On To SquareSpace!

So after a month at most using Blogspot as my content manager for my podcast I decided to give SquareSpace a shot. I’m so glad I did. At first I signed up for the 14-day trial period and as I was fiddling with the layout and pages and so forth I came upon an amazing discovery!

SquareSpace has really upped their game to give their customers “unlimited storage” as well as unlimited bandwidth. For as long as I can remember, all across the board,  the max size limit to any file that could be uploaded on their site was 20MB. It seems at some point they deviated from that policy and allowed audio files have a max size limit of 160MB which is more than enough for my podcasting needs. I was paying $15/month to Libsyn for 250MB of monthly storage which is more than I needed but their next tier down only gives 50MB which wasn’t enough. For $8/month, I can use SquareSpace as both my content provider and content manager.

I got to kill 2 birds with one stone, save some money and still have ownership of it all. Prior to this discovery I was thinking about foregoing ownership of the audio files and just putting them on Archive.org. Now I don’t have to. I’m pretty glad with this decision.

Which leads me to think about the future of this blog. I guess for now I’ll still leave it on WordPress. I don’t blog enough to want to finance it and I’ve written so much over the years I don’t know if I want to move it all. Not to mention I have another domain name that points to here.

For now, this blog is still safe on WordPress. Maybe someday later that’ll change.

I Want To Keep Using Firefox But Chrome Is So Good?!

When Google Chrome came out a few years ago my curiosity was piqued and I gave it a try. I’m a fan of most of the Google line of products (Gmail, Google Reader, etc) and thought this should be a half decent browser. It was built out of WebKit after all (the same open-source layout engine that is the foundation of the Safari browser). Well I was sadly disappointed and didn’t give it another look until about a year later. By then it was definitely better and was giving Safari a run for it’s money. But it still couldn’t quite match up to Firefox at the time. How times have changed.

One of the biggest issues for me with Google Chrome was that, though it was fast, it didn’t always behave correctly with every website I went to. Like Safari, it would have some issues with some site formats. One such site was WordPress.com. Firefox was able to render every website with no such problems. Its only problem, as has always been the case, was that it was sometimes sluggish. Especially if you used a lot of extensions. Because of this sluggish issue I would keep my extensions to a minimum and only used what I considered were essential.

While I kept plowing and waiting through the load times of web pages when navigating with Firefox, Chrome was quietly, and constantly, updating itself. Currently Firefox is now up to version 9.0.1; whereas Google Chrome is up to 16.0.912.63 in, at most, 3 years time. Chrome no longer seems to have those compatibility issues with websites and it’s still super fast when compared to Firefox (I’ve done the last few blog posts with Google Chrome with absolutely no problems). Chrome has also gotten extensions. Though Google’s library isn’t as extensive as Mozilla’s they have the same ones that I use on  Firefox and they haven’t affected the speed or efficiency of Chrome. I now find myself using Google Chrome more than ever before and Firefox has become a bit of an afterthought.

I usually don’t feel any loyalty ties with technology. I switch from PC and Apple without a thought except for what’s most convenient for me at the time. But with Mozilla, I feel like I’m letting them down. Firefox is built by a nonprofit organization that cares about a free and open Internet. They run a lot of programs to help steer the new generation to using the Internet in a lot of exciting new ways. They even have red pandas on webcam!

Do I abandon the cause of the everyman to use a browser that’s made by big corporation? Is the speed of Chrome enough for me to forgo my ideals because of the convenience of shaving seconds of load time? Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this. I don’t know. I haven’t removed Firefox from my dock but I’m using Chrome to write up this post. Make of that what you will.

WordPress for Android 2.0 Now Available

WordPress.com News

It’s Android blogging, re-imagined. Today we’re announcing the release of WordPress for Android 2.0, a major update that focuses on a new UI and enhanced post editor features. Check the video:

So what’s new?

Brand New Look

We’ve completely redesigned the look and feel of the app, now placing the actions you want to make with your blog all in one place: The Dashboard. You have one-tap access to create new posts and pages, upload media, view your stats, read blogs and more! There’s also now a beautiful comment count ribbon to show you how many comments you have in your moderation queue.

The Action Bar up top allows you to quickly get to other areas of the app as fast as possible. You can tap the blog name to switch blogs, refresh your content, and call up the dashboard from wherever you are in the app at the…

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A Message To Current FeedBurner Subscribers

Since the inception of this blog I have been using FeedBurner as the main aggregator for my RSS Feed. It was user-friendly. I got to feed the stat hungry side of my brain by seeing who was reading my blog and from where and how many were subscribed to it, etc. Also the great thing about FeedBurner was that if I ever decided to move my blog somewhere else, with FeedBurner, I wouldn’t have to hassle my subscribers with re-subscribing (I would simply do all the work on the back-end and no one would be the wiser).

Well with the recent updates to Word Press stats and subscription options, my need to simplify my digital footprint and my increasingly infrequent visits to FeedBurner, the one-stop shopping option of having everything done on the WordPress side of things has become more appealing. Consequently, I’ve wiped all traces of FeedBurner from my site and will be deleting the FeedBurner RSS feed within the next weeks or so. Unfortunately, the thing that I’ve been helping subscribers avoid is no longer feasible and anyone who has subscribed to this blog via FeedBurner will have to re-subscribe via the options listed above on the right-sidebar (the RSS Feed will now be http://juliofromny.com/feed/). If you’re already subscribed to this blog via the WordPress options then you’re ahead of the game and have to nothing else except wait for the next blog entry hit your inbox, rss reader, etc.

I do apologize for this inconvenience and I will make an effort not to encumber you readers any further. Please use the new subscription options and I’ll try to write more often.

The NoF Ezine Is Up And Running

As I mentioned in an update of an earlier post, the NoF Ezine turned blog now has their blog up and running. The name of the blog is “NoF Geek And Gamer Pants Party” and is of course hosted on wordpress.com. The head of the new blog asked me for some aid and I gladly helped organize the layout and design of the site. With wordpress.com it’s all a matter of picking a theme you like and organizing some widgets to your liking but I’m pretty pleased with how it came out.

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I also have a TV review of “Fairly Legal” posted there so by all means check out the site if just to read my article 🙂