No, I know it’s not really snowing yet. Well, at least not in Madison. It is snowing on joshbetz.com though. And we have Christmas lights. I’ve been holding off on this for as long as possible, but I broke down and enabled the “Let it Snow!” plugin and went and found a script to put some christmas lights on the site. Unfortunately, the javascript running the lights interferes with the jquery for the Portfolio carousel on the homepage, so I had to disable the lights there, but they’re on all the other pages and the snow works everywhere.

Also: The MacLampsX app is activated on my macbook to give a similar feel to the desktop.

Here’s the browser Microsoft needs:

The first time your computer is on the internet, “Microsoft Browser” opens up with 3 tabs: Firefox, Chrome, Safari. Those are the only 3 websites that will work, and that is the only time that “Microsoft Browser” will ever work.

If you decide to forego installing a browser at that time, you lose. Don’t pass go, don’t collect $200, and don’t use the internet.

The Resize Vimeo pluggin for WordPress does exactly what you would expect — it resizes Vimeo videos. I created this plugin, because I plan to start doing some more videos and I wanted any videos that I post on this site to look good. I really like how the Vimeo player looks, but the standard width only goes about half way across the content area they they’re in right now. I thought this looked really tacky, so I decided to experiment and see if it was possible to make the player bigger. Turns out that the player actually gets bigger very nicely.

This plugin gets the current dimensions of the video you post and increases them to a set width and increases the height accordingly, keeping the same width-height ratio as the original player.

This is a very early version. There is no admin menu. The plugin currently resizes all videos to a width of 776 pixels. If that’s not what you want, I don’t recommend you install this plugin yet.

I just put this together tonight and will be adding an admin menu sometime soon, so that you can set what you want the width of the videos to be. I’d also like to know if anybody has an recommendations for the plugin that they’d like to see.

Download

I swore I wouldn’t do this anymore, but here it is again. This blog is becoming the ‘10 webhosts to stay away from’ mashup. I just had to put this up to let everyone know, if you are already stuck on iPower, you’re probably better off setting the account to cancel at the end of the term and just keep it until then, especially if you have less than a year left. They charge a $35 early termination fee. Here’s the transcript from when I cancelled my account:

Alfred Andrews: Hi Josh. My name is Alfred, how are you today?

josh Betz: I’m good

josh Betz: I’m wondering how I can cancel my iPower account

Alfred Andrews: I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel the account.

Alfred Andrews: Could you please let me know the reason for canceling the account?

josh Betz: I have experienced too many issues while I’ve been with iPower.

josh Betz: My website has gone down too many times

josh Betz: I think it’s probably because I run a wordpress blog, because a friend of mine runs a static site on ipower and hasn’t had as many problems as I have

josh Betz: but last week my website was down for 6 hours and I started looking for a new webhost

Alfred Andrews: Okay.

Alfred Andrews: I have noticed that you have already submitted the cancellation form and your account has been scheduled for deletion on August 02, 2010.

josh Betz: Yes, but I know that I can get part of my money back if I cancel my account now. So I’d like to get whatever unused time back.

Alfred Andrews: Okay.

Alfred Andrews: Could you please hold on for 2-4 minutes?

josh Betz: Yes

Alfred Andrews: Thank you for holding.

Alfred Andrews: I have scheduled the account for deletion on October 12, 2009.

josh Betz: Thank you. Do you know how much money I should get refunded?

Alfred Andrews: Could you please hold on for 2-4 minutes?

josh Betz: Yes

Alfred Andrews: Thank you for holding.

Alfred Andrews: You will receive the refund of approximately $24.

Alfred Andrews: You will receive the refund of approximately $24 after deducting the early cancellation fee of $35.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new website layout and here it is. The logo at the top actually goes back few months when I started a new design to incorporate my portfolio into this website, but ended up ditching the design. After a recent design job, I decided to give it another go. This time I’m very pleased with the results. I took my time, for the most part, and tried not to rush anything. In the end, I couldn’t wait to push the site live though, and it currently is not completely finished. There are probably a handful of little things to go back and finish along with the only major part of the design to finish, the portfolio page.

The old and new themes side-by-side

There were many things that I liked about the old site. When I first did the design, I really liked the two sidebars. It gave me lots of space to display information such as my twitter, delicous, and last.fm feeds, as well as my blogroll, web projects and google ads. The problem with all the feeds is that they really slowed the site down and there was too much static content taking up space on the hompage. I’ve replaced the feeds from the old design with one feed to rule them all. To do this, I’ve used SimplePie, which caches the feeds, so everything is much faster.

My favorite part of the design has got to be the portfolio scroller on the homepage (seen in the image above), which will eventually be dynamically generated when I add something to the portfolio. I also only included the latest post on the homepage with the next 5 excerpts.

This is the third major design of the site since it moved to joshbetz.com in July 2008.