Flock: A New Blog Friendly Web Browser (UPDATED)
I’ve been looking at the Flock web browser (For Windows, Linux, and Mac) for some time now, but it finally seems like it might be getting developed enough to be useful. Flock is based on the Gecko engine that is used in Firefox, so it’s works basically as well as that browser. The major difference with Flock is that it’s designed to integrate directly into many popular blogging and social networking sites (like Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, MySpace, etc.) to make it easier to access your accounts and update your pages. Of course WordPress.com and a standalone WordPress install are both supported.
If you are tired of Internet Explorer and want to try out something different, give Flock a look. Even if you already use Firefox, you might find Flock to be an interesting alternative.
UPDATED: Apparently there is a Mac OS X version. It is strange though that they aren’t very obvious that that version exists if you go to their website–their “Versions” page is down also.
Little Tips 2
File naming. We all do it differently on our own computers. With Windows and OS X we have a large amount of leeway in how we can name our own files on our own computers. This is normally not an issue. It becomes an issue though when we want to use some of those files on a website. This is especially true of image or video files, though it can affect anything from documents to archive files as well.
As opposed to how personal computers work, most servers are fairly strict in how a file must be named in order to have it work correctly as part of a web page. The strict naming of files for linux servers only allows for letters, numbers, underscores (_), dashes (-) and periods (.) to be a part of the name of a file. You also must name the file as a continuous string of characters without spaces, so “my image.gif” isn’t valid but “my_image.gif” or “myimage.gif” or “my-image.gif” are valid.
This issue is particularly important for usage of WordPress with my AWSOM Pixgallery plugin, since incorrect naming of the image files can lead to issues displaying the images. The plugin supports custom names, so once you upload your images you can input a caption/custom name in the admin menu in any way you wish for display purposes, just make sure you leave the actual file name as something that is acceptable on the server.
AWSOM on Vacation
Awsom.org is on vacation this week, but I might get some updates up here at some point over this week. I’ll be working on some new updates to all of the plugins, so expect to see some new features and fun starting next week.
Weekly Update Releases: Archive and News Announcement plugins Updated
In what is seemingly turning into a weekly phenomenon, There are 2 updates to AWSOM plugins now available. AWSOM Drop Down Archive has been updated to version 1.1.1 and AWSOM News Announcement has been updated to version 1.2.3.
AWSOM Drop Down Archive has had 2 updates in this release. The first update is a new Admin Options area that allows the admin to set the width of the drop down archive box–this is a feature request from some people who’ve needed to adjust the size of the box to fit their theme. The second update is to fix an issue where the archive could show up in the wrong spot in some themes.
AWSOM News Announcement has one update in this release, which is the same fix as the Drop Down Archive, to make sure the News Announcement doesn’t show up in the wrong location.
You can get the new versions of both plugin from their product pages.