Geekazine.com» Geekazine

Woopra - There it is.

Jeffrey Powers — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:43:46 +0000

In the last week I have been playing with this new program I saw last week on Cali Lewis’ Geekbrief.tv . I loaded up the program and tried it out.So far I’ve been somewhat impressed with it’s features.

Woopra is a web site statistical analysis program. It gives you real time information as well as a timeline of who has been to your site, what pages they were looking at and how long they were there. You can put the code on more than one site and have all the data collected in one API.

The best part of the plugin is you can place your pointer over an area of the map or the statistic and get more information. For instance, I place the mouse pointer over the US and find out how many people visited from the US, Canada, Ireland, Zambia or wherever.I can then change to the ‘Loyalty’ tab and see how many return to the site.

Another great reference is the ‘referrer’ area. I can see where people come from to see my pages, then I can focus on those areas to post. The last referrer came from brightkite. 58% of Geekazine traffic comes from Search engines.

Finally, there is a great area to set up notification. Need to find out when someone from the US goes on the site? Specific IP or any other reference. You can also set up your custom live map for the Wordpress Plugin.

This program is a great addition to any web site and doesn’t affect any other statistical program. The API does need Java installed on the computer, which might be the only downfall for some. However if you can get past that, you might want to put this great program on your site and see where your traffic is and where it’s going.

Update to WordPress 2.6

Jeffrey Powers — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:15:20 +0000

We did a small update here tonight. I ran through all the plugins and updated them and then updated to Wordpress 2.6. I am going to check through the site, but if you see anything odd, please go to the contact page and let me know. If the contact page is not working, please let me know via the email (geekazine at the gmail dot com).

Thanks.

Jeffrey Powers

www.geekazine.com

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Your New Site Design

Jeffrey Powers — Mon, 19 May 2008 06:43:46 +0000

Last night I implemented the new design. It’s using the Gabfire template with some major tweaking on this end. It was a result from all the great feedback you guys gave over the last few months. I worked pretty dilligently over the last few weeks to get this page together.

The most noticable difference is the load time. It was important to get the page to load faster. This new template is more organized and I’ve noticed the difference.

There are still a few tweaks I need to work on but the general result is what I intended. I hope you like the new look. Feel free to comment on it - Good or Bad.

Dorkazine will go through a similar redesign - for now it’s still on the old look.

Small Crisis Averted - iPod / Zune Giveaway status

Jeffrey Powers — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:21:57 +0000

Today I was working on the site and the delete button jumped up and bit me! OW!

We had a small issue, and I had to restore the backup database. There were a couple tables that were restored from the weekly backup. There should be no data loss, but if you signed up for the site this week, you may have to do it again.

Speaking of signups - Some have been asking about the iPod - Zune Contest info. According to the rules I set up (found on the Giveaway Rules Page) I will be choosing a winner today. I will email that user and they will have 7 days to respond. Once a winner is acknowledged, I will post the results.

NEWay, thanks for being a part of the site and participating in the contest. I have taken your information to heart and will be using it down the road.

Webware 100 Winners - Who won, and what’s new.

Jeffrey Powers — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:51:03 +0000

Web Apps. Can we live without them anymore? What did we ever do without them? Webware put out it’s top 100 and we’re going to go through them and see what was good, what was bad, and what was… well, you know..

Webware is a site dedicated to watching what is popping up out on the internet. Any application that a web developer puts out will be checked out and reported on by this organization. It’s a good thing, too. There are so many out there, it’s tough to keep up.

On April 21^st, Webware put out the list of the top 100 apps. There were ten categories, each with ten winners. There were 5000 nominees, and 300 apps were chosen as finalists. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to dwindle this list down to 100.

According to Webware, most of the winners were also winners last year. There were a couple apps that pushed their way onto the list. This might not be as easy next year as Web Apps are expected to be more widely used within 2008.

So here are the top picks:

In the Audio category, we saw popular names like iTunes, Zune, eMusic and AmazonMP3. It was great to see sites like Lastfm, live365 and blogtalk radio on the list.

The Browsing category had Firefox, Google and Google Reader, Internet Explorer and Opera. iPhone was the newcomer and not a surprise to the list. Maxthon Browser is a lesser known app that is great to see win in this category.

Commerce and events saw Amazon, ebay, Google adwords, Paypall and Yahoo on the list. It was great to see Craigslist - it’s such a popular site and not graphically driven. Kayak was the name I wasn’t familiar with. It is a Travel aggregation website - which means it will find the best rates from the other sites, then redirect you there.

