Category Archives: Services

Services

Wanted: Cross-platform mobile shopping list app

By Dougal | Published: July 23, 2008

Okay Lazyweb, help me find what I’m looking for. I want a mobile shopping/todo list app that my wife and I can both use to keep shared lists. I’ve got an iPhone, Susan has a Blackberry Curve — it should be easy to use on either of those devices. And of course, we’d want to be able to edit our lists via our desktop web browsers, as well.

It should:

support multiple lists
support sharing lists between multiple people
make it super easy to check off items
be able to sync the latest list updates from anywhere
be easy to use on iPhone, Blackberry, or any web browser
be inexpensive

It doesn’t have to have (but could):

support store-specific lists
be aware of what aisle items are on
support recipe ingredient lists or meal planning functions
support item categories within lists

I looked at a few list applications for the iPhone in the App Store, and I did some searches on the general intarwebs, but the apps I found all fell down in some way. [...]

Also posted in Applications, Mobile | Tagged apps, blackberry, iPhone, Lists, Mobile, sharing, shopping, sync, Web, webservice | 17 Comments

Whither Spam?

By Dougal | Published: June 14, 2008

When I switched to my new Slicehost server, I spent a while trying to decide what I wanted to do about email for my domains. I contemplated using Google’s domain email service, or some other third-party email hosting. But I just hated giving up that much control of my email setup. [...]

Also posted in Hardware, Linux, Servers, Software, Spam, Tech | Tagged antivirus, clamav, Email, email spam, fighting spam, Linux, mail, mailscanner, mailwatch, Servers, slicehost, smtp, Spam, spamassassin, spamsnake, Ubuntu | 4 Comments

Now on Slicehost: Me!

By Dougal | Published: April 21, 2008

If you are seeing this post, then you are getting pages served from my new server at Slicehost. I still have to migrate my other web sites, and figure out how I’m going to mange email, but this was a big hurdle, and I’m glad to say that it went pretty smoothly. There are still some old files that I haven’t put back in place yet, so if anything seems awry, don’t be too surprised. I know of a couple of things I need to take care of, but I’m sure there are others that haven’t crossed my mind yet. [...]

Also posted in Announcements, General, Servers | Tagged hosting, self, Servers, slicehost, webhosting | 11 Comments

International Delete Your MySpace Account Day

By Dougal | Published: January 22, 2008

I just found out that January 30th is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. What an awesome birthday present — I’m there, dude!

Iâ€™ve been thinking about deleting my Myspace account almost since the day I got it but always opted out of doing so because of the few friends I have who donâ€™t have Facebook accounts. But by remaining on Myspace, I realize, Iâ€™m becoming an enabler. Iâ€™m giving those friends no reason to switch over from Myspace by giving them access to my Myspace profile.

The only reason I even have a MySpace account in the first place is because at my last job, we needed to test how to format our video player embed code on MySpace. [...]

Also posted in Community, Holidays, Humor | Tagged delete, dumb, funny, Holidays, Humor, myspace, weirdal | 15 Comments

No more daily Twitter posts

By Dougal | Published: January 15, 2008

Just as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary. I will continue posting to Twitter, and the most recent of my tweets will be displayed in my sidebar here. But think they should remain separate from my main blog content. I just feel like they “clutter” things up here, and the things I post on Twitter are different in scope from what I normally post in my blog.

I will likely continue to post mostly technical observations here in my blog (with the occasional side-track into non-technical areas). [...]

Also posted in Blogging, Community, Tech | Tagged automation, Blogging, delicious, Links, Personal, posting, posts, Tech, tweets, twitter, WordPress | 10 Comments

Twitterings

By Dougal | Published: December 13, 2007

You might have already noticed, but I finally hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon. You can see my latest tweets in the sidebar (it’s the “What I’m Doing” section), and I currently have it auto-posting a daily summary here on the blog (courtesy of the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress). I’m not sure if I’ll continue that or not, though. Of course, if you are also on Twitter, you can just follow my tweets with whatever method you prefer.

When Twitter first started, I didn’t think I’d see much value in it. [...]

Also posted in Blogging, Community, Plugins, WordPress | Tagged alexking, plugin, Plugins, RSS, SocialNetworks, tweets, twitter, twittertools, WordPress | 26 Comments

VPS Recommendations?

By Dougal | Published: November 19, 2007

I’m looking for a Virtual Private Server host. The server I’m currently on is woefully underpowered for the handful of sites I running (on the plus side, it’s been free), and it’s high time that I moved my stuff to a box that’s up to the task.

Ideally, I’d like the following features:

Virtual Private Server with at least 1GB of RAM (preferably with root access within my instance).
SSH shell access.
Decent monthly bandwidth allotment (at least 250GB/month).
Plenty of disk space (25GB would be be plenty, but I can live with less).
Hosting of multiple web/email domains.
PHP5 and MySQL 5.
Ability to configure many email alias fowards within each domain.
Procmail for mail filtering.
DNS hosting, preferably with the ability to directly edit my own zone files, but I’ll live with a web interface if I have to.

Those are listed roughly in order of importance. [...]

Also posted in Servers, Tech | Tagged bandwidth, dns, dom, domains, Hardware, hosting, hosts, MySQL, PHP, recommendations, sysadmin, virtualprivateserver, vps, webhosting | 23 Comments

WordPress.com supports OpenID

By Dougal | Published: March 6, 2007

The word just went out today that the WordPress.com blog hosting service now supports OpenID, ~~both~~ as a server ~~and a consumer~~. Supporting it as a server means that if you have a blog on WordPress.com, you can use your blog URL as an OpenID. ~~Supporting it as a consumer means that you can use any OpenID to login to your WordPress.com account (once you’ve associated your OpenIDs with your regular login)~~. [...]

Also posted in Community, OpenID, Standards, Tech, WordPress | Tagged Identity, plugin, SingleSignOn, SSO, WordPress | 6 Comments

OpenID News

By Dougal | Published: February 13, 2007

Since my WordPress upgrade and theme change, the OpenID sign-on functionality here has been a little iffy. I think I’ve got all the kinks worked out now, and it should be working correctly again. There seems to be a buglet in the functions that attempt to automagically add the OpenID login fields to the comment form. So I had to disable that option and manually edit my comment template file to insert the appropriate bits. I don’t like having to modify the theme files (it’s going to make it harder to upgrade when a new version of Sandbox comes out), but that was my best solution, short-term.

In other news, Microsoft is working on interoperability between OpenID and their CardSpace™ framework. [...]

Also posted in Microformats, OpenID, Standards, Tech, Themes, WordPress | Tagged FOAF, hCard, Identity, Microsoft, PHP, plugin, Sandbox, SingleSignOn, SSO, Web, WordPress, yahoo | 4 Comments

Reinvigorated

By Dougal | Published: February 7, 2007

Reinvigorate’s Hourly Stats

About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about how the Reinvigorate web stats service was entering a private beta, and I hoped to get a chance to try it out. I applied to the private beta program and waited. And waited. [...]