To chronical tech stuff that Supportus Maximus is up to and share information about all sorts of experiences in the world of Tech.

Mac to Me

Posted July 3rd, 2008 by joel

Apple is soon going to transition their .Mac service over to something called Mobile Me. I hope this is a good thing. There are many things that have bothered me about .Mac over the years. Don't get me wrong, it's much better than anything else out there, except Microsoft Exchange Server, but it has always been a bit wonky and I think Apple knows it. I hope the new Mobile me is better. Here are the things I don't like about the current .Mac account. We'll see if they are fixed in this new Mobile Me.

  1. iDisk. Although I use it and it's convenient, it never quite works the way I want it. It when I upload something to it so that someone across town can download it, it uses Web instead of FTP, and kind of synchronizes the whole folder rather and just uploading it. It also gives terrible feedback on what it's doing and how long it's going to take. I just get this barber pole and it says something to indicate that it's finished, when it's not. It seems to take forever and is impossible to stop, if you need to.
  2. Synchronizing across computers. Truly confusing and scary. Just make sure that when you do any sychronizing that you backup your address book. I've spent the last 7 or 8 years compiling a pretty extensive address book. I would hate to lose it. There has been more than a few times that my heart has almost stopped because I thought I erased it because of .Mac sync. No matter how careful I am, it eventually gets confused and I have to reset it (usually a few times) and it never really works again. I usually just turn it off because it's too much hassle.
  3. Calendars. I would love to just share a calendar across my home network or even across the internet with my wife. Is this too much to ask. Apple seems to think that just because I want to share my calendar with my wife, that I want to share it with anyone who subscribes to it. I don't. Second of all I would like to be able to share a calendar with my wife that we can both change. I would also like to share a calendar like that with an assistant as well. No dice. I think Mobile Me might fix this. We'll see.
  4. Homepage. Homepages are soooo wonky on the internet and the addresses are impossible to remember. I'm hoping it'll be easier for me to log into my account and see what I have on my home pages when I'm away from home.

These are just a few things off the top of my head. There are great things that are already there, but I would love these things to be fixed.

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GetFresh, our first application is released!

Posted June 16th, 2008 by joel

Get Fresh

The first program is out from Supportus Maximus' new site GetAppy.com

If you use Freshbooks for your accounting GetFresh helps your customers log into FreshBooks. Install it on your customer's computer and with two clicks they will be into the Freshbooks site, where they can write you support tickets, see their billed hours and pay their invoices.

GetFresh helps you get your invoices paid, and soon you'll be able to customize Get Fresh so that it can look like your company. This will be a constant reminder to your customers that you are there for them.

If you don't have FreshBooks yet, check it out here:

FreshBooks

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Drupal Clean URLs with Aplus.net Hosting

Posted April 29th, 2008 by joel

I'm happy to announce that a second tier support technician named Philip Petrov fixed the problem I was having with Aplus, Drupal and Clean Urls. Clean urls, as explained in the video I put on my last posting, just means that the path to the pages doesn't say ?q=PAGE at the end of the path. It just says PAGE.

This will apparently make Google happier. Always pays to make Google happy.

Anyway, I'm just going to post the text of the .htaccess file (a file that tells the server how to behave) that they had me put on my site.

Here is the text that goes into that file:


#
# Apache/PHP/Drupal settings:
#

# Protect files and directories from prying eyes.

Order allow,deny

# Don't show directory listings for URLs which map to a directory.
Options -Indexes

# Follow symbolic links in this directory.
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Customized error messages.
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

# Set the default handler.
DirectoryIndex index.php

# Override PHP settings. More in sites/default/settings.php
# but the following cannot be changed at runtime.

# PHP 4, Apache 1.
#
# php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
# php_value register_globals 0
# php_value session.auto_start 0
# php_value mbstring.http_input pass
# php_value mbstring.http_output pass
# php_value mbstring.encoding_translation 0
#

# PHP 4, Apache 2.
#
# php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
# php_value register_globals 0
# php_value session.auto_start 0
# php_value mbstring.http_input pass
# php_value mbstring.http_output pass
# php_value mbstring.encoding_translation 0
#

