Today, I’m pleased to announce that one of my longer standing sites is no more. Why am I pleased to announce that? Because in killing the site, I have brought into a new name that will continue to grow. A few months ago, I started work on a site called “The Dev Scene”, the idea was that eventually QuickPipe would get moved over to it and cease to exist. Today, I’m happy to say that this time has come. There’s still some rought spots to iron out, but overall, I’m pretty happy with it.

WP-Clickmap has gotten a minor update today to allow it to install in wordpress 2.9. Over the next few months or so, I’ve got some new features planned for that plugin, and will be adding it to the wordpress depository once I’m done with the upgrades.

We have a compaq mini CQ10 floating around the office so I decided to try out some of the new OSes that are out there for netbooks.

Currently, I run Windows 7 on my main netbook, so I wanted to see how Ubuntu and Chromium run with it.

I made the decision early on to complete remove windows XP from the netbook, and use Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the main OS.

Installation went pretty smoothly, and the only hitch was getting the wifi drivers to work, which really didn’t take much to fix.

Once you install UNR, make sure you go to System / Update Manager and update all. If it says there are no updates, go to “Settings”, and make sure you check the top 4 options under the “Ubuntu Software” tab. Once the updates are done, go to System / Hardware Manager, and your wifi card should show up.

I also installed Chromium on another partition. Chromium is the Open source release of Google’s ChromeOS, and so far it’s been nice to play with, but I’m not sure I’d use it as a main OS due to how long it takes for the wifi to start up (upwards of 10 minutes after you reboot). Also, while most of my work is done in the cloud, it’s nice to be able to unplug sometimes.

Also, being the avid ebook reader that I am, I made use of Wine and install the Kindle for PC application which runs pretty smoothly after you tell wine to run as windows 98.

When I redid Foodizu a few months ago, I added canonical URLs to each page. The easiest to do this was with a quick PHP function:

function canonical_link(){
    $url = 'http';
    if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$url .= "s";}
    $url .= "://";
    if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
        $url .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"];
    } else {
        $url .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"];
    }
    if( isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ){
        $url = $url . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    }
    if($url){
        echo '<link rel="canonical" href="'.$url.'" />'."\n";
    }
}

to call this function you simply add in your header somewhere:

<?php canonical_link(); ?>

and it will display the canonical URL.