Posted on: January 20th, 2010 by Famous Phil

Hi, and welcome to the new FamousPhil website!  It isn’t actually all that new, but it is a major revision of my website.  This has been coming now for at least the past 5 months because I completely hated the colors that I chose for the overall site theme.  I can’t believe that I thought mixing all sorts of colors would even remotely look good. Anyways, I fixed it and I feel that the site looks better.

So what exactly changed?

I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest.  I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide.  For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/.  That site helped me a lot!

In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0.  This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website.  This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict.  Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well   You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.

Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened.  On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system.  I wrote a theme for Wordpress (thanks to John) and I now use Wordpress as my content management system.  Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”.  Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future

Thats all for now.  I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future

Tags: color scheme, design, famousphil, validation, xhtml
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Posted on: January 1st, 2010 by Famous Phil

At the time of beginning this post… it is 12:01am Eastern Time, January 1, 2010.  My first words are: Happy New Year! and Happy new decade!  Hopefully this decade will bring a lot more fortune than the last one   I just want to quickly look back on the last 10 years of my life and the funniest videos of the year that I’ve found.

Ten years ago from today, I did not know much about a computer.  I can assure you that I did not know how to turn one on, and I only had a slight clue about what the internet was.  At the time, I had high hopes of becoming an electrical engineer and I loved playing around with circuits.  I was also much younger and had a lot to learn (obviously).  I also wasn’t entirely sure about what all the Y2K stuff was all about, so it didn’t really affect me.  Finally, a last tiny tidbit… I have spent *every* new year of my life in my own bedroom here at home.  I might be a few feet off from the same position each year, but I’ve basically in the same spot.  This is only the third year of my life that I’ve been up to witness the new year come in.

So, how does it feel?  I doesn’t feel any different… its just another day.  For some people, its an iconic day I suppose, being a new year and all, but for me, nothing has really changed.  I will continue to live and will continue to do what I do every day.  The only difference is, I will have to get over the annoyance of not remembering to write 2010 on any documents I create for at least the next few weeks (probably about a month or two in reality).

2009 brought me 8 hard drive failures in various machines that I’ve worked on, 2 being my own.  It also brought some bad fortune with the passing of my grandmother.  On the brighter side, it brought Windows 7, Microsoft Exchange, XM Radio, 2 new Laptop computers, a new server, and the magic of Verizon wireless high speed internet here at home.  It also brought me a wonderful job at my college and lots of new knowledge about computers.  Overall, 2009 for me was a decent year, especially considering the killing I made on Ebay selling Michael Jackson dolls (I sold quite a few within the first day after his death).  Of all the stuff that 2009 brought, perhaps the biggest was a new and improved FamousPhil.com.  Within the next few weeks, FamousPhil.com will change slightly again to become more smooth in color transitions

In 2009, I watched a lot of amazing video.  I think its time to share some of the more memorable youtube links of the best videos I saw in 2010!  I’m also going to leave this blog post here.  I hope that your 2009 was as enjoyable as mine and that your 2010 brings good tidings   Enjoy!

Ancient Modem that still works (seen on Yahoo for several weeks back in June, 2009)

World’s Fastest Speed Reader reading the original Health Care Bill – Cavuto (Fox News)

Glen Beck – Turtles on TV (You may have to get half way through this partially edited clip)

Next up is from a movie that was hilarious (Monsters vs. Aliens).  I also liked High School Musical 3.

I discovered something about geiko!

And finally, the video that combines it all together perfectly!

To another great year!  Thanks for stopping in!

Tags: 2009, 2010, Happy New Year, New Year, video
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: July 31st, 2009 by Famous Phil

I’m going to break this fairly short blog into 2 parts since I have 2 helpful tips that are fairly fast to implement.  I was going to make two blog posts on these, but they are closely related concepts, so here is a single post.

First, a helpful CSS Imagemap code creator:

For this site, if you ever have noticed, you might see that the top icons in the header (including the FamousPhil.com text) all link to certain pages on FamousPhil.  Usually, a HTML or CSS imagemap is used to make these links.  The site designer figures out where to place the selectable link area on the header by calculating pixels on the image.  Being the lazy designer that I am, I went to find a better solution to where I wouldn’t have to figure out exactly what pixel lengths I need to accomplish the clickable areas I wanted.  There is a really handy site that I found that allows you to upload or specify an image location on the web and easily specify areas for clickable links.  It then makes the html code.  This site is: http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap. I have used this site many times for creating CSS Imagemap code.  I just have one word of caution when using this site, that is, the code generated is really condensed and not really friendly to work with.  I recommend using a program like PHPDesigner 2008 in HTML mode and using HTML Tidy, make the code into the CSS2 standard to make the code look better and much easier to read.

