So I finally bit the bullet and ponyed up $59.4 for a year’s worth of hosting at Bluehost. I’d done as much research as possible, but I couldn’t get a definitive guide to which was better. So now that I’m settled into my new place, here’s the lowdown on which hosting plan is the best for a WordPress blog.

Blushost performance vs Go Daddy

The thing that really impressed me about Bluehost was that they throttle the CPU resources of accounts that go over the limit. Now this might seem like a bad thing to you, but it really ends up benefiting everyone. Since I can be sure that the sites of others won’t be eating up resources that are meant for me. Godaddy on the other hand had no indication of how many resources my applications were using. The transparency in Bluehost is amazing. Here’s how it looks in action:

Throttling status in Bluehost's cPanel

You can choose to view the CPU throttling on an hourly, quarter hourly, or minute by minute basis. This allowed me to test which plugins were causing the problem because of the quick feedback. Go Daddy has nothing like this in their economy shared hosting plan.

Minute by minute CPU throttling

As I mentioned above, I also got access to all the error logs which allowed me to identify a few more faulty plugins. Go Daddy didn’t give me this access and the help center guy told me I’d have to upgrade if I wanted to just take a look at what was causing the 503 Internal server errors.

Transferring WordPress from Go Daddy to Bluehost

One truly amazing thing about Bluehost is their temporary URL feature. When you migrate hosts, you need to redirect your DNS entries to the new servers. But before you take that final step, you want to be damn bloody sure your site is working perfectly. You want to preview it and test it in a production environment. But what do you type into your address bar when your domain hasn’t moved yet?

Bluehost makes this easy. When I purchased a new Bluehost account, I got a temporary URL along with the welcome mail. Clicking that, you can access your new hosting account exactly as if your DNS entries were already changed! Go Daddy has a feature like this, though you have to specifically turn it on, but the URL they give you doesn’t allow you to do everything on your site that you would normally do. With Bluehost, the temp URL can set cookies and all the rest. So I took my own sweet time making sure it was working precisely the way I wanted before taking the leap and changing the servers.

Installing WordPress itself was easy. Just a single click, choose the directory and it happens in seconds. When I did the same thing in Go Daddy, it took me half an hour at least with the message “pending installation” staring me in the face. There was no waiting with Bluehost. And when I set up a subdomain for my CDN requirements, it was ready almost instantly. No waiting period at all.

When I wanted to archive my site using Go Daddy’s file manager to transfer it off my account, I found that they only allowed 20 MB to be archived! A pittance. And with several hundreds of files, there was no way I was going to use FTP to transfer it out. So I had to rebuild from scratch. Luckily, with the temporary URL I faced no issues. Later when I tried to use the archive function on Bluehost, I didn’t find any size limitation.

It made me wonder why I put up with Go Daddy’s shoddy service all this time.

Speeding up WordPress on Bluehost

As I was trying this and that to reduce WordPress’s CPU load, I stumbled upon a fantastic way to cut the resource use by a full 50%. It’s called “FastCGI” and it’s disabled by default on Bluehost. Enabling FastCGI in the cPanel configuration reduced my CPU throttling to almost zero! I tested it out for half an hour and was astonished at the performance. There’s no downside to enabling it and the link explains what FastCGI is all about. Again, after doing some research, I found that Go Daddy also supports FastCGI but not for Economy shared hosting plans and they sure as hell don’t make it easy for noobs like me to find it.

I’m sure there are lots of other aspects of the these two hosting providers that I haven’t touched upon, but there were the ones that mattered to me. I hope it’s useful to someone who’s thinking of making a switch.

Chrome’s has inbuilt support for Greasemonkey. I modified an existing userscript that makes it easy to count the words in any textarea. By just selecting the words and pressing “Alt + C” , a popup is displayed with the word and character count. In addition, you can also insert HTML tags by clicking “Ctrl + I” for italics, “Ctrl + B” for bold, and Ctrl+Shift+M to insert a link.

Here’s what it looks like:

Count words in Google Chrome

To learn how to install this Greasemonkey add on, just watch the video I made. It also works for Firefox.

