Beckism.com

This is a pretty simple tip, but when I was looking around online I couldn’t find any information about it.

If you’re using FeedBurner (or some other feed that you don’t have direct control over) and you want your site’s favorite icon (often called a favicon, typically favicon.ico) to show up in association with the feed, stick it in the directory that the feed directs visitors to (this is usually your root directory).

I’d been wondering why my Tagamac and Beckism.com favorite icons weren’t showing up for anything except my browser; copying the favicon.ico file to the root directy of my website solved the problem.

If you control your RSS feed, of course, you can directly reference an image to be included with it instead of relying on auto-detection.

Down for everyone or just me asks a simple question: Is [_____] down for everyone or just me?

I will definitely be using this service. I just wish it has some sort of explanation about what’s going on behind the scenes, since as things are you pretty much have to take it on faith.

Chyrp’s installation instructions are worthless, and the installation script’s errors even worse. If you’re trying to install Chyrp and getting “Could not modify database settings file” errors, make sure that you’ve followed all of these steps:

• If you don’t already have a database ready for Chyrp, set one up and make sure you have the details on hand (host/database/user/password).
• Unzip the package and upload the files to the desired location on your server.
• In your FTP program, open up the includes folder and change the files named config.yaml.stock and database.yaml.stock to config.yaml.php and database.yaml.php respectively. Set both files’ access permissions to 777 (read/write/execute for everyone).
• You may also need to rename chyrp.htaccess to .htaccess and give it 777 permissions, as well. There were conflicting reports online, and I did it just in case.
• Navigate to Chyrp’s install.php script in your browser, and follow the instructions. This will probably be somewhere like http://yourserver.com/chyrp/install.php.
• Delete the install.php file with your FTP client once you’ve finished.

That should get Chyrp up and running! Hopefully one of these days there will be some useful installation instructions included with the download. For such an easy process, it sure was difficult to figure out.

Update: I had an opportunity to install Chyrp again, and you do indeed need to rename .htaccess and make it writable or you’ll get an error about Chyrp not being able to write to the .htaccess file. Please note that these instructions are for Chyrp 1.1.3.2. They may or may not apply to future versions of Chyrp.

Wow. Like others around the web, I am shocked to learn that IE 8 will render pages in standards-compliant mode by default; Microsoft has spoken out and reversed their decision to have IE 8 require a meta tag for standards mode.

This is so mind-boggling that it’s hard for me to process. Microsoft is giving improved web standards priority over backwards compatibility and, more importantly, listening to the developer community (many of whom spoke out vehemently against IE 8’s proposed requirement of a meta tag to operate in standards mode). Thank you, Microsoft. I’m really happy to know that you’re actively working to support web standards, and especially that you’re willing to listen to the community.

HarperCollins has a web program called Browse Inside that allows you to browse books on your computer before buying them. Although most of the books in the program offer 20% of the book for your reading pleasure, HarperCollins is testing the effect on sales of offering full text versions. For the next month (March 2008) you can read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free, along with a number of other titles that don’t excite me as much.

If you’ve never read American Gods, this is a fantastic opportunity. It’s a wonderful book, and the Browse Inside application is pretty slick. For iPhone users, there is also a version of Browse Inside specially formatted for your phone.

Go. Read. Enjoy.

What is the coolest 3D browser game using the Unity plugin you’ve played recently? Was it Off-Road Velociraptor Safari? Yeah, I thought so.

Who doesn’t like running over velociraptors in an off-road jeep? Freaking hilarious.

I have to admit, Garfield minus Garfield is freaking hilarious. So far, I’ve got a pretty clear favorite; basically sums up my life.

(Via Daring Fireball)

The Big Word Project was launched a couple days ago, and it’s an interesting idea. Basically, it’s just a list of a lot of English words. If you pay them $1 per letter for a word, that word will be a link to a website of your choosing henceforth (though pick wisely, because you can’t go back to change it later).

Possibly the most intriguing get-rich-quick scheme I’ve seen yet, and certainly a creative web venture. Will the site have any sort of longevity, or were the people who defined “spam” and “crap” to point straight to www.thebigwordproject.com correct? Regardless, the idea, though probably just a good way to convince people to spend money on nothing, is creative enough that I bought a word for Beckism.com. And to be honest, going through and seeing what words have been chosen for what websites is kind of fun. Props to the developers for thinking outside the box.

I’ve been eyeing the MediaTemple hosting plans for a while, and after a weekend of being unable to edit any of my sites because of intermittent downtime and crippled FTP, I’ve finally made the switch. I’ve read lots of good reviews and a few bad ones and I’m not too happy with the downsides of shared hosting but have no need for a virtual server, so we’ll see how it goes. Given my past experience positive experiences with MediaTemple support (my employer hosts with them), I suspect that I’ll be very happy even if they can’t deliver on perfect uptime. I’ve found that quality support is better than delivering on pie-in-the-sky promises every time. Plus now I can finally use PHP 5 (and be able to run PHP 4 side-by-side if necessary), which is pretty freaking cool.

