Category: Bits

  • Amazon Lightsail

    I have been working on moving all of my web projects from Rackspace to Amazon for the last couple of months and yesterday I came across a newish Amazon service Lightsail.

  • The switch from GD to imageMagick

    Recently I launched a new photo site called cape.photography. For years I have been using the GD library in PHP for image manipulation basically just re-sizing images.  This has never seemed to be an issue I think because I was always uploading the actual size I needed then making the thumbnails on the server so […]

  • CSS For Responsive Images

    Responsively designed websites are become more of the norm than the exception these days and one of the biggest challenges for a beginner trying to develop these sites is dealing with the images. Luckily with a little css we can make sure they re-size proportionally as the screen re-sizes.

  • Quick and Dirty Instagram API implementation

    Last Friday I spent the morning looking into the Instagram API thinking it would be cool to have our members be able to share their photos on the site via instagram. So this is a quick and dirty implementation but it works. There are a couple of things to keep in mind though. Instagram has […]

  • GMail desktop notifications

    This is something I have been waiting for, well since I started using Gmail. I have tried the chrome plugins for notification but non of them really accomplished what I was really looking for. As soon as I saw the GMail blog post about these notifications I turned them on and I don’t think I […]

  • Chrome Web Store First Impressions

    The Chrome web store is now live and, at least in my opinion it is very cool. I keep reading about how this is no more than glorified bookmarks, and why is this necessary. These questions are coming from a lot of the tech journalists I read and look up to, I would really expect […]

  • Google Open DNS solves Comcast problem

    Tonight there is a wide spread Comcast internet outage all over the east Coast. This problem is being caused by a problem with Comcast’s DNS servers. A quick and easy way to fix this is to change the DNS servers your local computer is using from the default to Google Open DNS which is 8.8.8.8 […]

  • Rethinking the Social Web

    Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network View more presentations from Paul Adams. Above is a slideshow prepared by Paul Adams a senior user experience researcher at Google  detailing the differences between the current social web and the actual real life social graph.

  • Facebook Places initial thoughts

    Facebook has finally released Places, which is basically a rip off of all the other location based services out there right now. While reading about this new feature for the past couple of weeks I was excited to see how they would implement it and if they would have some type of partnership with one […]

  • Googles Background image fail or not?

    Yesterday Google did away with their ultra clean home page to showcase their new “feature”, background images. Not surprisingly there was a major uproar from some of their users, myself being one of them. At the time I could not believe that they would betray me like that after all of the times I have stuck […]