The script has limitations though. It won’t count the words if they’re not in a textbox. Meaning you can’t select text on a page to count the words and characters. If the words are in a rich text box, this won’t work either. If you absolutely need to have that functionality, you might be better off installing the extension instead.

After waking up lazily and taking her time to get ready, she fired up her laptop, connected to her VPN and started doing exactly what she does in the office! Which made me wonder why more people don’t decide to do it. I realize that not all bosses will be happy, but surely that’s a question of their own inability to monitor work? From where I sit, here are some major advantages:

Working from home

1. Less hassle. No commuting stress
2. Can save hours by not having to travel
3. No money spent on travel
4. Reduces fossil fuel emissions and helps the environment
5. Creates less traffic congestion on the road
6. Can get some more sleep
7. Cheaper for the company. No office to maintain
8. Fewer accidents
9. Potentially more free time to enjoy or spend with your family

It seems like a win-win situation for everyone involved. So I don’t know why more people don’t take it up. Do bosses feel they will lose control? Do they feel that employees will slacken? In these days of virtual conferences, email, and mobile phones, why do we need to sit in a particular place and work? I can understand sales people needing to go out and do their stuff, but the vast majority of administrative staff and desk workers need not.

I feel that management of telcommuting employees will be easy with objectives based management where each person is allocated tasks for the day and deadlines for completion. As long as they meet them, it doesn’t matter where they sit and what they do.

Of course, some people like to go to work. Sometimes I myself miss the hussle and bussle of an office – but for me, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. What do you think?

Being a very lazy person, I decided to find an easier way. My final solution works on Firefox and Google Chrome (sorry IE – you suck). This is how I implemented it – and it just takes a few clicks!

This is my URL that’s referred to in the video: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/81551.

Watch this in full screen and in HD if you can – it’s much clearer.

Update: Steps are different for Firefox and Google chrome. In the video, Google chrome is shown first, and then starting at 1:15, the steps are shown for Firefox.

After this, here are the shortcuts which will work in any textarea in Firefox and Google chrome.

Ctrl+B surrounds selected text with <strong></strong>
Ctrl+I surrounds selected text with <em></em>
Ctrl+Shift+M surrounds selected text with <a href=”"></a> (cursor will be placed within the quotation marks)
Ctrl+U surrounds selected text with <u></u>
Ctrl+S surrounds selected text with <s></s>
Ctrl+P surrounds selected text with <p></p>
Alt+C counts the words and characters in selection. If nothing selected, it counts all the words in the box
Ctrl+2 surrounds selected text with <h2></h2>
Hope you found this as useful as I do. No more manual typing!

After using Firefox for five years, I’ve been fighting it for a while now, but I could hold back no longer. With Chrome supporting Greasemonkey scripts, I was able to replace my beloved Firefox Ubiquity plugins including those which allowed me to quickly surround text with HTML tags for easy blog commenting among other tasks. So here are five reasons why I finally made the switch:

In Chrome, one tab doesn’t hang the others

Switching to Chrome from Firefox

Some sites like Slashdot contain lots of Javascript, CSS and Ajax. The same goes for Gmail. The problem with Firefox is that while these complex pages are loading, it freezes every other tab! It’s very irritating to have to wait seconds while a new Slashdot page opens up. You can’t switch, or type. And since I always open new tabs in the background, I want to be able to continue to do what I want in the meantime. Google Chrome on the other hand runs each tab in a separate process – so no matter how badly one tab misbehaves, the others don’t suffer. I can happily open a new Gmail window in the background and just continue to do what I’m doing until I’m ready to turn my attention to it. Chrome is also blazingly fast – pages are rendered in no time at all and applications just feels snappier.

I can reclaim the “status bar” space

I can’t stand stuff getting between me and the web. That includes bookmark bars, navigation bars, search bars, and finally the status bar. Until I tried Chrome, I never realized how I hated the status bar. To be sure, there are plugins or add ons for Firefox that remove the status bar, but in the first place I don’t like to install too many add ons and second, none of them exactly replicates the status bar behavior in Chrome – namely by:

1. Not being present
2. Showing up when I hover a link – some do, but they show the entire bar instead of just the URL
3. Showing a shortened version of the link
4. Expanding the URL if I hover a little longer

I’m a stickler for space and Chrome’s solution is so elegant and neat that it’s a wonder why other browsers haven’t just copied it outright.

