My Wet Coast Life

Today is a beautiful sunny day on the wet coast and just wanted to share 2 useful Google bookmark features that can help you when you are traversing the intertubes.

Both of these tips are bookmarks, the first one gives you the ability to create tiny URL's with the click of your bookmark and uses one of the fastest short URL services courtesy of Google with 100% up time and around 1/3 of a second to resolve and process the URL. All you need to do is drag the following link into your bookmark toolbar:

If you want to see how it works, you can click the link right now to make a tiny URL for this page.

Once this bookmarklet is in your toolbar, if you need to make a tiny URL, just go to the page you want to generate the link for, click the bookmark link and voila! a popup window will appear with your tiny URL and you can copy and paste it where ever it is needed.

The next bookmark tip gives the ability to google search a site you are on and only show results for that particular site. This is useful is the site doesn't have a search box or you want to find something specific on the site and not want to go to google and add "site: URL" in the search box. The bookmark is:

Once this is in your bookmark toolbar, just go to the site you want to search, click the bookmark and enter your search key words. It will take you to Google search results for that particular site only.

Hopefully you will find these two quick tips useful. Let me know if you have any tips you want to share that helps making your web surfing more enjoyable.

A typical wet coast rainy Sunday morning and up early waiting for Canada to take gold in Olympic hockey later today. With sometime on my hands, onto the net I go. Now if you use B2Evolution's blog, you most likely have LiveHits plugin installed. Recently i noticed my Google Maps API was putting all the markers to the left of International Date line and stacking them vertically, what the deuce???.....hmmmm...now that's odd. Now i guess i am being a bit of a stat junkie curious where my readers are coming from and this plugin is a nice graphic way of showing me where, in near real time, my visitors are coming from on this great planet. And now it is broken and been that way for a couple weeks now. With some spare idle time on my hands while i wait for the liquid wake up juice, aka coffee, to kick in, i decided to look into the issue.

So whenever you have an issue with software, troubleshooting 101 says it is always best to start out with the creator's site to see if it is a known issue and has been reported or if a possible fix, patch and/or update is available. So off to the LiveHits site but alas, no recent updates to the plugin and only 1 comment about the issue but no solution. At the time of this post, there are 4 comments awaiting moderation, what those are and if they have the fix?, no clue. Well, i guess i'm going to have to fix it if i want to continue using it.

So after some reading on Google Maps API's and how they work, i did some tests to validate functionality. Next step was to see how the code passed the Latitude and Longitude to Google. It uses the following URL: http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?position=true&ip=000.000.000.000 where 000.000.000.000 is the IP of your visitor to get city, country, longitude and latitude. Taking my own IP and submitting it to the URL; voila! City, Country, longitude and latitude returned, excellent. Now that i know what is returned and in what order, now it's time to pop the hood and see what the LiveHits PHP code is doing.

After a couple quick scans of the code, i came across this in _livehits.plugin.php file:
// Look up the location of the IP
if (!empty($row->hit_remote_addr)) {
$url = "http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?position=true&ip=$row->hit_remote_addr";
$rawlocation = $this->fetch_remote_page( $url );
if (!empty($rawlocation)) {
$loc_array = explode(':', $rawlocation);
$location = $loc_array[1];
$country = trim(str_replace('City', '', $loc_array[1]));
$city = trim(str_replace('Latitude', '', $loc_array[2]));
$lat = trim(str_replace('Longitude', '', $loc_array[3]));
$lon = trim($loc_array[4]);
}
}


Hmmm...an array with explode and a string replace. Now i know the api.hostip.info returns the lookup in this order:
Country: CANADA (CA)
City: Wet Coast (Unknown city)

Latitude:
Longitude:
IP:

Now i know the google maps only show latitude so something is up with the longitude. So not quite sure what the variables are holding, i went a couple lines down to this line:

//echo "<br />Lat: $lat <br /> Lon: $lon";

and removed the //, saved the file and uploaded it. Refreshed live hits and now i can see latitude and longitude and right next to longitude is the word "IP". HA, found it! There's the issue, no removal of the word IP! I can only assume the hostip.info site updated the API and would explain why it was only mapping the latitude and not the longitude as it was passing the Longitude with "IP" at the end and failing silently. So with a quick change to the following line to remove the word "IP":

$lon = trim($loc_array[4]);

with this:

$lon = trim(str_replace('IP', '', $loc_array[4]));

Saved the file and uploaded it to my server, refreshed my LiveHits page and then loaded my blog in another tab. Jumped back to LiveHits and voila! My marker is in the correct spot. It is working again *pats himself on the back*

Now with any fix on the net, use at your own risk and I cannot be held liable if you edit the wrong line and break the page. Now with that out of the way, if you would like the updated file with both the fix as well as longitude and latitude now showing on the LiveHits page, you can download here or make the chnages yourself to the page.

I assume if you're reading this, then you are effected by this issue and are now fixed.
Let me know if this works for you and now time to go watch Canada take GOLD in Olympic Hockey!

Link: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

This is by far the best, comprehensive list of tools and utilities i have found for developers and windows power users. Created by Scott Hanselman, he has taken the time to break down the list into appropriate categories, give his 2 bits and a good majority of what is on the list i currently use and most are free.

You can view the complete list on Scott's website

Highlights include:

• Paint.NET - the best open source free image editor
• 7Zip - Winner of the compression battles and can give up to 10% better compression than Zip
• BabySmash - Firstly, it is not what you are thinking...if you got a wee 1 and want them to be able to play on your PC without killing it, then this is the app to get them started on the road to being a programming guru, one key smash at a time!
• VLC Media Player - All i can say is all other video players suck compared to this, capiche?

So if you are a developer, a power user or just want to use some really cool apps, check out Scott's list

So, now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Link: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

Are you one of those people still using Internet Explorer? Want to ensure you're getting the most out of your web surfing experience? Do you want a faster response and quicker page loads?

Google Chrome Frame can help solve that.

Once installed, Chrome Frame brings open web technologies and its speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. This will make JavaScript sites more responsive (and most sites out there utilize JavaScript in some form or another) and load quicker.

I was skeptical at first but after a quick install, I noticed a night and day difference when loading sites that use a lot of JavaScript using Internet Explorer. Testing page loads with and without Chrome Frame enabled, some pages loaded 10+ seconds quicker with Chrome Frame, which can add up over time. I've been using it now for a couple months and so far experienced better speed and no issues so far. Overall, this would be ab beneficial plugin for any computer running Internet Explorer.

Currently, Chrome Frame is supported by Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 on Windows Vista / XP SP2. To Learn More, you can watch this:

And for those reading this article and not using Firefox, why not consider switching to Firefox and enjoying the extra features, customizations and add ins.

The answer is not Microsoft, it is the question. The answer is NO