I don’t think I can wait for Twitter to become more reliable.  I think it’s a great service, but it’s time to look at alternatives.  I wanted to try testing other things because Twitter was really starting to slow my sites down.  I guess anytime it has to lookup data on another site, it will cause a slowdown, but when a site is down it makes it pretty frustrating to even use the site.

I had already signed up for Ping.fm which is a good service for posted to a whole bunch of other services.  So I figured I would look for a wordpress plugin that would send the posts to Ping.fm and then off to my other services.  This is sort of a test post to make sure that all works.

I’ve also been using Pownce which I am using right now to show status updates and the what am I doing section of this blog.

I’m going to see how it goes for a while then see if it’s worth deploying to my other sites.

I recently switched my sites to Media Temple and I think for the most part it’s been a pretty successful experience.  All four of my main sites (brandonquintana.com, brandonquintanaconsulting.com, lightenment.com, and webdevtwopointzero.com) have all been transfered and after some tweaking and fine tuning I think they are running pretty well.

Media Temple offers a great hosting package which allows you to host up to 100 sites on one account.  My sites are relatively small so I think the allocated bandwidth of 1TB a month will be more than enough for me.  On top of the typical PHP/MySQL setup, other nice features include SFTP connectivity and the ability to run Subversion.  Their hosting control panel is laid out well and easy to use.  Tech support issues are resolved in a timely manner.  As of right now, I’m a happy customer.

If you are looking for a hosting provider, Media Temple is worth a shot and if you are interested in having me host your site, I would be more than happy to work some arrangements with you.

I didn’t get a chance to go to WWDC so I haven’t had any real life experience with the iPhone 3G.  I would assume that it is just like the iPhone I have now with faster internet access and basic GPS.  As far as the iPhone 2.0 software it’ll run on both models.  I haven’t used that either, but I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new iPhone running the new software.

I think the app store is a great idea and I like that Apple restricts some access to the system in order to keep stability within the iPhone system.  I had a Palm Treo 650 that let you install whatever you want and the phone because slow and would restart on my face in the middle of a call.  I eventually restored it to default and I still had some issues with it.

As far as the price is concerned, you don’t really save any money.  It’s a pay now or pay later type deal.  Last year you paid up front and this year you pay over the contract life.  I think if you are like me I only really expect to keep the phone a year until the next model comes out next year.  In this case I break even if I get the 3G data and 200 text messages to make it equivalent to the existing model. Read the rest of this entry »

Well after a few hiccups, the revision to this site is up and running.  It has been completely revamped front end to back end with some additions and subtractions throughout.  This is the first code run for the new look and feel which is now running on Wordpress.  I’m hoping I’ll have some time in the near future to do some code cleanup and fine tune some of the plug-ins I’m using. Read the rest of this entry »

Since Apple has decided to release Safari for Windows, it got me thinking, what’s preventing me from using Safari as my default browser for web development. Up until now, I had been using Firefox with a few extensions for web development: Venkman, Firebug, and Web Developer. It got me thinking, Apple is releasing Safari so Windows users can develop for the iPhone. I’m thinking that’s the main reason, and it might be nice to pull some of the marketshare as well. Since I primarily use Macs for my web development, I wanted to see if others were using Safari for web development and what their feedback has been. Read the rest of this entry »

Out of all the projects I’ve worked on both individual and group, the last and final step seems to be documentation. A lot of times it gets overlooked. When the deadlines approach the product manager wants to get a working product. What a lot of people don’t realize is software documentation takes a substantial amount of time to write. It is very important to keep track of the software. Marketing individuals won’t actually see changes in the product in the time it takes to write documentation and that seems to make it less important in the overall product. Read the rest of this entry »

DHTML Goodies has a post on their site including code for a folder tree with drag and drop capabilities. It is actually a pretty creative script and works very well. It also has a demo and tutorial to implement it into your own site. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a blog post on Blogger giving 10 tips for writing reusable code. For the most part I think that these tips can be applied to almost any coding language. If course some things might need to be varied. Read the rest of this entry »