Chrome’s new Web Applications are awesome

One of Chrome 6′s new features is the ability to make web applications. I use some sites like Gmail a lot and would like to keep them open all the time. So by making it a web application, I can have it minimize the space the tab uses, have it open all the while, and also remove the navigation bar, search bar, etc for that app! Here’s what it looks like:

Google Chrome Web App

Ain’t that awesome? I need never close Gmail again. It’s always on the left, can’t be moved, doesn’t interfere with my regular work and allows me to access it at a moment’s notice. I’m told that Firefox 4 is coming out with something of the sort in it’s later Beta versions.

Chrome’s Bookmark Sync

Using a simple Google sign in, I can now synchronize my bookmarks across all Chrome browsers no matter which computer I’m using. One of the motivations for moving to the cloud by using Google Docs and Gmail is so that I have complete flexibility and don’t need to be tied down to any single piece of hardware. Chrome’s bookmark sync also allows me to synchronize my extensions, preferences and themes.

Firefox tried to integrate such a feature earlier and called it “Weave”, but they never got the implementation right – it was buggy, and slow. Google’s got this one down pat. It’s completely seamless and doesn’t necessitate any additional sign ins. Marvelous!

Greasemonkey Integration

Greasemonkey is a simple tool that allows users to do cool stuff with their browsers. For example, if you want to comment on a blog and need to italicize some text, you have to wrap it in “<em></em>” tags. To make it bold, you have to surround the text with “<strong></strong>.” I find this painful. While using Firefox, I wrote a Ubiquity script that would save me from this painful typing. But Google Chrome didn’t have Ubiquity and till now, this was the one thing holding me back from adopting Chrome full time.

But when I found out that Chrome now natively supported Greasemonkey scripts which till now only worked on Firefox, I went and found one that did the same job! True, I had to tweak it before it worked in Chrome, but now if I want to italicize a comment, I just press “Ctrl+I” and if I want to insert a hyperlink, I just press “Ctrl+Shift+M” and the <a> tag is fully formed with the cursor in the right place to paste the URL!

This was the feature that finally tipped me over. And so now I’m officially a Google Chrome user instead of a Firefox user.

Another thing that nudged me over was the fact that Firefox 4′s latest Beta for Linux didn’t have the new look which the Windows version got. I was pissed I and felt I wasn’t being treated on an equal footing. But I’ve used Firefox for so many years now that I won’t hold a grudge. I’m willing to be lured back to Firefox if they improve their speed to a level comparable to Chrome’s. But for now, I bid Firefox good bye and with tears in my eyes, save this post in my shiny new Google Chrome browser…

Alternatively, we can change the touchpad settings in the xorg.conf.d folder. Thanks for the tip Jensel!

Let’s look at both techniques

Using Udev

Users can place their configuration files for udev inside “/etc/udev/rules.d” The files have a certain syntax, but of course it’s best to simply copy someone else’s file and just modify it to what you want. I created a file called touchpad.rules (the file must have the extension “rules”). Here is what I put into it:

ACTION!=”add|change”, GOTO=”xorg_synaptics_end”
KERNEL!=”event*”, GOTO=”xorg_synaptics_end”

ENV{ID_INPUT_TOUCHPAD}!=”1″, GOTO=”xorg_synaptics_end”

ENV{x11_options.MaxTapTime}=”300″

LABEL=”xorg_synaptics_end”

See the bold section? That’s where you put in your own settings similar to the rules we used to put into our .fdi files. Here are the settings in my earlier fdi file and here is the full list of options you can use.

I had to reboot the system to apply the changes – logging off didn’t work. If I find a better way to do this, I’ll post it here. The command posted on the official instruction page didn’t work for me either.