# PHP 5, Apache 1 and 2.
#
# php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
# php_value register_globals 0
# php_value session.auto_start 0
# php_value mbstring.http_input pass
# php_value mbstring.http_output pass
# php_value mbstring.encoding_translation 0
#

# Requires mod_expires to be enabled.
#
# Enable expirations.
# ExpiresActive On
# Cache all files for 2 weeks after access (A).
# ExpiresDefault A1209600
# Do not cache dynamically generated pages.
# ExpiresByType text/html A1
#

# Various rewrite rules.
#
RewriteEngine on

# If your site can be accessed both with and without the 'www.' prefix, you
# can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred
# URL, either WITH or WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix. Choose ONLY one option:
#
# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
# (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#
# To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix,
# (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory and
# the rewrite rules are not working properly.
# RewriteBase
RewriteBase /

# Rewrite old-style URLs of the form 'node.php?id=x'.
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([^&]+)$
#RewriteRule node.php index.php?q=node/view/%1 [L]

# Rewrite old-style URLs of the form 'module.php?mod=x'.
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^mod=([^&]+)$
#RewriteRule module.php index.php?q=%1 [L]

# Rewrite current-style URLs of the form 'index.php?q=x'.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /blog/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
#

# $Id: .htaccess,v 1.81.2.3 2007/09/21 12:24:22 drumm Exp $


Please note the line of code near the end that says

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /blog/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

This line is particular to my site because my Drupal is in a subfolder called "blog". If yours is not, just put "/index.php" instead of /blog/index.php  If your Drupal site is in a subfolder that is not called blog, substitute the name of your subfolder. Also please note that sometimes when you FTP a .htaccess file you have trouble. Sometimes it's good to upload it as filename: htaccess.txt and then change the name once it's on the server. Also please, if you already have a .htaccess file on your site, you should rename it as a backup before you do this. That .htaccess file might already be doing something very necessary and you might have to combine them or something. Please consult with your website host before doing any of this of course.

Thanks to Philip Petrov.

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Drupal Clean URLs

Posted April 22nd, 2008 by joel

I'm having a lot of trouble getting clean urls with my hosting plan on Aplus.net. So I made this video to show them. I think it's a setting with Apache. I uploaded the video to Brightcove to show them. We'll see what kind of response I get. The main thing is that I feel if I can't resolve this I'll have to move to another provider. Clean URLs are pretty serious when you're trying to get Google ranking.

Drupal is php based and it uses php queries to create pages. But then your page urls have q?= before them. This is not so good when you're dealing with Google, from what I understand.

For the record, I did find this YouTube post, and tried what she said, but still couldn't get it to work.

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Windows Live Writer for Easy Blog Entries

Posted March 31st, 2008 by joel

Here is one tool to make regular blog entries easier. If you have a blog, or several blogs and you want to make entries easily from your computer, this is one tool to do so.

Right now it is available at Windows Live Writer

Now they might have you signup for a Windows Live! account, which is free. I think that's the way they rope you into some bigger plan they have.

When the installer runs, just opt out of all the extra stuff they try to give you.

  1. go to the link above and click on the orange "get it free button"
  2. Run the installer. If it asks you to install other things, just uncheck them.
  3. Open the program under Start>All Programs>Windows Live>Live Writer (this part is tricky, because it took me a long time to find the program on my programs list)
  4. Once you find the program, I would right click on it and choose "Send to Desktop (create shortcut), so you can find it easily.
  5. Launch the program from the icon you put on the desktop or from where you found it in "All Programs"
  6. When the program opens it'll ask you information about your blog. Enter in your blog or website address as you would in an Internet browser.
  7. Enter in your username and password.
  8. The you should be able to click on the "New" icon at the top of the page and start blogging. Tools for inserting pictures, maps and links are on your right.
  9. When you are done writing, click the "Publish" button at the top of the screen and it will publish directly to your blog.
  10. If you want to change old blog entries, just click the "Open" icon on the top toolbar. Choose your blog on the right and it will populate the window with previous entries that you can open and edit.

I used Windows Live Writer to make this blog entry.

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