In Communication we saw Gmail, Skype, Yahoo mail and AIM. Meebo is a multinetwork IM platform that lets you chat between AIM, Yahoo, google and msn. Pidgen also is a multi IM site. and OoVoo is a chat and Video chat site. Too bad Twitter or Friendfeed didn’t make it.

Productivity showed us Google Docs, Microsoft Office Workspace and Yahoo Calendar. Some other lesser known sites could be Basecamp, Mint, Remember the Milk and Zoho. It keeps reminding me I have work to do…

Publishing and Photography contained sites like Blogger, Drupal, Flickr, WordPress and Twitter. Good to see an old site friend in Worth 1000 - a Photoshopping contest site - added to the winners.

The Search and Answers section had a host of old favorites. From Ask, Google, Wikipedia and Yahoo. A new entrant is Hakia. It’s a new site that searches on common words.

The Social winners were MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google LiveJournal. Friendster had some tough times and almost were bought out by Google. However they prevailed and joined the list of the top 10 in this category. I may never go to “Stardoll”, but for anyone that wants to “Dress up dolls”, this may be the Social site for them.

Utility and security showed sites like Amazon, Bittorrent, Yahoo, Yousendit and OpenID. It’s also good to see OpenDNS in the list. It’s a great way to thwart online rogues in getting your information.

Last, but not least, the Video category had a lot of new names in it. YouTube, Netflix and Amazon were the three mainstays. Ustream and Joost were ones I knew about. Fixmymovie helps clear up pixilated video. A pretty good service - I may need it for my videos…

The list is pretty impressive. Like I said earlier, it’s too bad Friendfeed wasn’t on the list. Pownce is another site I can think of. But there is always next year. And it will be a competition to look forward to.

Website Update - WordPress 2.5

Jeffrey Powers — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:59:47 +0000

Wednesday evening, I made the switch over to WordPress 2.5. It was a fairly painless process and only took about an hour to update. Here is the process I went through (which I recommend if you plan to update your WP site soon)

1. Backed up my whole site.

2. Backed up the Database

3. Deactivated ALL plugins

4. Since I use CPanel, I let Fantastico update the site for me (I checked with the host to make sure there were no issues)

5. Ran Validity on the Database.

6. Reactivated all Plugins.

7. Copied All files back to my staging area (so versions matched)

Here are some issues I ran into:

* Some Plugins (when they updated) installed to a new folder. The staging area had the old folder, so when I sync’d, it would put the old folder back on, causing the system to hiccup. I deleted the old folders and everything went back to normal.

* A certain plugin (which I wont talk about for certain reasons) did not work in 2.5. It’s disabled for the time being.

* Changes I made to the Admin folder got changed back. Not a big issue - I will make the changes as I go.

* Minor settings had to be re-entered. I needed to re-insert my API key, which I agree needs to be done manually.

I believe the most important thing is to disable ALL plugins. Also, make sure you have an inventory of plugins, for if they go to update, the Auto update feature will remove the old folder to install the new. The inventory actually saved me with a couple plugins.

Overall, this update was quick and fairly easy. I give it an A+ for the ease of use. Thanks WordPress!

Wordpress 2.5 is out

Jeffrey Powers — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:32:37 +0000

updated 7:45 CST

Today WordPress had released the final version of 2.5. I have successfully installed it into my Sandbox and am playing with it aggressively. I will be adding information as I go, but here is what I had so far:

First of all, for those who don’t know what a “Sandbox” is, this is an area I designated as a test area. In this case, I have a computer at my home in which I installed XAMPP (an acronym for Apache, MySQL, PHP and PERL - the X stands for the “Four”). The Sandbox is a great way to test new plugins, CSS code or anything. One thing to keep in mind in mantaining a Sandbox, though - make sure your Sandbox matches your websites credentials (example - if your Sandbox is running PHP 5 and your website runs on PHP 4, then the test area is pointless).

So Far I have done the following:

- Copied Geekazine SQL to the Sandbox.
- Made changes to the SQL so it will import in the Sandbox correctly without refering to Geekazine.com
- Downloaded 2.5 and installed in the sandbox
- Copied over all themes and Plugins
- Set up WordPress
- Made sure all initial settings matched the site
- Activated all plugins
- WP-Cache plugin caused problems at first - there are several lines that have a misplaced “%20″ or ASCII code for a “Space”.Corrected the problem and the plugin activated.
- All other plugins Activated.**(other issues arose though)
- Went to check all settings.
- RAZ-CAPTCHA would not show a picture. Had to disable the Plugin.
- Yet Another Photo-Blog is causing issues on the folder - working on issue.