Using .conf files in xorg.conf.d

This is simple. Go to the folder “/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d”. In there, find the file that has your synaptics settings. For me it was “10-synaptics.conf”. You can add your synaptics settings after the “Driver” line in the relevant “Identifier” section. My Identifier line was: Identifier “touchpad catchall”

Option        ”HorizEdgeScroll”    ”1″
Option        ”MaxTapTime”        ”300″

This will change the HorizEdgeScroll and MaxTapTime parameters. Just modify for whichever parameters you want to change. When you log out and log in again, your settings should be applied.

If you learn something more about these rules, be sure to let me know!

Yesterday, I wrote my first Google Chrome extension. The feature that was really keeping me on Firefox all this while was the Ubiquity add on, and though it still works, Mozilla has decided to put a hold on Ubiquity’s development.

Without Ubiquity to hold me back, I succumbed to Google Chrome’s seductive minimalistic interface, blistering speed and overall smoothness. And since the Chrome Extension gallery didn’t have an extension to count the words and characters in a selection, I decided to write one myself since it’s absolutely essential to me as a writer.

This is the first time I’m writing an extension for a browser (I don’t count Ubiquity commands as extensions as such), and the results are pretty neat. It took me well over a day to figure out exactly what the architecture of an extension is and I almost lost my head trying to implement things like message passing, but I finally came through with the goods :)

This is what the extension I wrote looks like – Word and Character Count:

Google Chrome Extension - Word and Character Count

I’m not much of a designer, so the logo for my extension is just a big blue “W” and the output simply gives the number of words and characters – good enough for my needs. Initially it was just a word count extension and then two people were kind enough to use it and suggest that I include a character counter too – which I did promptly.

So if you’re a writer using Google Chrome, be sure to install my humble contribution to the Google Chrome universe :D

Those who know me are aware that I’ve switched to ebooks since 2004 with a variety of Devices starting with my Tungsten T, then my O2 and finally the iPod Touch. I’ve read hundreds of books on smartphone like devices, never bothering about the small screens (after all, it’s the font size that matters) and the less than stellar battery life. They still outdid physical books by a very long shot. Here were the reasons for switching to ebooks:

1. Don’t need to carry around trunks of books
2. Don’t need to maintain them
3. Can carry thousands of books in my pocket

Till now however, devices like the Kindle were too expensive for a cheapo like me. Though I salivated over the latest Kindle from Amazon and the Sony Ereader, I simply couldn’t bring myself to purchase a device when my needs were already so well met by the iPod Touch.

My Gorgeous new Kindle!

But then came along a contest organized by the freelancing website where I work,  oDesk.com which offered a Kindle as the first prize for a Haiku writing contest! I couldn’t resist and greedily submitted my Haikus which I was sure would win the prize. I looked forward to the day the results would be announced – so sure was I that mine would be the winning entry. Alas, when the day arrived I found to my consternation that I had come second and that my only prize was a T-shirt :(

I thought I’d lost the opportunity forever. Anupa (my wife) however, thought this the perfect time to surprise me with a new year’s gift. She thought my Haiku was better than the winning entry (and I secretly agreed with her :D), and decided that I deserved one of the few things in life that I actually wanted. So it arrived the next day, all wrapped up and beauuuuutiful!

Sexy Kindle cover

Since then I’ve transferred my reading exclusively to the Kindle when I’m at home which I almost always am. My job as a freelancer doesn’t require me to travel out of the house and in these circumstances, the Kindle is perfect. On the rare occasions when I do leave the house for some reason, I still carry the iPod Touch with me for a quick mobile read. So why did I give up the iPod Touch for the Kindle? These were the main reasons:

1. E-Ink technology allows me to read in full light without a glare
2. The battery life is around 8,000 page turns! Around 2.5 books – perfect for a long flight
3. Larger screen means more text on the page and fewer page turns

So far, it’s been an absolute ball reading on it. I’ve already polished off seven books or so with this neat device. Anupa even bundled a beautiful case for it. It now looks just like a regular thin book and only I know that it’s a one stop shop for all my reading needs. It basically saved my life on the 25-30 hr flight from Chicago to Frankfurt to Mumbai and finally to Chennai.

