Dissociated Press

There’s a new Tool of the Month column up on UnixReview.com. This month, I looked at two very nifty utilities — jMemorize and detox. The detox utility removes characters from filenames, like spaces or “%20″ when you download a file with a space in its name from a website. The jMemorize utility is a flashcard utility written in Java. Very nice.

Any suggestions for Tool of the Month column are welcome.

Have been trying out Bloglines lately. So far, I have to say I think it’s pretty damn spiffy. There are a few interface glitches that I’d like to change — for one thing, I don’t see any way to rename a folder once it’s been created.

I’m also curious about the business model. I don’t see how the site is going to make money — there’s no membership fee, and I don’t see any advertising on the site. Seems like a great idea, but how will they continue to provide the service? It’s part of Ask Jeeves now, I believe, but it’s got to be bringing something to the table, right?

Other than a few minor complaints, I really do like the service. I have been looking, off and on, for quite some time for the “perfect” RSS/Atom reader, and Bloglines is fitting the bill so far. I’m always open to suggestions for new ones, though.

I really love WordPress…

Wednesday morning, I noticed that the hard drive on Inara (that’s the server that was hosting Dissociated Press) was going south. You may have noticed the MySQL errors on the front page over the past day or so. I was far too busy to have time to replace the drive, but before the drive died completely, I was able to move a few of the db backups off the server.

This morning, I recreated the two sites that were running on Inara in less than ten minutes. Nothing lost, except maybe some comment spam that was posted since the last good backup on March 7th. (And, really, who cares about that?) Oh, and one or two images posted to the other site.

It’s stupid easy to set up a site using WordPress. And double stupid easy to re-create the site on a new host, assuming you have backups…