First Update:

The Yet Another Photo Blog error was because I didn’t have all the current pictures imported into the proper folder. Once that change was made, the plugin began to work.

The WP-Cache was a plugin I had installed, but did not implement on WP because of issues. I have disabled it on 2.5

I went through all the settings and matched them up to the site. A lot of plugins had their settings. There were a couple that didn’t remember the settings, so it’s important to have a reference.

There is a Media Manager in WordPress now, but I am continuing to use PodPress. I will be checking out the images gallery option.

TinyMCE had a small hiccup. This is a plugin that extends the use of the Post area. It gives me more buttons and able to customize that area. I had to re-organize the buttons to get it to work again.

The rest of the day I spent getting the blog ready. The theme went over without a hitch. The only 2 issues are RAZ CAPTCHA, which I talked about earlier, and a mobile theme in which I couldn’t get loaded from my smartphone. It may only be because of the sandbox, but I will play with that in the coming weeks.

Summary - 2.5 is easy to install. So easy a cavem…. well, it’s pretty easy. It’s also easy to import your data. I did it the hard way, but then again I like challenges.

I only had minor issues with the CAPTCHA and the mobile theme. There are some other tests and checks I will run before putting it on a mainstream site level.

I like the additions to WP 2.5 - Media, the ability to set up multiple blogs, Update of Plugins right then and there as well as a updated interface. It will be interesting to see what the first few posts are like.

To anyone thinking of updating, my suggestion is one that goes for ALL software. Wait one week before updating. Why? Well sometimes problems might not show up until after the release. A hacker gets their hands on a imperfection and next thing you know your blog (as well as the rest of the site) has been comprimised.

The best thing to do is install XAMPP and run your own sandbox. Understand the program first, then upgrade. You might find a lot of cool things that you may have missed before.

Good luck on Blogging. It’s a lot of fun.

Upgrading Existing site to 2.5 RC2

Jeffrey Powers — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:20:10 +0000

Last week we did a clean install of 2.5 and all went smooth. Today we’ll run 2.5 on an existing database.

The First thing I did was backed up the existing Database. Once that was accomplished, I proceeded to install 2.5 in a clean directory.

Next week we’ll talk about installing plugins and widgets to get 2.5 back to where it was before.

Wordpress 2.5 - Installation

Jeffrey Powers — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:39:08 +0000

So I took the challenge and downloaded the Wordpress 2.5 RC1. I installed this in my sandbox and got aome awesome results. We’re going to take a focus on this - each week we will talk about the setup and how to integrate it into an existing Wordpress blog.

Part I - Installation.

This was by far the easiest WordPress to install. I didn’t have to worry about knowing anything except how to create a Database in MySQL. I gave the Database a name and that was it. I copied the files over and went to http:/localhost/geekazine2_5

The first window was the best part. I was pretty much greeted by WordPress. It said I don’t have the geek_config file ready, but just press the button and BAM!

I was then pretty much shuffled through a series of screens to set up the database.

This is where setting up the Database comes in handy. I put the database info below (sorry, can’t show THAT info).

Notice the last line of the setup. It asks you to give your tables a name structure. This is so it can run more than one WordPress Blog in the database. Pretty cool stuff…

And Voila! That was it.

Now it’s time to set up the main account.

Episode 19 2-06-08

Jeffrey Powers — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:00:52 +0000

CompUSA - More Snow - Car Accidents - Trip to Goodwill

Twitter - http://twitter.com/geekazine
MySpace - http://myspace.com/geekazine
Pownce - http://www.pownce.com/geekazine
ustream - http://www.ustream.tv/geekazine-video-show

Call the Hotline - 608-807-4379
email -geekazine (at) gmail.com
Skype: Geekazine

Download the show

Microsoft Trys for Yahoo - Network World
Yahoo Music moves to Rhapsody - Geek
Microsoft Launched Comic - Information Week
Macbook Air Taken Apart - Register
Gartner top 10 predictions - Network World

AT&T Outage - DSLReports
Apple Increases iMemory - Cnet
3rd Party Apps at MySpace - Cnet
Internet Killing National Parks? - Ars Technica
ebay to ban negative posters - BBC

30 Second Promo - The Force Field

Porn Database Hacked - RADAR
1.1 Million for Domain Name? - Valleywag
Car Fueling Robot - Network World
Garmin Mobile Phone? - Geek
norbtech - www.tctpodcast.com
Best Buy to Sell Apple? - AppleInsider

2008 CPU Forecast - ComputerWorld
Wordpress Urgent Update - eWeek
SuperDuper for Leopard - MacMinute
Adobe Discontinues Stock Photo Service - PCWorld

30 Year Watch:
LAN

Of Note:
Apple IIc Unboxing
Knight Rider Case Mod
Google Homicide
Chip on a Band-Aid
Giant Pocket PC Phone
VPN on iPod

Yahoo, Google, Geekazine and OpenID.

