Tag: google

Using Symbolic Links in Vista/Windows 7 for Google Chrome User Data

Recently I have been able to shed Firefox completely and start using Google Chrome, mainly due to it’s simple and speedy nature, but you can read all about that in my previous quick review of it when it first came out here.

I have recently purchased an OCZ Vertex SSD, the problem with Solid State Drives at the moment is their limited writes and while the MTBF is high enough to not expect to reach the limit before it becomes obselete it is still enough to make you self conscious about what gets to write to the drive.

Web browsers are arguably the most common abusers of file reads/writes on hard drives, the cache is constantly being written and overwritten as you browse and SSD users often look for a way to keep a browser’s cache off their SSD. With Firefox it is as easy as using Firefox Portable, it’s also quite handy to use if you move from computer to computer, but Google Chrome doesn’t have this feature yet, though a Chromium based browser SRWare Iron has a portable version.

There is a simple solution for keeping Chrome’s cache and other user data on another drive and that is the symbolic linking feature found in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Move the User Data folder from the C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome directory and place it on the other drive in whatever folder you want to call it, I simply put mine in D:\Chrome Profile

The next step is open up Command Prompt as an Administrator (right click, then click “Run as Administrator”) then type in the following command

mklink /J “where you want the symlink and what you want to call it” “where the real folder is”

For Example:


mklink /J "C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data" "D:\Chrome Profile\User Data"

In this case the symlink name must be called User Data.

The /J command tells it to make a Directory Junction, in other words make windows applications believe that the folder is in the same spot as the symlink, you will notice that if you head to the chrome AppData folder on the SSD that there will be a folder with a shortcut icon in it called User Data, if you double click on it all your user data files with be inside and unlike opening up a normal shortcut, or soft symlink, the files in the folder will all appear to be on the SSD in the correct folder.

If you open up Google Chrome it will open as if nothing happened.

Update 22nd August 2009: I have done the same thing with Firefox’s ‘Mozilla’ profile directory, the only problem is if you load Thunderbird Portable it will for some reason (and somehow) delete your ‘Mozilla’ junction for Firefox, the solution for now is to set up Thunderbird with the ‘Thunderbird’ folder in the same fashion and not use Thunderbird Portable for this function.

WordPress 2.7 RC1 update and a few tips

Today I upgraded Tech Gremlin to WordPress 2.7, it was pain free and I love what they have done with the admin section. I was expecting to have a bit of a learning curve with finding where everything is now however I am fairly surprised that everything is where I expect it to be.

A few issues of note, the Blogging Tips plugin is now situated in a spot that doesn’t look right, needs to be about 20 pixels lower.

Tip #1
If you are using the Google Sitemaps plugin and you experience php errors uploading the new sitemaps files after upgrading your WordPress version, this is a permissions issue and is fixed by deleting sitemaps.xml and the gzipped version of the file if you also use that and refreshing the page, posting the data you attempted to post before.

Tip #2
Try to just use the html version of the post add/editor as graphical post editors make a general mess of the html and make editing it later a slow and tortuous experience.

Tip #3
I know this seems pretty obvious to some however it is important to try to get a host situated physically closer to you, due to the latency it may take as much as an hour more to upgrade your blog via ftp than it would with a host that is situated in your country as each file is small, yet needs to be negotiated for on the connection each time, this ends up taking it much longer to upload than just one file of the same size, it is highly affected by latency. If however you cannot get around having a host a fair way away, uploading the wordpress zip file and using their admin panel (or the shell if you are familiar with it) to extract it into place is much faster even than the previous example, however not all hosts support this.

Changing Domains

Tuesday night I set about purchasing a new domain name for the blog, firstly it was tough simply finding one that could serve the purpose. .com domains that actually mean anything are starting to be in very short supply and even though many interesting companies have come up with words that at the time didn’t mean anything, a blog is suited to words that make sense from day 1.

After choosing my domain and delegating the name servers (surprisingly fast nowadays) I was able to start the difficult task of moving an establishing blog to a new domain while the previous one was still running.