Second, I would like to cover making a div in HTML with two images and have text span both images.

This problem plauged me for a good two hours the other night.  Basically, I am designing a site that has a body with an image gradient (fades out as the image goes down the page), and then at the bottom of that fading image, I have to continue a textured background repeating.

To accomplish this in CSS, you need to nest div tags in HTML and specify CSS.  Here is an example that I am using directly on this site:

"<!--HTML CODE-->
	<div class="middle">
		<div class="middle2">	

		</div>
	</div>

"

"/*CSS CODE*/

div.middle{
	background: transparent url("img/backgroundrepeat.png") repeat;
	min-height:250px
}

div.middle2 {
	background:url("img/bodytopgradient.png") no-repeat;
	min-height:124px
}

”
In this example, middle is the bottom layer that will repeat down the entire page. middle2 in this example is the top layer and has a single image that contains the top gradient. I add a min-height to make the top layer show up entirely before the background repeating pattern becomes the top image.  Text will expand the page downwards, but due to the lack of text, I made a minimum height on the repeating image also to verify that it works as expected.

Hopefully these tips will help you on your next design.  Thanks for reading my blog as always!

Tags: css, div, image, imagemap, map, span
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: June 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here!  I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere.  The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share

Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft.  Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make.  I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of  my hosting business up until now has ran off from.  Man, I never thought that I would say that

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Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
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Posted on: May 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil

As you probably have noticed, I have changed a few aspects of the site yet again Most of these changes came from commments and suggestions via email and comments.  Overall, the roughness of the images and the size has been corrected.  Remember, I’m not that good at photoshop, so although there are errors, I’m going to kind of push off fixing them until I become better at photoshop.

Of the corrections, the most notable is the contact envelope now points to a contact page.  I also have integrated the calendar to the famousphil.com theme.  The blog has also been shortened with read more tags.  Hopefully this makes my site more reader / user friendly

Finally, the main addition to FamousPhil is the Philki.  This is an attempt to make FamousPhil.com more modern and involve user interaction.  I’ve added mediawiki and will allow everyone to describe me.  I probably won’t do much moderating (if at all).  I think its a great, humourous addition to FamousPhil and I encourage you to “define me”.

I’ve also gotten a few emails from other people wanting to promote their sites through posts (similar to the promotion I did for asciibin).  I have no problem in doing this for other sites if they don’t seem like spam and look really useful for readers of my site.   I also don’t mind adding partners to my partners widget if the site in question has great potential

Thats enough for this post.  I will probably be blogging about our pool experience this year tomrrow or the day after and why pool regulations from the government are really starting to get out of hand.

Tags: philki, smooth images, updates, user friendly, wiki
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Posted on: May 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

After a lot of pressure, not only from Jordan but mostly everyone, FamousPhil.com now has a new, shiny look!  *at least for the most part*.  Sure, I could improve the navigation buttons a bit to make them look “web 2.0,” but that will come in another project down the road after I finish up the rest of this never ending to do list.

As you’ve probably noticed, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been very tight with my blog releases after posting almost every day for one stretch there.  The truth of the matter is, when I get highly involved in a site redesign, I like to spend all of my time and effort working on that redesign and forgetting about everything else.   I do admit that its tough for me to get into working on a website design in the first place, but once I’m in the process of working, I generally do not like being distracted.

For me, a distraction of any kind, even that 1 second hi to a friend passing by can throw my mind off by a huge amount.  To me, distractions can end up costing me a few hours (sometimes an entire day) to get my thoughts back and continue working on the problem I was focusing on at the time of the distraction.  Sure, this is annoying, but I’ve learned how to slam the door and tell people not to disturb me at all unless the world is on fire when I begin such projects.  Its just the way that I work I suppose.

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Tags: chrome, css, design, div, firefox, internet explorer, position, positioning, problems, relative, safari, table, validation, web 2.0, website, xhtml
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Posted on: May 3rd, 2009 by Famous Phil

Anymore, it seems that at least once a week spam gets on my nerves and I end up researching ways to block it more effectively without blocking legitimate messages.