The migration was super easy (although I haven’t moved beckism.net over just yet, so there’s more to do), and hopefully you’ll be seeing better uptime and speed from my sites in the future. Because they were down so often and so sluggish before. Oh well. I’m a nerd, and a terabyte of bandwidth impresses me, even if I’ll barely use a fraction of it in a given month. At least now I can host the Things screencast myself without fear of running out of bandwidth.

The only question that remains is how to gain enough readers (even temporarily) that I’ll actually be able to use MediaTemple’s vaunted performance burst technology.

I admit that it’s unlikely. But a man can dream, right?

Ever since my recent redesign (and subsequent drastic increase in activity), I’ve started using Amazon.com Affiliate links when linking to good books, games, and so forth that I am currently experiencing. I hate the idea of advertisements on Beckism.com, and since I was planning on sharing opinions on books/etc. anyway, this seems like a pretty unobtrusive way to create a small possibility of revenue. My pie-in-the-sky dream is that someday Beckism.com will pay for its own hosting costs. That will be a good day.

In any case, I’ve only recently started using Amazon.com affiliate links, and may I just say that Amazon.com has a terrible system. You have to visit their Affiliate Central. Then log in. Then view all their widgets and so forth. Then choose the Product Links option. Then search for your product. Find the product in the search results. Die of boredom.

And the URL’s hideously long. Some monstrosity like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525457585/104-5843009-5065550?ie=UTF8&tag=beckism-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0525457585

It makes me cringe. I’ve been searching for a way to quickly build my own Amazon.com Affiliate links; since I’m just using simple text links, I see no reason to jump through Amazon’s hoops. My goal was something that doesn’t require me to sign into Amazon and that gives me drastically shorter URLs (because long URLs make it difficult for me to read my post’s code):

These do not seem to me impossible demands. I searched for a Mac OS X Dashboard widget that would let me find products on Amazon and automatically generate an affiliate link: no love. Searched for blog posts about how to do this: Dave Taylor had some interesting advice, but it seemed outdated (given that I’ve never seen the types of URLs that he uses as examples before), and Noah Coad’s regex, while definitely good to know for non-affiliate links, doesn’t mention how to append an affiliate ID. Chris Thomson posted Using Amazon Associates Easily in MarsEdit recently, but his solution churns out hideously long URLs (and his MarsEdit macro forces you to input text; I don’t like doing that).

So here’s what I’ve come up with, which is hardly revolutionary. First step is to search for something via Amazon’s normal webpage (forget that convoluted affiliate link generating crap). You’ll get something hideous like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Neverending-Story-Michael-Ende/dp/0525457585/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203784616&sr=8-3

Yuck. The part that you want is the string of letters and numbers immediately after /dp/. This is the product ID. Copy it out of your address bar.

Now you just need to construct your shortened version. Insert the product ID into a URL that looks like this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/?tag=beckism-20

Of course, use your own Amazon.com affiliate ID instead of “beckism-20″, and stick the product ID after /dp/.

This link is the smallest format that I can find that is recommended by multiple people on the Amazon Affiliate discussion boards. I’m curious, however, if Dave Taylor is still correct about just slapping the tracking ID onto the end. If you’d like to help me test this, click here (I don’t expect you to buy Neverending Story, although it’s a classic and well worth reading, but in a day or so the affiliate reports will show that someone clicked a link, and then I’ll know for sure; currently the affiliate ID in the link hasn’t been published anywhere else).

I’m sure this is a common problem, so let me know in the comments if you’ve heard of a better way. Also, be aware that there’s the possibility that shortening your links down like this may disable some of Amazon’s fancy reporting stuff. I have no idea (or any way to test it).

Lastly, if you’re using MarsEdit, you can make the link creation process incredibly easy. Open up a post (or new post) and choose the “Markup” dropdown in the toolbar (or select Post→Text Markup→Edit). Click the + button to add a markup macro, name it whatever you like, and stick this in the opening tag:

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/dp/#pastetext#/?tag=beckism-20″>

(Again, replace “beckism-20″ with your Amazon Affiliate tag.) The closing tag is obviously just </a>. If you like, assign a keyboard shortcut for easy access. All you need to do to use the macro is to copy the product’s ID (which follows /dp/ in the standard Amazon URL) before selecting the MarsEdit macro. The macro will deal intelligently with selected text (or lack thereof) without your needing to do a thing.

Update April 13, 2008: After a couple of other people have tested the linking in the comments (and having myself tried both the shortest method and the method I recommend in the article above), it turns out that the format http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/beckism-20 does not work. The shortest format you can use is http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/?tag=beckism-20 (a similar format is additionally cited on Amazon’s own blog, so presumably it will be valid for the foreseeable future).