To move a WordPress blog, you must have the contents of the site’s folder (ie public_html) and saved sql file, once you’ve done that, upload the wordpress files to the new site, upload the sql files to the new database and change the details in wp-config.php file, once you’ve done that you must change the domain listed in the sql table wp_options from your old one to your new one. Then run this sql command:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (guid, 'http://exampleoldsiteurl.com', 'http://examplenewsiteurl.com');

This is assuming you have the default names for wp_posts and guid, change the first url to your old domain, change the second url to your new domain.

This was fairly straight forward, however it seems that every link in every post and page’s links are hard coded with the url of the old domain, so I went through using a similar command to the previous one to change every instance in every post to the new address

There were also some references to the absolute address for the site, which changed completely, they didn’t seem to be causing problems, but I changed them just to be sure.

Once I had done that the site was active, I just needed to change a few minor things and it was almost ready.

Firstly I redirected beejay.perthmatrix.com/* to www.techgremlin.com/*, this is to ensure that anywhere that I haven’t updated my address and anywhere that has a link to beejay.perthmatrix.com is still able to access the area requested as the server automatically redirects, for example if you go to http://beejay.perthmatrix.com/2008/09/17/the-digital-downloads-delusion/ you’ll find that you have just arrived at https://www.techgremlin.com/2008/09/17/the-digital-downloads-delusion/ without having to update the link, it also works for image links.

If you are running cpanel this is quite easy, on the redirection page add your old address to the first field and add your new domain to the field underneath titled ‘redirect to’ and check the box labelled wild card redirect, then click add.

This also helps me as my site works well for it’s SEO abilities and considering I don’t know what I’m doing in that area half the time. Allowing the old domain to stay open, while redirecting people who have found the old site through a search engine allows the new domain time to be indexed by the same search engines.

WordPress.com accounts are tricky, it seems that if you create a username for use with the WordPress Stats Plugin for a site, it is linked to it forever, further more you can’t add any more, so I instead created a new account for this domain.

Google Chrome Beta Review

When Google Chrome came out I instantly downloaded and installed it to see what the big deal was. Here is an optimistic look at Google Chrome, past the possible security issues with the browser and the general distrust of Google around the internet at the moment.

Performance
The performance of Google Chrome is amazing. I didn’t think there would be much improvement in day to day browsing, but the speed increase from using Internet Explorer and Firefox is quite noticable. The other noticable speed increase from these browsers is in the speed that Google Chrome can open and close, on my PC the browser window opens instantly and is able to be used in a few seconds, Firefox depending on what plugins you have install, what theme you are using, at the quickest you normally can’t get it under 3-5 seconds unless you are doing some major tweaking. Google Gears integration also helps on websites that are compatible with it, such as the WordPress Admin section.

Stability
There were many reports of Google Chrome crashing when It was first released, I never experienced anything like that, in fact I have only ever experienced 1 crash and it appeared to be caused by a specific website that I had never been to before and had no interest in going to again. However, I do experience problems with Google Chrome suddenly losing the ability to produce sound, it happens with YouTube the most often and usually occurs when I have many tabs open.

Compatibility
This is not quite a strong side of this browser yet, flash is supported and works great, however Java support is flaky to say the least. Java 1.6 Update 7, the latest stable version of the Java Runtime Environment is not compatible with Google Chrome yet, however Java 1.6 Update 10, currently in Beta is apparently compatible, however I have had no luck with it on my PC, it stops Java applets running in any browser when it is installed, this may be due to a previous (working) installation of Update 10 being removed a few months ago, however I have had no success with the version that worked previously. Other users of Update 10 have also experienced a wide range of problems specific to Google Chrome, so although the latest Beta of the runtime environment is listed as compatible the chances of getting it to run correctly aren’t too good yet.

Obviously your favourite FireFox plug-ins are not compatible with Google Chrome Chrome Plugins seems promising in the future and has some good information so far. Theme support appears to be built into Google Chrome but not much has been done in that area yet.

As far is website compatibility goes Google Chrome has no major issues, I have rarely come across a website that cannot display properly in this browser.