For instance, the other day, I noticed a huge influx of email spam to “phil@saveourshows.org” and I went into that account and increased the spam filter a touch more.  This quite often brings up a very legitimate problem for me, that is, what happens when someone legitimate tries to send me an email?   Everytime I notice spam on accounts that is heavier than usual, I usually end up bumping the spam filter up a little more, and to be perfectly honest, that spam filter can’t go much higher!  Sure, I do recommend that if I don’t respond within a few hours, try sending email to another one of my many addresses, but what happens when that someone finds my address on one of these sites by googling?  They will potentially not get a response from me and not realize that I have so many email addresses.

I could go on about email spam, but that isn’t my main focus, comment spam is!  I installed wordpress sometime back in January (don’t ask me when lol) when I was redesigning my site (which needs a lot of improvements still).  Back in January and even into February, I didn’t really blog much (mostly because I didn’t feel like it), and this site got so little traffic that no spammer would consider hitting it.  Actually, this was the case until my blog on WHM / CPanel came out.  For some reason, I rank really high with terms like “cpanel advantages and disadvantages”.  I also began blogging about technical topics, which drive traffic to my site because it is generally unique content that most system admins are looking for (but usually can’t find).  That is great for my site’s traffic, but not really great for my current spam fighting techniques (for my blog, these have been me manually deleting spam).

I am now getting on average: 30 spam comments a day.  Being a human that makes mistakes, I sometimes hit delete on legitimate comments by accident because it gets to a point where legit comments look like spam too lol.  Unfortunately, I have to let the legit comments get deleted after this because there is no backup copy of these comments.  Anyways, long story short, I’m sick of the spam.

Solution: I used the google approach (as usual).  I found this wonderful blog here.  My default install of WordPress did have Akismet installed (but not activated) exactly like this blog said.  I installed it, got an API key from WordPress and now I should get no more spam, or minimal spam.  I will say that I am getting no more spam that isn’t easy to delete.  It no longer takes as much brain power from me to think about what is spam and isn’t spam.  Hopefully this plugin will keep the spam away for a long time before I need something more powerful.

Personally, I recommend this plugin for WordPress.  It has saved me time in the past week of having this installed and I’m sure that it will save me much more time to come.

Tags: akismet, blog, comment, comment spam, spam, wordpress
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site
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Posted on: April 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil

The other night, I was working on installing a new RSS feed reader that is similar to Google Reader.  I first found out about Google Reader from a friend (Chris) here at my University over a lunch.  I then looked at it and discovered that it is much better than going to each and every blog site and reading the posts on each blog directly.  This reader basically gathers all of the full text blogs and puts them in an email interface format, making it extremely easy and painless to read a bunch of RSS feeds while on the go (for me, on my windows mobile smart phone on the bus going to class or during dinner when I’m too lazy to get up and return to my room).

Anyways, I am not a real fan of using everything Google when I have an alternative that runs in ssh and doesn’t require an additional login (or saved password).  I found 2 alternatives that run in ssh, one is snownews and the other is newsbeuter.  Both of these programs are extremely simple and do exactly what google reader does, but they run in the SSH window like Pine or Pico does (Pine is an ssh email client, and pico is an ssh text editor).  Snownews is not really good at reading rss feeds because it looks at the description tag of RSS 2.0 feeds which only puts a brief outline of the feed on the screen.  Newsbeuter is much better and places the full content of a post on your screen like Google Reader does.

So, what does newsbeuter look like?

Here is the Main Screen, a main listing from a single rss feed, and a single blog post from an rss feed:

Newsbeuter is a great program, I’m willing to put up with no images, videos, and sometimes some gargled text to save time.  As you probably know, I use public keys for ssh and and to get to this reader from my pine email takes a matter of seconds and no mouse movement.  I’m slowly working on getting my instant mesengers to ssh, however we will see if that ever materializes.

So now onto my rant about partial vs full text feeds.

When I was configuring newsbeuter, my main concern was, “would it read a full feed that is in the rss file, or would it just show the description cropped by [...] like snownews did”.  Because I compiled this on my server from source, I didn’t want to waste effort installing dependancies (a compiling problem) if it wouldn’t work in the end.

Luckily, it did read full rss feeds, except for John’s blog. I asked John what was different about his blog, and he told me he turned off full text rss feeds.  His reasoning is, rss feeds make it very easy for someone else to post dynamic changing content on their own websites.  While I totally understand this concern, I really wonder if it will kill off readership to his site, which I know he might eventually want to make money off from some day.   I know for sure that I want famousphil.com to eventually make money for itself although I’m still debating how to put ads on it without hurting the design (which will be changing in a month or two again to make it easier to read).

