Web

It’s 2021! Happy New Year!

2020s, Web

Thank feck for a new start!

Just got the blog moved over to another host. It’s something that I do every 3 years or so. Something happens at a web host that means that a move becomes necessary.  This time, the renewal fees were costing 1 year what I got for 3 years before. I can see why this works with admins who don’t have so much experience with databases and PHP. And this was a pain going through problems in the database migration and working out server permissions. But this is the final test to make sure that it is working.

Happy new year and I wish you the best for 2021!

Dear @youtube, please provide an option to remove the pause overlay.

2020s, Music, Video, Web

I’m a huge fan of YouTube and have learnt a lot from many of the tutorial videos on there from photography to cooking. Today, I have been trying to recreate a video reconstructing the song Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz from Point Blank Music school.

At some points in the video, I want to pause it to see the pattern in Ableton that is being shown and recreate it in BeatMaker 3 on the iPad. However, each time I pause a YouTube video, this overlay comes up when I want to see the full screen.

It would be great to have an option to turn off the overlay, especially when I paying for the premium package.

By the way, here is a link to the video in question. Highly recommended if you like to see behind the scenes of a work.

https://youtu.be/I_fWfmQ1ZbM

Control Your Content by having your own platform

Development, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Just saw this from twitter : Matthias Ott – Into The Personal Website-verse

Such a thought-provoking article that reminds me that I need to publish more of the work that I on here rather than on Instagram or Twitter or Flickr. I think of businesses that run their pages from Facebook or Instagram and wonder how they are giving control over their audience to another platform. Break their rules and years of content could disappear. Remember “musicblogocide 2010”?

One day, Twitter and other publishing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Medium will indeed die, like so many sites before them. And every time this happens, we lose most of the content we created and with it a fair amount of our collective cultural history.

Data loss isn’t our only problem, though. If you decide to publish your work on a platform like Medium, you’re giving away control over it. What if Medium suddenly decided to extend the already existing paywall to all articles? There’s not much you could do about it. Simply because you don’t own your content anymore.

Go there and read the whole article as he articulates it much better than I can.

If you’re a beginnner and prepared to rollup your sleeves a little, get a domain on NameCheap for less than €10 and hosting with WordPress on SiteGround for €4 per month. It’s not that hard to do and allows an easy way to get your content on your own platform.

The next hacks are coming from the browser

2010s, Security, Social Networking, Tech, Web

I was reading this article on Tom’s Guide about how some Twitter accounts were exposed.
What was startling to me was that Chrome and Firefox store passwords in plain text. Eye opening for me. I used them a lot until I got a Lastpass subscription.

The upshot is that you should never let your web browsers save login credentials for important accounts, such as social networking, bank or other online financial accounts, webmail or online retail accounts such as Amazon.

Chrome and Firefox store login credentials in plain text, making them ripe targets for hackers. Internet Explorer, to Microsoft’s credit, stores then in encrypted form in a separate application.

If remembering passwords is a pain, use a dedicated password manager, such as LastPass or Dashlane, that encrypts and protects your passwords much more securely than a web browser can. And don’t forget to enable two-factor authentication on every account that allows it.

Reducing product and enhancing result in design

Design, Development, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Fanstastic post by Goran Peuc in Smashing Magazine about design in information products.

Some highlights are mentioned below but read the whole article.

One of the main problems in product design:

I still find a lot of products today, be they digital or physical, to be too complex and feature-driven. Shouldn’t we as designers instead be looking to remove complexity for users as much as possible or as much as allowed for by current technology, by making our products fit more seamlessly into their daily lives and routines? I feel that we simply don’t and, more worryingly, that we still haven’t learned lessons from the past.

The desired process:

Figure out a way to remove such complexities. Figure out how to remove entire pieces of your product or interface, while keeping the user on the path to the desired result.

Finally:

Theoretically, the ultimate goal for any product is to be completely removed from the user’s perspective. Work towards that goal because nobody wants to use your product.
People just want the benefit of using it.

10 year anniversary of the blog

Tech, Web

It’s ten years since I started this blog. Guess what? Yes, I’m moving to another new hosting company.

Most of the work has been done today and I waited for this blog to transfer over before writing this post. Most websites are wordpress based. Moving them is straightforward, ftp down, ftp up, sql export, sql import, change server settings.

Have a great 2016!

Backup all of your photos on Flickr

Photography, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

I read about an update an update to the Uploadr tool from Flickr. In the past, this tool has been cumbersome and inefficient. However, this new tool is working very well for me so far. I just pointed it at an external drive and it’s working well so far. It is possible to view photos by date uploaded or by date taken which extracts the exif information from the photo.

Unfortunately, I used some terrible photo editing tools in the past and in many photos, that information is wiped.

So now I’m on the hunt for a good tool that can batch update exif date information. So far, apart from a couple of command line options, I haven’t found anything.

The photos are all uploaded to private mode so only you will see them. If your computer or backup option goes wrong, this is one option that can help.

Download the new Uploadr here

This page explains the tool and how it works in more detail.

Flickr Uploadr is finally here

Google changes search engine to prioritise mobile friendly sites

Development, Mobile, Software, Tech, Web

I got an email from the Google Webmaster Tools Team in relation to one of my old sites.

Google systems have tested 204 pages from your site and found that 99% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 202 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.

Now I have to update this old site. I feel it is a good time to implement some current technologies like angular.js and jquery with it and maybe some others. But this is really a tipping point in the supremacy of sites being ready for mobile devices above normal computers and laptops.

CMS Wire has more detail here about the change.

It’s possible to test a site for mobile friendliness using this link.