Collin Condray’s Blog

A coworker recently switched from Firefox to Google Chrome. I made several suggestions for the first extensions that she should install. Here they are in no particular order:

• Trash Can-Remembers and lets you reopen previously closed tabs. Nice if click the close button one too many times.
• Forecastfox Weather-View current conditions, 7-day forecast, maps and severe weather alerts in an easily readable format. No need to install an extra program in the taskbar.
• Google Mail Checker-Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to open your inbox.
• Chrome Gestures-Very fast way to navigate and control your browser.
• FlashBlock-Stops Flash from playing by default. Block them all, or be selective with the embedded whitelist manager. Very at keeping embedded media players from starting automatically.
• IE Tab-Display web pages using IE in a tab. One less button to press to get a new browser when one of Chrome’s quirks pops up.

Hope you find them useful!

I’ve recently updated several of my WordPress sites. I took this opportunity to check my plugin lists and see if there are any new or updated plugins that I had to have for every WordPress installation. Here is a list that I’ll probably add to about 90% of my new WordPress installs in no particular order:

• Simple Facebook Connect/Twitter Tools-This one-two punch makes it much easier to notify your social media network whenever you update your site.
• Sociable-Tons of ways to add those little buttons that let your visitors syndicate your content over several dozen different social media type sites and get your content out.
• WPtouch iPhone Theme-I recently got an iPhone and love it when I visit sites with this plugin.
• Contact Form 7-I used cforms II for a long time but it I couldn’t use the one click upgrade with all versions. This plugin is simpler to configure than cforms II and is still pretty flexible.
• Google Analyticator-Lots of ways to track activity (admin pages, outbound links, etc.) on your site using Google Analytics
• FD Feedburner Plugin-I was using Feedburner’s WordPress plugin but can’t seem to find it anymore on their site. This plugin gives you an easy way to redirect WordPress’ standard feed to your Feedbuner feed where you have access to all sorts of neat tricks and stats.
• Subscribe2- My mom will never, never, never use an RSS feed but does read email. For those people who don’t subscribe using RSS, this plugin will let them learn of changes to your site the old fashioned way via email.
• Google XML Sitemaps-Automatically builds a special site map for Google that helps them index the content of your site.
• WP Super Cache-Speeds up your WordPress site by serving static HTML pages rather than dynamic PHP pages. Good for sites that run on shared hosts.
• All in One SEO Pack-A little more automated than other SEO plugins, but still allows you to fine tune everything.

I’ve been struggling for a while to get one of my favorite web frameworks, Perl’s Catalyst on to one of my favorite LAMP servers,  XAMPP with little success. With the help of Ishigaki Kenichi over at http://ppm.tcool.org/ I’ve figured out a way get everything running. Here’s how you do it.

1. Install XAMPP and the Perl Add-On.
2. Install Perl 5.8.8.820
3. Run PPM and add the tcool repository (http://ppm.tcool.org/archives/) and disable all other repositories.
4. Remove File-Spec
5. Run ppm-shell and install Catalyst-Runtime and Catalyst-Devel using the –force option
6. Disable the tcool repository and reenable the ActiveState repository.
7. remove Errno using the –force
8. Reinstall the latest version of Errno (1.10)

I hope this saves someone some time and frustration in the future!

I’m thinking about changing the RSS feed of the site to include not only the posts from this but some of my other social networking sites using Yahoo! Pipes. To do this I have to change my default feed and I’d like to get an idea of who’s currently subscribed to my feed. If you read this blog, please vote in the latest poll so I can see who’s signed up now. Thanks!

I’ve been working on moving my site to a new server and upgrading the guts of it to a full fledged Content Management System (CMS) named Joomla. I’m really impressed by Joomla and the functionality it provides. It has a lot of plugins to it that knit together various web applications into one convenient system. Modules that I’ve currently added are:

• WordPress blogging software which now contains the contents of my personal blog and Japan trip blog
• Gallery2 image gallery which allows users to comment on photos
• Joomlaboard forum
• Polls
• Banner ads for Google and Amazon

I’m also eyeing the install of a few other modules as well

• Google Maps
• Wiki
• Battlefield 2 Leaderboard

There’s still a few more design tweaks that I want to make to the site and I have to recover all the user comments, but for the most part, I’m pretty happy with it.

Please answer the poll, leave a comment, or make a forum post and let me know what you think of the new site.

Lifehacker had a link to a program that I have been looking for for a long time, Taskbar++ . It lets you move your applications around on the task bar much like you can move tabs around in Firefox or Avant Browser. I really like this because there are times that you want all of one application together in the task bar or you want them in a specific order but you forgot to open them up that way. Now you can just drag them into whatever order you want.

Make sure that you read the instructions on how to use it on the Lifehacker site and not on the Japanese homepage. The Bablefish translation makes reading the instructions really weird.

I do a lot of work with Excel files and oftentimes have to paste its contents into Lotus Notes. When you do this it pastes the data in as an image file instead of just plain text. PureText is a great tool to take whatever you have copied to the clipboard and converts it into plain text. This is very nice if you’re copying from webpages or word documents and just want the words and not the formatting. With one extra keystroke you can paste plain text instead of having to take the time to go all the way to Paste Special. PureText is a highly recommened program and, best of all, its free!