I have looked at several blogs debating rull text vs partial text feeds (they aren’t hard to find), including the following:

1. http://econsultancy.com/blog/018-rss-strategy-full-text-vs-partial-text-round-2
2. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004717.html. Although this site says the problem was fixed, I think it grabs my true feelings about partial feeds
3. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_partial_text_rss_feeds.php “So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible — and that’s a bar that’s high and rising.”  Thats how I feel (although I have yet to move many of my favorite feeds into newsbeuter.

For me, I will probably keep his blog on my feed list and look at his teasers.  I will probably not actually read any more than his teasers though (mostly because I don’t have time to go look at these other sites that feel too smart to post a full feed).  I don’t use other people’s content for my blogs normally without citing then adding significant material onto their blogs, therefore, I don’t consider myself a blog theif either.  I do however visit other sites if I feel like leaving a comment

Finally, with wordpress, if you use a “more” tag, this material will not show up on your blog feed.  I will likely begin using this a bit (only after my site becomes eye friendly) because I do have long blogs and sometimes that material is an aid, but not necessary to know everything about my blog.  If people want to read the aiding material, then they can then visit my site.

As for this blog, always expect a full feed, if there isn’t one, I will do everything I can to help.  Comments are appreciated as always   If you host with me, feel free to use these programs I mentioned as they are installed on the main server

Tags: blog, content, description, feed, full, newsbeuter, partial, pico, pine, rss, snownews, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site, Personal, Technology
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Posted on: April 15th, 2009 by Famous Phil

You can purchase expandrive at: http://expandrive.com

I bought sftpdrive (the old name) about 8 months now after looking for a solution to hot edit php files on my web server so I could effectively develop remotely while having the local development feel.  Shortly after I got this program, I shared it with John, who then shared it with Jordan who recently blogged about it here.

I will leave the screenshots to Jordan, but I have never had a problem with this program.  I now use it for all of my development needs and it has never failed me.  The best part is that this program is easy, many programs that interface windows to linux are not easy!

So thats my pitch for expandrive   Hopefully they can make a few more hundred bucks off from this blog

Tags: expandrive, file transfer, sftp, sftpdrive, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site, Personal, Programming, Technology
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Posted on: April 13th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I guess first, I should thank all of my blog readers for coming to my site, since now I’m on track for 500 visitors a month!  I thought I’d post the to date statistics screen since I’m really proud of what my new site design has done

Now onto the main topic of this post, last night I was with a few friends at about 11pm and we got searching through all the domains in the world looking for what domains are taken and what not.  Anyways, many of my friends and I always can Windows Vista with the term: shitsta, since I would never consider running Windows Vista on any of my computers, it is far too unstable and slow for my needs.  Granted, I am a power user, but I cannot use Vista for a few hours without it getting super slow from all the memory and processor demands I put on it with programs that I write and test thoroughly.   Anyways, we found that shitsta.com is available, so I grabbed it.

It did take me a few minutes to think if I really wanted such a domain, but I thought it would be a nice humor site to have since I do like having a side of humor.  I don’t dislike Microsoft or anything like that, but Vista is a failure and Microsoft knows that but they keep pushing it. For example, Microsoft recently discontinued support for Windows XP to force the market to move to Vista, which isn’t really meant for anything more than causal use if you ask me.  Right now, I am still in the air on what I want to do, but I might add a few cool features to check for Internet Explorer and perhaps find some sort of known hole in IE (since 99% of home users don’t install Windows Updates), and use it to inform users of what can really happen to you when you don’t update.  Its only an idea, but I am confident that something cool will come of such a great domain!

I don’t hate Vista, but I hate how slow it runs.  I hope that Windows 7 comes out and is much better than Vista is right now.  If it isn’t, I may stop at Windows XP and move to Ubuntu as an upgrade!  I consider the extra 5 minutes of work for Ubuntu worth not suffering from performance issues that newer versions of Windows seem to suffer from.

We will see what comes out of shitsta.com, however I think its a great domain to have a little informative fun, don’t you?   Just for your curiousity, I will not have phil@shitsta.com as an email address, that just doesn’t look right   But I might offer an email service using the domain if there is some demand for it *laughs*.

Tags: famousphil.com, Microsoft, shitsta, shitsta.com, stats, vista
Posted in My Site, Personal, Technology
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