Just tried and abandoned FeedWordPress. It’s an impressive plugin, but seemed like too much work only to cross-post news from the Joe’s Filters site here too. Mostly though, I didn’t like the way my language would have had to float inbetween sites. I may add a JavaScript feed display at some point, but for now I’ll just post a note here when something updates over there.
I’ve finally posted the revised Joe’s Filters Documentation. Much of the content is the same, but the backend system has been completely reconstructed. It’s now running on WordPress, includes feedback, RSS and will soon offer a printed version as well (via a print stylesheet). This is finally the write-once publish everywhere solution I’ve been thinking about since I first posted the docs in 2003.
There are a few things left to do, mostly just integrating the news RSS feed with this site and moving the feeds to Feedburner. Now I can get back to the filters and document them as I work. (And start benchmarking in FCP 5.1 on my MBP, more on that later.)
Take a look and let me know what you think, here or there.
So Final Cut Studio is now available as a Universal Application, with less than 48 hours left in March. I have zero credibility talking about software release dates, so I’ll stop there.
Apple’s crossgrade tracking page doesn’t show mine as shipped yet.* Looking forward to being able to move Joe’s Filters development over to my new MacBook.
* It shipped a few hours after posting this, now I’ve really got to get this documentation online so I can use it… (I’m not transferring everything to the MacBook until the new docs for Joe’s Filters are online)
I’ve been asked to move IOP’s web and email hosting off Hosting Matters after an excess of problems. One of the biggest issues is that we always have emails flying around with large attachments, these tend to fill up the smallish space HM provides. To be fair, HM has been very good about fixing stuff when it breaks, but there’s been a lot of stuff to fix. Also, they don’t offer phone support, don’t take American Express and their billing system is a pain to use.
I host my own sites and several others on LiquidWeb, which has been excellent for the past several years. I really have nothing to complain about, except maybe that they don’t have a more recent version of MySQL installed, apparently due to a CPanel dependency.
I would move IOP over to LiquidWeb too, but I don’t want to have all the sites I’m responsible for hosted by one company. With multiple locations, I have many more options should one host suffer a catastrophic failure.
Researching web hosting is miserable. Google’s results are heavily spammed, and while sites like WebHostingTalk are helpful, they tend to be full of casual users looking for a zillion TB/month for $2.95. I was considering DreamHost after some time on those boards, but there are a lot disgruntled former-customers out there and I was troubled by DH’s CPU time metering. I’m still thinking about them simply for a cheap off-site Subversion repository and Jabber server. However their whole referral thing is actually a huge turn off for me, I’d rather their customers were genuinely fans of the service. That program makes me question the credibility of anyone advocating for DH.
I was also close to signing up with MediaTemple, but their shared hosting plans don’t include rsync. Rsync is a critical tool for local mirroring and development and a deal-breaker.
Jim Boykin ‘s page asking for web hosting advice is a nice resource. There are some good links in there and I’m looking into several of the places from his roundup.
My current shortlist is pair Networks, Swift Communications and TextDrive, wanting to lean towards TextDrive because their users seem really happy and I’ve been reading John Gruber for years, but he doesn’t host his site there (yet?).
Suggestions are welcomed, my requirements are basically:
I ended up going with Swift Communications, based largely on two factors. First, they were very fast in answering my pre-sales questions. Second, they offered the best cost per gigabyte of my three finalists.
The domain is already switched over and everything seems good so far. Server response is fast and SSH/rsync worked right away. Their support continued to be excellent after opening my account. They had initially set up our account login based on my name, which wasn’t ideal since this is a company site, but this was changed within 5 minutes of me requesting it. The move seems to have gone exceptionally smoothly and I’m very happy so far.
Dave sent me a link to Bid to Lure Films Works So Well, It’s Nearly Broke, which is an exceptionally lazy piece of reporting.
But the good news for the city’s film industry is a mixed blessing for the city’s treasury. In 13 months, the city has exhausted the $50 million it had allotted for four years’ worth of tax credits for the industry, while the state has used up most of the $125 million it has allotted over five years. It is not clear if new business spurred by the program is making up the difference.
And being the New York Times, they didn’t see fit to, you know, do any actual reporting or fact-checking.
Otherwise, after two minutes of Googling and a search on the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance site, they might have learned that January 2006 NYS tax revenues were up 18.6% over the previous January with personal income tax revenue up a remarkable 28.3%. (page 2 of the January 2006 Tax Collections PDF)
One hopes our elected public servants do better than to trust the Times’ lazy reporting at face-value. Cutting the tax credits would just screw everything up again.
This is the Laffer Curve in action, again. Lower taxes lead to increased tax revenues, in different kind of taxes as state taxes or vehicles taxes like the IPVA 2018.
Please visit dccu.us for more information.
