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Flickr Collections

Finally! Flickr has introduced a way to organize sets. They’re calling their new feature “collections”. You can read more on the Flickr blog:

What are collections, you ask? A collection is a container into which you can place either sets or other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy as deep as 5 collections. You can place as many of your sets into a collection as you like, and a set can be in as many different collections as you like.

This feature has been long overdue. It is a big help for pro account members who have many sets and until now had no way to organize them.

I am using collections to do the following:

  • Create a collection for each year: 2007, 2006, etc. to provide chronological ordering of sets.
  • Create a misc collection: a place to store random sets with no chronological meaning.

My usage of this is pretty basic, but the payoff in usability is huge. Compare my “sets” page with my “collections” page:

  • Sets - Unflattened and cluttered, hard to visually scan.
  • Collections - Logical ordering, much easier on the eye and brain.

This is definitely an exciting addition and something I’ve been hoping they would implement for a long time. I remember requesting this feature on a survey they provided last year in addition to the multitudes of people requesting this on their forums.

Thanks, Flickr, for listening and following through!

7 Mile Walk in SF

I was up in San Francisco a few weeks ago visiting Mitra. The weather was gorgeous, so we decided to take a leisurely “hike” through the city.

Later that night, I sketched out our path on Gmaps Pedometer. It wasn’t surprising at all to learn we had tracked over 7 miles.

7 mile walking route in SF

There were some beautiful photo ops along the way, some of which I posted to Flickr. My favorite of the bunch is of the small building by the Cliff House, with the rocks and sea in the background. I really love how it looks.

cliff house

Regardless, I should probably upgrade my camera soon.

Lapse in Posting

I haven’t posted in a while and my blog has grown quite stale. I’m going to try to change my habits.

I think a good goal to start is: one post per day, no more, no less.

This would help me from feeling overwhelmed by the constant need to write, but would also help me stay focused enough to keep my blog up-to-date.

Whenever I have an idea for something I’d like to write about, I can queue it in a system until it’s ready to publish. I’m sure this is probably how most bloggers function anyway.

YouTube - Cat Stuck in Tree on News

if you don’t find this funny on many levels, then there’s definitely something wrong with you.

drupal multisite setup with sub directories on single domain

I am testing out different installation profiles for Drupal 5.0 and wanted to create multiple “sites” on the same domain. Each site shares the same code base, but they are differentiated by sub-directories.

To set this up, creating a new sites folder is not enough. You also need to create a symbolic link in the physical directory structure (or perhaps add a mod_rewrite rule).

For example, if your main drupal site is setup at example.com, and you want to create a new site at example.com/new:

First, create the new sites folder and settings.php:
./sites/example.com.new/settings.php

Then create a symbolic link at the root folder of your drupal installation:

ln -s . new

so that new -> DRUPAL ROOT

This last step wasn’t not documented clearly in the Drupal Handbooks.

Now example.com loads main drupal site, but example.com/new loads the drupal installation page, prompting me for that site’s specific settings.

Since I plan to develop a handful of installation profiles, it will be really useful to dedicate each site to a specific profile.

Thus, I’ll end up with a handful of drupal sites:
example.com
example.com/profile1
example.com/profile2

and so on…

TextMate Blog » Subversion support and ssh key pairs

TextMate Blog » Subversion support and ssh key pairs

This article was a life-saver for getting painless svn_ssh:// connections to work.

YouTube - Live Action Hamster Video Game

The music really helps making this worth watching.

Caution of Giving WordPress Its Own Directory

http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

This site provides great step-by-step instructions for sweeping the WordPress files out of the root and into a sub-directory. However, this may cause some vendor clients to choke when looking for the xmlrpc.php. This happened to me when trying to set up my “external blog” at bimactive.com

Assuming that the new folder you created is called wp, then the uri for the xmlrpc.php file is: http://yourserver.com/wp/xmlrpc.php. However, the html header generated by WordPress shows a link to http://yourserver.com/xmlrpc.php. Any app following this link will be sent a 404 error.

View the source of this page to see for yourself. At the bottom of the head tag is the following line:


<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://www.srhaber.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" />

To work-around this problem, I created symbolic links at the root folder to point to the xmlrpc.php and wp-config.php files (wp-config.php is a dependency for xmlrpc.php)


ln -s wp/xmlrpc.php xmlrpc.php
ln -s wp/wp-config.php wp-config.php

This fix is simple, and prevents any unnecessary hacking of the WordPress core code.

Forerunner 305

Forerunner 305

I want this! I have the Forerunner 101, and it’s very nice. The 305 would make for a very nice upgrade…

iTerm

iTerm

I made the switch and started using iTerm today. I felt limited somehow with Terminal, and iTerm delivers more features with the added bonus of having a comforting cocoa-app look and feel.

The main productivity boost in iTerm comes from using the Bookmarks window. Essentially, I can create a bookmark for each server I ssh into on a regular basis. Then with a simple double-click, a new tab is created (another shortfall with Terminal) and the ssh command is issued with a prompt for my password. It’s pretty nice.

Bookmarks could also be used for issuing other common commands, such as starting a WEBrick server for rails development.