Jeffrey Powers — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:00:33 +0000

It’s a new day at Geekazine as today we implemented a new system called OpenID. On Jan 30th, Yahoo will also be implementing OpenID. There are many different sites out there with OpenID signatures. What is it and how is it going to affect your web browsing habits.

OpenID is a new ideal to bring Web 2.0 sites together. When the pre-cursor to web 2.0 started, you had to create a profile on each blog or forum to participate in the site. This can mean many hassles – remembering passwords (especially since some sites wanted more characters than others, or had other special requirements), emails back and forth to get your password back, CAPTCHA, and most annoyingly, filling out all the forms just to set up a profile.

Episode #12 12-19-07

Jeffrey Powers — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:00:19 +0000

Last minute Shopping, 24 hour Podcast, USB drive giveaway going til Dec. 31st.

Twitter - http://twitter.com/geekazine
MySpace - http://myspace.com/geekazine

Sponsored by Rhapsody.com. Get your 14 day free trial by selecting this link. Sponsored by Buy.com Get $10 off $200 in our Computer store

Shop Now at the Apple Store for Holiday Deals

My Odeo Channel (odeo/e9728eb8b41c2e72)

Download the show (MP3)

Knol - Cnet
Ribbit? - Digital Trends
SSD in your Gadgets? - Cnet
USB DRM Restriction? - Wired
OpenOffice Online Goes Beta - ArsTechnica
Commodore Apple II - Yahoo

On Geek.com:

Replay TV bought out
Playstation Pre-Pay Cards
Vista Biggest Tech Dissapointment?

Microsoft on Ebay - PCPro
Background Check your Credit Card - TheStreet
GM Saves Millions on Heat - Network World
Match.com on Facebook - New York Times
Video Bandwith - ZDNet
Sony vs. Activision on Price - 1up
RIP Web2.0 Office - Active Network
Viewing others files - Techdirt
Adobe Opens up AMF - ArsTechnica
Voice2TXT - Network World
PS2 still the most popular - IGN
We Google ourselves - Computerworld
Wordpress vs. others - ZDNet
More Apple Patches - PC World
Blackberry Store - CBC
Why Mac didn’t ship with GPS - Macenstein
3.2Gbps Firewire - Electronista
Defining Products of 2007 - ExtremeTech

Ten Year Watch:
Blogging

20 Year Watch:
Perl

Thanks:
A Couple of Admins
pineviewfarm

Of Note:
SanDisk Photo Album
Cool Bridge and Bar
IPodcicle
LiquorLock
9 Clever Business Cards
10 Worst Gadgets 07
3 million users on wincustomize
N64 Tie-fighter

Episode #10 12-05-07

Jeffrey Powers — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:00:21 +0000

I really like WordPress. AJAX Rocks! Pictures to come. Lots of news on a Snowy Week. I have to shovel again when this show is done….
608-807-4379 - geekazine@gmail.com

Twitter - http://twitter.com/geekazine

Sponsored by Rhapsody.com. Get your 14 day free trial by selecting this link.
Sponsored by Buy.com Get $10 off $200 in our Computer store

Shop Now at the Apple Store for Holiday Deals

Google Bids 700Mhz - Yahoo
German iPhones Relocked - Wired
Porn Sites’ New Tactics - ABCNews
Geek Squad Porn Ring Busted - The Consumerist
Green Employees See Red - NetworkWorld
CCTV Could Track Branded Suspects - BBC

On The Geek:
Facebook Changes, Again.
3.3 Billion Mobile Phone Subscriptions
YouTube Still Dominant in US
Mobile Phone Did NOT Kill Man

MySpace Suicide goes unpunished - Cnet

Important FireFox Update - PCWorld
Dell Makes 40,000 PCs with Ubuntu - Register
ActiBlizzardvision - BBC
PayPerPost Fights Back - Wired
Vista and Mac Usage on the Rise - InfoWorld
Price Drop on SSD - ZDNet
Tiny Linux PC runs on Solar Power - Gadgettastic
AMD discontinues Quad FX - Engadget
Identity Theft in MA - infoworld
Power Strips - ExtremeTech
Software Engineering tips for Startups - AdaptiveBlue
Another Facebook Partner? - Yahoo
2008 Predictions - Cnet
160Mbp Internet in 2008? - Engadget
Brix - Techeblog