LwEEs.com

Hello World! I’m testing Picasa Web Albums embed functionality. I’m placing my images into WordPress using Google’s Servers. I wonder if they would mind, I don’t know if this is a violation to their terms of service or what.

If ou have more information on this practice, please let me know. For now you should see a beautiful woman picture cropped and pasted into an iPhone picture, if you don’t please let me know.

Pushing my luck and looking for an online change, I switched my blog to a social networking site. The blog functionality still on, the main difference now is that I’m focusing more in the users, my visitors, in other words “you.” I spend a great deal of time helping others, much of it commenting on other people blogs, forums, and social sites like Facebook. With that in mind I’m hoping to bring all these interface ideas, help, and tips and tricks to one place to bring you “in” and have you spend some time with us.

While all of this may sound like a great idea, social networking has its limits, you have to spend a lot of time monitoring your users, moderating their content, and is very hard to get new quality users. Automating most of the parts of your social experience within your site is part of the trick to not go crazy while trying to maintain your site. Thankfully, WordPress makes moderating easy and developers have made great plug-ins that help your manage your online experience even more.

The tools are just part of the problem and the solution at the same time, the people contributing are also hard to manage. Sometimes you get so frustrated trying to explain others to keep your vocabulary clean, I have kids and I would like them to be able to read my blog posts without having to worry about explicit content. Monetization of a social site is also very difficult, if you don’t believe me try asking the guys at twitter, they are still studying different ways to earn money from a simple social networking site.

To start, I added a simple Amazon add that changes depending where the user is at any point. Integration with twitter is done as well, so go ahead, create a profile on this site and link it to your twitter. My next project is to add Facebook to my site so that you can link to your Facebook profile as well. Do you have any ideas? Contact me at webmaster@lwees.com and let me know what you think, thanks for stopping by.

After moving my website from web host, and moving all my articles I immediately noticed the speed improvement. One thing that halts down a website is the load time, and part of the problem when dealing with load time is large files. Photos, videos, and other media are heavy objects that pulls a lot of bandwidth on our servers and taking them off your server is always a good idea.

I’m currently exploring Amazon’s S3 and sites like Flickr to offload all my images and prevent this way the lags that slow down my website. The problem I have with Flickr is that the company stability is not that great, we all know the rumors of Yahoo sinking and there is no word on what would happen to Flickr if Yahoo disappears. On the other hand Amazon’s S3 problem is cost, It can get very expensive very fast on a popular site.

I’m not sure whether or not the Amazon S3 option is right for me, first of all, the plug-ins available are not that simple to use with WordPress. Since the guys at WordPress like to change things around from time to time is hard to predict whether or not functionality will break on future WordPress releases.

In the meantime, I’m not loading the images back to the posts, they will remain blank for now. If you can suggest any type of plug-in or hack to use external images on with easy within the WordPress admin back-end, please let me know.

If you follow my feed or my website you probably notice a couple of weird stuff lately, while I was trying to change my hosting plan I also replaced my WordPress installation with a Multi-User installation. The WordPress MU installation helps the site achieving some long term goals like allowing for more that one site to be hosted under the same url, and the addition of the BuddyPress plug-in makes my site look more like a community for all its users.

While I was setting up the site a couple of bugs bite me right on my hand, the site posted some old articles as new and I’m missing some newer articles that I plan to put back at a later date. This is my apology to you, please don’t unsubscribe from my site, I promise this will get more interesting from this point on. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet, subscribe to my site to belong to a much greater community.

If you have questions please don’t hesitate on asking, I’ll answer all inquiries withing 24 hours. Thanks.

**Note: This is an ongoing article.**

With the release of the Apple iPad web developers have jet again take a look at Adobe Flash and mobile web browser Safari, the debate of whether Adobe Flash is too processor intensive for small devices has revived and some tech-driven people are making more noise than usual. Back in 2007 when the iPhone was released, Apple even had class actions suits about the phrase “the internet in your hands” because of the widely use of Adobe Flash on such device.

The story is repeating all over again, this time with the focus being the new Apple device, it looks like Apple has no plans to include Adobe Flash on their portable devices and whether they end up doing it or not, a good web developer should look at other alternatives to properly place code on websites.

