantee - every respectable host offers a money back guarantee (30 day minimum)

Complicated uptime Warranty - some hosts hide behind their Terms of Service with complicated uptime guarantees such as the customer must report the downtime.

Webhosting -- this is a killer business

Top 10 Web Hosting Reviews: Personal and Business

I can't recall ever finding out so much information so quickly. Armed with two data points I'm sorting this out very quickly. Two of my early choices are in the top 4 on this site.

Globat
Startlogic (this is a sister site to iPowerWeb run by the same people, I'm downrating them for doing this)
lunarpages
ipowerweb

I'll check out a few more reviews and decide who I like. I'll look mostly at the clarity of the support site, quality of the documentation and FAQs, and read some more reviews. At this level features don't matter so much to me -- except I like the LunarPages WAR hosting. Overlal LunarPages is pulling ahead.

Looking for a new hosting service

I'm looking for a new hosting service. I've used softcomca (MyHosting.com) for years, but their prices are high for what they offer and I always have problems with their FP extensions being enabled on my site -- I don't want those darned extensions!!

Some alternatives

lunarpages
dreamhost

Both of these offer vastly more than my MyHosting.com site. Lunarpages allows one to install WAR files (ie. Blogject, Zope, etc)!

Searching on these two companies (a very sneaky technique -- if you ever want to find good reviews about a service or product, search on both the product and a competitor -- eliminates 99% of the junk and almost all ads) found this comment:

"LunarPages, DreamHost, iPowerWeb, and AvaHost"

So LunarPages and DreamHost are very well ranked, as are iPowerWeb and AvaHost.

Now when I search on the above I also see some interesting Google AdWords listings.

This doesn't look hard at all.

Update: I ended up with Lunarpages. I paid for a year in advance, but they have a 30 day MBG. They had the best description of their overall services and they were the only site to mention spam filtering options for email.

Friday, October 22, 2004

Site Studio: FrontPage LITE for OS X

Site Studio

Now this is innovative. It's a cross between a simple content management system and something like FrontPage. The application uses a variety of templates and forms to design an "web site". The site is a single XML document (looks like an OS X plist document). It can reference images and files. You click a button to generate HTML locally or to upload the HTML.

It could be used easily by schoolchildren or non-techies. There's a limited WYSIWYG editor for some web page work.

It reminds me a bit of all the creative site creation tools that came out on PCs in the 1990s. Most went away. A few mutated to become very high end tools, and FrontPage just mutated (period). This shareware tool harkens back to a lost era.

I'm not quite sure how I can use it, but I'll play with it for a while. Maybe I'll figure out a use. I don't think there's any way to use to import an existing web site.

Find a word based on a description of the underlying concept

OneLook Reverse Dictionary As we boomers age, we need to incorporate this thing into our cell phones.

jux2: Google is not what as good as it used to be

jux2 Search for special education faughnan
Google has problems. JUX2 is a metasearch tool with a novel feature -- it shows what Google misses. Turns out, Google misses a LOT. In particular it's not indexing Blogger's blogspot very well.

I think there's a problem with Google.