travisj » Internet http://travisj.org cooking up the offense like he's cooking ravioli Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:19:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Pandora Question http://travisj.org/2007/08/27/pandora-question/ http://travisj.org/2007/08/27/pandora-question/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:20:51 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2007/08/27/pandora-question/ I’ve been listening to Pandora a lot lately and had a question about the stations I created. When I’m listening to a station, and rate it, do those rating affect the station if other people listen to it?

And this post successfully concludes what I was testing, no more junk posts for a little while :)

And I can now edit from my secret project!

]]> http://travisj.org/2007/08/27/pandora-question/feed/ 4 In Sunnyvale http://travisj.org/2007/08/27/in-sunnyvale/ http://travisj.org/2007/08/27/in-sunnyvale/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:13:56 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2007/08/27/in-sunnyvale/ From my previous post, you can tell I’m working on something. This post is just another test, but I’m trying to provide a little content, so check out some of the photos I’ve taken while in Sunnyvale:

Sunnyvale Bootcamp ‘07

]]> http://travisj.org/2007/08/27/in-sunnyvale/feed/ 0 Open Shortcuts http://travisj.org/2007/05/21/open-shortcuts/ http://travisj.org/2007/05/21/open-shortcuts/#comments Tue, 22 May 2007 05:34:39 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2007/05/21/open-shortcuts/ Today a co-worker pointed me towards Yahoo! Search’s Open Shortcuts and I instantly became a fan. With Open Shortcuts you setup shortcuts for other (longer) URLs. For example, I created my first shortcut with the keyword ’sb’ and it redirects me to http://www.swap-bot.com/. Now I can type ‘!sb’ into Yahoo! Search and instantly be redirected to Swap-bot. The part that makes Open Shortcuts so useful is that I switched my Firefox keyword search URL to ‘http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2&p=’ and now I can type ‘!sb’ in the URL field in Firefox and again be redirected to Swap-bot.

To change your keyword search URL in Firefox you need to type ‘about:config’ into the URL for Firefox and then filter to ‘keyword.URL’. Then double click on the URL that is currently set and paste the URL snippet from above.

You can set new shortcuts by typing ‘!set shortcut URL‘ (ex: !set eft http://www.travisj.org).

The other really cool feature of Open Shortcuts is that you can include a search parameter by including ‘%s’ as the text placeholder. So, for example, I can create a shortcut to my del.icio.us account and allow for an optional tag search:

!set d http://del.icio.us/travisj/%s

Now, if I type ‘!d php’ I am taken to http://del.icio.us/travisj/php and if I just type ‘!d’ I am taken to my main del.icio.us page.

]]> http://travisj.org/2007/05/21/open-shortcuts/feed/ 1 twitter and Swap-bot http://travisj.org/2007/03/16/twitter-and-swap-bot/ http://travisj.org/2007/03/16/twitter-and-swap-bot/#comments Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:10:05 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2007/03/16/twitter-and-swap-bot/ In case you haven’t been following the internet this last week, twitter exploded at SXSW. As a result, I think it became blog-law that you had to make a post about how much you love/hate/don’t understand twitter. I don’t see the need to update the world with my every action, but I do see value in using twitter’s various distribution channels.

One area I see promise for twitter is in the micro-announcements from other web services. For example, I just created a Swap-bot twitter account that gets updated every time a new swap is created. Other twitter members can follow Swap-bot and choose how they want to be updated when Swap-bot updates. I can choose to get an IM, SMS or just a web update. Posting to twitter is just one more way I can hopefully get new people to Swap-bot or remind old members to come back.

]]> http://travisj.org/2007/03/16/twitter-and-swap-bot/feed/ 0 Twitter http://travisj.org/2007/02/25/twitter/ http://travisj.org/2007/02/25/twitter/#comments Mon, 26 Feb 2007 01:01:33 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2007/02/25/twitter/ I’ve been hearing a lot about Twitter lately and finally decided to give it a try. I’m mostly interested in figuring out what makes it so popular. I am also interested in APIs, so I wrote a TextMate Bundle to post to my Twitter page.

If anyone else has a Twitter account, please be my friend :)

]]> http://travisj.org/2007/02/25/twitter/feed/ 0 Using mod_rewrite and FeedBurner http://travisj.org/2007/02/24/using-mod_rewrite-and-feedburner/ http://travisj.org/2007/02/24/using-mod_rewrite-and-feedburner/#comments Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:37:55 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2007/02/24/using-mod_rewrite-and-feedburner/ I decided I wanted to start using FeedBurner on my blog to see how many readers I actually have. One of the things I didn’t want to have to do, though, was to make both of my readers switch the URL of my feed, so I set up this simple mod_rewrite directive in my main .htaccess folder:

RewriteRule ^feed[/]?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/Eightfivethree [L]

Now, any request for /feed will redirect to my feedburner feed.