I’m not an expert on the field but I have work enough as a web developer to know that you can set browser specific content on a web site to load separate code depending on the web browser used to visit your site. We see this everyday when you visit a site on your iPhone and it looks different from when you visit the same site from your computer. With this in mind I ask myself, how hard is it to code browser specific content to load beautiful websites on the iPad, iPod touch, and the iPhone.

The idea is to load non-flash objects on your site when they are visited from and “i” device and regular Adobe Flash when not. With WordPress, more than often, developers use browser specific hooks to display different design elements or “CSS” files depending on whether you are smart and use a regular web browser or you are locked into using IE6. The simple code looks a bit like this:

With this example in mind we can tell exactly that what I’m proposing is not far from reality or a crazy idea. Instead of arguing about whether Apple is going to allow Adobe Flash on the iPhone, iPod, or even the iPad, we can create an environment of good developer skills and fix the web to our advantage.

In the next installment I will be explaining the idea in more detail, give a few examples of the implementation, and discuss any comments that we have from you, our readership. Expect to have the 2 part of this article in the next couple of weeks. I’m creating a forum to discuss any ideas you may have or you can simply leave your comments here on this post.

After digesting the iPad news from a day, I finally came to organize my ideas and post this small article about the device. At first I was a bit disappointed because of the similarities with the iPhone-iPod touch, my main concern is that a device like this would be better if it was marketed as a computer replacement or companion as opposed to marketed as a media device.

I really think that is an awesome media device, the ability of managing your media and your communication from a device like this one blows my mind. The addition of iWork for the iPad is just a killer move on Apple’s part, and because is open to developers to create incredible applications, this makes of the iPad the best media-communicator device in the world. Read the rest of this entry →

Downloaded Office 2010 Beta to see what’s next on their idea of yet another update, at first glance, I like that I’m not seeing anymore the ribbon circle at the top left corner that the last version incorporated. That doesn’t mean that is not there, the ribbon button is being replace by a simple tab. The tabbed navigation at the top of the application is actually a good idea since this is how most web browsers work now and people are getting familiar with it.

The previous version of Office had the tabs but the ribbon button was what threw people off, I know many people that disliked the ribbon, very few felt comfortable with it. I still feel that the top of the screen is clutter with lots of icons. The organization at the top of the new MS Word 2010 is as crowded as its predecessor, and I couldn’t find a way to make is look like Office 2003. I’m sure there is a way but I’m just trying to see how difficult for a normal user is to have its way around the new Office 2010. Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve been fixing computers for some time now, as part of the tools of the trade I have many cables and tools that helps me with the day-to-day task of fixing computers, drives, and other technology. One of the tools that have helped me a lot is a USB 2.0 to IDE & SATA cable from Cables Unlimited that I got at CompUSA, but you can get it pretty much anywhere you can buy computer parts.

This useful tool allows you to plug a hard drive to a computer without having to open it and installing it inside, better for people like me that I only have an Apple MacBook. To add to its simplicity, I can use it even if I’m on Windows XP using VMWare on my MacBook. Read the rest of this entry →

Adobe BuzzWord is a web application that allows you to write documents similar to Microsoft Word. Of course it doesn’t have all the functionality that MS Word have but at least you can set your mind to writing no matter where you are and whether you are on your computer or not.

I created an account sometime ago but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to give it a try, I’m writing this small review on it now. The menu system is very basic, you can change your font style, the size, and set up bold, italic, and underline text. You can also add colors, and set other parameters like paragraph style, lists, add an image, a table or a comment, these are again very basic functionality. Read the rest of this entry →

On an article published on November 2007 I talked about my favorite mouse, long time has passed and I have changedmouse several times. I finally found one that I like, the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, and I’m loving this little mice, I picked this one up from OfficeDepot for $30 while on sale about a month ago.

This mouse is lightweight, comes with a pouch for carrying it while on the go, and it doesn’t use as much batteries as other wireless options. The downside is that to make all the buttons work I had to buy a little software called USB Overdrive. Before I dive into details, let me say that this is not my first Microsoft mice and both of them were excellent, this is my second must have from Microsoft, when I get a new MacBook I always install MS Office then get a MS wireless mouse. Read the rest of this entry →