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Blogging From The Nexus7

Nexus7Not long ago I read a post by a blogger who had made the effort to give up his laptop for the day. While attending a conference he left his laptop in his hotel room intent upon using only his Nexus 7 tablet throughout that day. I thought it an interesting experiment.

The tale of his day highlighted a few worthy accessories for the Nexus 7 tablet. He pointed to a premium stylus and a Bluetooth wireless keyboard as key to his productivity. I was impressed by his logic and the tale of his experience that day. So much so that I ordered those same items so that I might try them for myself.

At this very moment I’m typing on the Logitech Keyboard for Android , wirelessly connected to my Nexus 7. Just as he described the case for the keyboard doubles as a stand for the tablet. It’s handy. To use it properly really requires a table, but it’s working on my lap at the moment.

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One Great WordPress Plug-in: WP Smush.it

wordpress-logo As mentioned previously, some weeks ago I moved this site into a brand new VPS. Such a move is pretty transparent to readers, but gave me a chance to rework the site, enhancing the WordPress installation in some interesting ways. I think that some of what I’ve recently discovered might be useful to others.

This new WordPress installation has been refined with respect to how it handles media. One of the niceties that I’ve discovered is a WordPress plug-in called WP Smush.it. This plug-in leverages a Yahoo API to automatically implement a best practices approach to optimizing images as they are uploaded to the site.

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Meta: New VPS Launched

hp-compaq-8510p-comp Not all progress is obvious without careful examination. Much of my time working on this site has, for the past week, revolved around getting the entire thing moved to a new virtual server…not that you would likely notice.

After some well documented effort (part 1, part 2 & part 3) to move from a shared host to a VPS, it ran well, essentially untouched, for over a year. UnmeteredVPS.net has proven a responsive and reliable hosting provider.

However, over that time there were a great many patches to the software (LAMP) that are the foundation of a WordPress installation. In July I found that something I wanted to do required updating PHP to a much newer version.

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Blog Hosting Quality Update

Recently Pingdom published another in a series of reports documenting their findings about the reliability of various large blog hosts. It seems that in the months of October & November 2010 Google’s Blogger platform managed perfect (100%) uptime, while tumblr (96.81%) was the least reliable blog host.

As I am a WordPress user, and I started this blog at  WordPress.com, it’s interesting to note that WordPress.com was the second best host, with 99.99% blog uptime and no single outage lasting more than four minutes. That seems impressive to me.

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Reader Voice Comments Officially Launched

You may have noticed the widget that I added to the sidebar about a week ago. Inspired by hearing about Voxeo’s Phono on a recent VUC call I decided that I’d like to provide a mechanism for readers to leave comments in the form of a voice message.

This seemed like it would be really easy, even though I’m not a developer. I was particularly happy to see that there is a WordPress plugin called WordPhone that makes this practical for the complete newby.

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Blogging In Transition: A Host Of Issues – Act Three

There’s nothing like your site going down routinely to lend a sense of urgency to the search for an alternative hosting solution. While my circumstance was not quite as dire as that pictured right, it certainly felt similar.

The newly live server at VPS.NET was crashing at least once every day or two, but it remained live while I poked around the TKL web site investigating the other hosting providers that had partnered with the project. The biggest was Amazon’s EC2, but recent events lead me to shy away from Amazon for my own purposes.

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