Another benefit of setting up this rewrite, is that I can give out the URL to my domain, but get FeedBurner to gather the stats for me.

UPDATE: FeedBurner is taking hours to update my feed, not the 30 minutes they claim. I even tried pinging their service to update my feed without any luck. So, as easily as I put the RewriteRule in, I took it out. Now everyone is pointing back the RSS feed on my server and gets my posts as soon as I write them. No waiting, no hassle.

]]> http://travisj.org/2007/02/24/using-mod_rewrite-and-feedburner/feed/ 0 Swap-bot switched servers over the weekend http://travisj.org/2007/02/19/swap-bot-switched-servers-over-the-weekend/ http://travisj.org/2007/02/19/swap-bot-switched-servers-over-the-weekend/#comments Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:18:19 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2007/02/19/swap-bot-switched-servers-over-the-weekend/ I spent most of Saturday moving Swap-bot to its new server. In the past, moving servers wasn’t too big a deal since I never really got any traffic. A day or two downtime wasn’t anything I worried about. But, the reason I had to even move in the first place was because Swap-bot has started to decent amount of traffic. On the old host, when Swap-bot would go down for a couple minutes I would hear about it from the users. With this move, a day or two downtime was not a real option. I luckily came up with something that resulted in about 2 minutes of downtime and it would have been shorter, but I took about a minute to track down a typo I made.

The reason coordination is even an issue is because changing a domain’s DNS records takes time to propagate throughout the internet. It isn’t instant and it doesn’t happen at the same time for all users. So at the exact same time one user could be browsing the new server and another could be browsing the old server because they are using different nameservers that have different information for my domain.

The first thing I had to do was setup the new server and test it. One mistake I made when setting up Swap-bot in the first place was setting up the SVN repository on the swap-bot.com domain. Once my DNS was changed, I would have no way of getting to the repository on the old server. So, the first thing I had to do was create a new repository on a different domain. The next step was to check out the swap-bot code and copy over all the user images from the old server. To copy everything over I chose to use rsync. rsync allowed me to copy everything over and then continually check for new images added throughout the day. Anything new that was added could easily be transfered over to the new server. Over the last year, we have accumulated nearly 1 GB of images, so copying the images over multiple times wasn’t something I really wanted to do. After transferring over a copy of the database to the new server, I added a record for the new server in my /etc/hosts file, telling my computer which IP address to use for swap-bot.com, instead of asking some other nameserver for it. This way, I could go in my browser to swap-bot.com and look at the new server. I found a few minor things that needed to be changed based on the way the new server is setup, but nothing major. It looked like everything was ready to go.

Then came the moment of truth. I was ready to make the switch. To do this, I setup my new mysql server to accept a remote connection from the old host. I then shut swap-bot down and transferred the database from the old server to the new one. Updated the database information on the old host and started swap-bot back up. At this point, swap-bot was now running on the old server, but pointing to the database on the new host. This way, I wouldn’t have to worry about any data syncing issues as DNS records changed at random throughout the next 24-48 hours. I gave a quick test of the old site and everything looked good, so I updated my DNS records to point to the new server.

It was actually a pretty uneventful move. I had a few people using AOL have a little trouble because, I think, they would get switched from one server to the other at random, but that was about it.

]]> http://travisj.org/2007/02/19/swap-bot-switched-servers-over-the-weekend/feed/ 1 Google Calendar http://travisj.org/2006/04/12/google-calendar/ http://travisj.org/2006/04/12/google-calendar/#comments Thu, 13 Apr 2006 05:17:23 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2006/04/12/google-calendar/ Google Calendar is open. I just logged in with my gmail account and it work. It looks decent, but I doubt I will use it too much. We’ll see…

]]> http://travisj.org/2006/04/12/google-calendar/feed/ 1 CDS? http://travisj.org/2006/04/01/cds/ http://travisj.org/2006/04/01/cds/#comments Sat, 01 Apr 2006 17:28:58 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2006/04/01/cds/ Google Romance reminds me of the days in undergrad when I ran the Closson Dating Service. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the Closson Dating Service, let’s just say that it, like Google Romance, started as a joke and turned into the premier way for my house-mates to find dates.

]]> http://travisj.org/2006/04/01/cds/feed/ 4 Gunnerweb http://travisj.org/2006/03/21/gunnerweb/ http://travisj.org/2006/03/21/gunnerweb/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 07:54:53 +0000 Travis http://www.eightfivethree.com/2006/03/21/gunnerweb/ My old gunnerweb landing page didn’t survive the move to the new host. For the past few weeks it was some generic “Site coming soon” page. The wait is now over for the new gunnerweb.net. I even had some time to throw together a cool little ajax contact page (the ajax is cool, not exactly the form layout). Please give it a try, it will be time well spent :)

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