Features
Google Chrome has many features that interest me, the One Unified Box (Address Bar) is very handy, normally I’d have to choose which box was active before I started typing, this was annoying when I started typing somewhere and had to move it to the right area, the lack of recently typed URLs is annoying, but that can be accessed from the New tab page, this lists the most common websites that you have visited and is used to access the history list, the list is set out well and the readability is great.

I have not yet used the application shortcuts, but they seem fairly simple to use. The dynamic tabs are fun to use, they allow you to drag a tab out of the window to create a new window with the current tab’s contents. A common feature starting to come out in browsers now is the ability to hide your history, cookies etc for a session, Chrome’s Incognito Mode is very similar to other types of this feature.

Google Chrome also warns about malware and phishing websites, I haven’t ran across this yet. The downloads bar is a little annoying and it took a bit of a look through the settings to get it to not forget the folder I last downloaded to.  The settings importer was automatic at the end of the installation, but can also be invoked from the menu as well, it worked flawlessly for me, cookies and favourites were imported exactly as they were in FireFox.

Look & Feel
Google Chrome looks and feels very polished, in Vista the glass border is familiar to those that use Internet Explorer, the tabs are in an interesting place, apart from having to remember that they are not in the standard spot I really didn’t notice anything good or bad about them being at the top. The bookmarks are fairly hidden when you first start using Chrome and I had to add the Bookmarks bar so that I remembered how to get to my imported Bookmarks, they are listed under Other Bookmarks and don’t appear to be accessible unless you always show the bookmarks bar.

As I stated in the compatability section I have not had many issues with page rendering, also I have not experienced any rendering issues with the browser itself, the UI is smooth and gets familiar fast.

Conclusion
As I touched on at the start, this is probably not the browser for you if you are paranoid or have any distrust of Google, also If you don’t have a good virus scanner installed and/or you blindly allow executables to run you may be put off by the possible security flaw regarding launching executables.

Google Chrome is a polished browser that is fast and works great, it has no plugins that I am aware of yet and that stops most adopting it as their default browser, but if you’re not worried about that the speed and features certainly helps productivity while browsing. I use Google Chrome for most of my browsing, however if I feel like doing some stumbling or need to use Java I will run FireFox.

Update for Servage Referral Widget etc

Last night after over an hour of coding I was able to finish version 1.2, the new version is able to count how many times a user clicks the link, then report it in the Widget control panel. I might make an option later to report it under the widget, or in the Dashboard.

Google Analytics is quite a handy tool to see who reads my site and for what purpose, the Webmaster Tools is also great, however I am noticing the search ranking isn’t very accurate for some reason.

In other news I went out half way through writing this entry, the slimline sets of Mythbusters seasons appear to be slowly coming out, I got my copy of Season 1 today.

I also just bought the spamannoys.me domain, mainly for e-mail of course.

Google Suggest/Trends, theme editing, FileZilla issue

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
This is now my homepage, it is extremely handy, plus it’s slightly less bloated than the default Firefox search page, trends http://www.google.com/trends is quite interesting to have a look at as well.

Thanks to http://www.blogohblog.com/, http://www.dyers.org/blog/archives/2008/05/21/how-to-add-avatars-to-your-wordpress-25-theme/ and Jason I was able to fix some issues I was having with the Gravatar section of the theme which is by default not supported, the code at first didn’t work I figure because it was incorrectly detecting the WordPress version as something less than 2.5 however there was a </div> that had no starting tag which caused the theme style to get messed up also, after fixing those the Gravatars work fine now.

I have been experiencing a ‘DDE execute request failed’ error in FileZilla 3 when choosing to view/edit files regardless of the fact that it does appear to view/edit the file perfectly fine, there doesn’t appear to be any information that I can find about it when searching around.
I managed to stop it appearing by setting a default text editor, choosing ‘Always use default editor’ and unchecking ‘Inherit system’s file-type associations’, must be a Vista/FileZilla/TextPad/UAC thing.

I received my Windows Vista upgrade advisor shirt not long ago, it’s very well made but I don’t think I’ll be wearing it anywhere anytime soon.

I just found out what a post slug is…