The only disappointment so far is that the famous “Whispernet” technology doesn’t work in Chennai though it’s supposed to. In Chicago, I was even able to browse the Internet at no charge and I’m supposed to be able to do the same in Chennai as well since Amazon claims coverage here too. It’ll be really cool if that works and would make it a killer device. It comes with a built in dictionary which is damn neat as well. The cursor allows you to navigate to difficult words and the definition automatically pops up. And the extra space at the bottom allows me to get a nice solid grip on it.

Another convenience is the fact that the “Next page” buttons are located on both the left as well as on the right. So if my right hand is busy, I can still turn the pages. Perfect for eating and reading at the same time :D . Okkkk, I just realized that sounds really perverted, but the sentence stands!

Of course, I’m hardly a model customer for Amazon who expects me to log into their website from the Kindle and purchase books from them. No siree. Instead I download books onto my PC and use the super duper open source program Calibre to transfer the books onto the Kindle. I’m now reading “Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham and have Isaac Asimov’s entire Foundation Series lined up for my reading pleasure! Going by all this, it’s not surprising that I’m a very happy man :)

For those of us living in India, you can order the Kindle from Amazon for an equivalent for Rs. 16,000 or so. The US price of $250 is increased by the customs duty in India. Still, not too bad I would say all things considered. I suppose we should be glad they’re shipping it at all. But if you can get a friend of yours to pick it up in the US and simply give it to you when he or she lands, that would save you some Rs. 4,000 . May or may not be worth it for you. If you do decide to order it from India itself, keep an eye out for unscrupulous delivery men who will try and take money from you just as they deliver it claiming import fees. Take the Kindle away from them first (by pretending to agree) and then ask them for a receipt and a bill. And then call their delivery company and report them.

I’m sure in a few years, ereaders will come out in full force into the Indian market. I’m looking forward to improvements and innovations, and most importantly, cheaper prices as well!

So it makes me happy when I see a company in India showing how things should be done. Ahmed Khan’s company in Bangalore is using discarded plastic to make roads which last longer – removing the need for the plastic to enter landfills. And it seems to be a success in Bangalore which already has around 1200 km built using this technology.

Image Credit: Himalayan Trails

Green Roads Reducing waste

Here’s my favorite part though: “The Khans’ business spread to other cities and states, and although they patented the plasticized pavement in India, other companies are copying the technology. The Khans said they had decided not to object”

Don’t you just love that? Inventions like this help the entire country and can speed up the process of making our living space a bit cleaner. Now with competition, prices can be cut and made more affordable. If this was a traditional western company, they would not only have not allowed anyone else to use it, they would also have charged triple the price of a regular road to maximize their profit and milk their monopoly.

Incidentally this highlights the difference between a professional corporate company and a smaller personal firm. The former doesn’t belong to any one person and has no morals other than profit. A smaller firm on the other hand is linked to a person and can behave ethically as well as make a profit. Can you for example imagine a corporate like AT&T giving away a technology to other people because it’ll be good for the country? Never! Till a few years back, I used to dislike smaller businesses, but now I understand why they’re better than large faceless organizations.

Profit isn’t the sole motive of innovation and human kind has adapted and succeeded in the world only because people copy others and when one person discovers something, the entire group shares the benefits. Here’s hoping that more of common sense prevails!

This command should have already been written by someone. Unfortunately all the versions I’ve seen till now either don’t work or are not compatible with Ubiquity 0.5 . So I wrote one on my own. I had to modify the awesomebar noun type for this so that you could see the title of the page as well as the URL link that is going to be inserted. If you’re using Ubiquity with Firefox, the command should have popped up by now for you to subscribe to it.

Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge):

Insert a link from your history using Ubiquity

When you call the command, simply type in part of the Title or the URL of the page, select your choice from the list and hit Enter. The command will insert the URL at the cursor point. I’ve also noticed some odd behavior in some cases where the suggestion list changes without warning displaying a completely different command after you type in a few characters. This must be due to some optimization problems with Ubiquity’s Parser 2. I’m not sure why it happens.

Other than that, this command should work just fine. Hope you enjoy it!