This Wordpress plugin allows you to rebuild all thumbnails on your site. There are already some plugins available for this, but they have one thing in common: All thumbnails are rebuilt in a single step. This works fine when you don’t have that many photos on your site. When you have a lot of full-size photos, the script on the server side takes a long time to run. Unfortunately the time a script is allowed to run is limited, which sets an upper limit to the number of thumbnails you can regenerate. This number depends on the server configuration and the computing power your server has available. When you get over this limit, you won’t be able to rebuild your thumbnails.
Why would you want to rebuild your thumbnails? Wordpress allows you to change the size of thumbnails. This way, you can make the size of thumbnails fit the design of your website. When you change the size to fit for a new theme, all future photos you are going to upload will have this new size. Your old thumbnails won’t be resized. That’s where this plugin comes into action. After changing the image sizes, you can rebuild all thumbnails. But instead of telling the server to recreate all thumbnails at once, they are rebuilt one after another. Rebuilding thumbnails for one photo won’t take all too long, so you won’t run into any script timeouts. Note that you still have to wait until all thumbnails have been rebuilt. If you close the page before the task is completed, you have to start all over again.
You can download the plugin on it’s homepage.
If you get the error above when you upload a file to a Wordpress MU blog, you need to change the maximum allowed upload file size. You can find this setting under “Site Admin … Options … Max upload file size”.
Unfortunately there is no option to change this value for existings blogs, but you can you change it directly in the database:
UPDATE `#YOURDATABASENAME#`.`wp_sitemeta` SET `meta_value` = '32000'
WHERE (`wp_sitemeta`.`meta_value` = 1500)
AND (`wp_sitemeta`.`meta_key` LIKE "fileupload_maxk");
Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The industry likes to call it “Digital Rights Management”, but that’s not what it is. Basically it’s a way to restrict your rights to use the product or even take it out of your hands. After years of struggling with DRM-laden music downloads, the music industry finally realized that customers don’t want restrictions. For years, the industry complained that they need to have DRM because they won’t make any money otherwise. They argued that if you can copy your file freely, you will copy it for free to everyone else. Now that DRM is gone, the music industry is still alive. Apparently people still pay for music downloads. It seems like the publishers are making the same mistakes again.
Sure, there are sources for DRM-free books, but you won’t find the bestsellers everybody is talking about.
Pricing. Printing books is a lot of work. You have to kill all those trees, produce paper, print the book, display it in a bookstore and finally ship it to the reader. You won’t be able to sell every book you print, which results in additional costs. On the other hand, ebooks are cheap to produce. The author and all the other people involved in writing a book still need to get their money for all their hard work. You still need a bookstore to display your book (online and/or offline). But that’s all you need. No trees, no paper, no printing, and shipping is virtually free. The production of an ebook-file is virtually free too, since it’s safe to assume that the starting point for every book is a digital file. The only thing that will add some cost will be licensing costs for the DRM you don’t want anyway.
Let’s have a look how prices are in real life. As an example, I randomly picked “Becoming enlightened” by the Dalai Lama. Prices for this book (at the time this post was written):
- Hardcover: $16.56
- Paperback: $10.12
- ebook: $12.59
It gets even worse when you start to compare prices in different countries. The same book in Germany costs EUR 17.25 (about $25). The same file, with the exact same production cost will cost you twice as much in Germany as in the US. The price of the paperpack version is EUR 10.99 (about $16), with free shipping.
Availabilty. Not every book is available as an ebook. It’s nice that I can carry more books than I could ever read in my pocket, but this doesn’t help me if the device doesn’t hold the book I really want to read. Again, it gets even worse when you consider the whole world. An example for this would be the popular book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. You can get this book as an ebook in the US. But while it’s no problem to get the original (english) paperback version in Germany, it’s impossible to get an ebook. Considering shipping costs it should be easier to get an ebook than a paperback, but it’s not.
Handling. The books you own can be read by many people. If you find something interesting, you might give this book to a friend. If you no longer want a book, you can sell it. If you enjoyed a book, your kids can have the same experience with the same book. Thanks to DRM, you cannot do any of this with an ebook. You pay almost as much (or even more) as for a dead-tree book, but you just “buy” a license which allows you to read this book. This license might even be restricted to a device.
It’s true that a dead-tree book feels much better in your hands than an ebook reader. But that’s not the problem of ebook readers. The problem is the difference between the old “owning a book” and the new “license a copy” model.
I really want ebooks to work. I love E-Ink displays and the idea of carrying my library with me wherever I go. I could even ignore the problem that if my ebook reader breaks, I have to buy a new one for the price of 25 books so that I can read the books I already bought. When ebook readers get popular, they will get cheaper and when it comes to technology, I’m one of those people who pay the high early-adopters price. But given the points above, I won’t buy an ebook reader even if the geek in me badly wants one. I don’t think any of these points will go away in the near future, but I hope I’m proven wrong. In the meantime, I’ll stick to paper.
I recently bought myself a nice little netbook to get some work done while I’m on the road. I’ve always wanted one of these little computers, but I always felt that the performance didn’t justify the expense. I don’t need that much power on the road but when I get less CPU power than with a “normal” notebook, I’d at least expect a decent battery life. I took some time, but finally the battery life of (some) netbooks is long enough to justify the lack of speed.
I went for a 10″ Asus Eee PC, which boasts a battery life of 9.5 hours. While it’s screen is one of the larger ones found in netbooks, it’s still way smaller than my 24″ screen at home. I do most of my work in a terminal window where small resolution doesn’t matter that much, but while it might be possible to use Lynx for browsing the web, I still prefer a browser with a little bit more Web 2.0 feeling 
My browser of choice is Firefox. Not only is it highly configurable with extensions, it’s also available for all platforms I’m regularly working on (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows). Unfortunately, the default configuration for Firefox wastes a lot of pixels for stuff like menus, the location bar, bookmarks and more. But since Firefox can be customized quite easily, it’s not that hard to make some extra room for the websites you want to see.
1. Hide bookmarks. The first step is to disable the bookmarks toolbar. Under “View” -> “Toolbars” you can deselect the “Bookmarks Toolbar”. Once you get used to the Awesome Bar of Firefox you won’t use it anyway, so why waste those precious pixels?
2. Hide the status bar. The next step is to hide the status bar. Simply uncheck “Status Bar” in the “View” menu, and it will go away. Some people like to keep the status bar so that they can see the URL of a link before clicking on it. If you don’t want to hide your status bar permanently, you might want to check out the autoHideStatusbar addon for Firefox. It promises to show the status bar whenever you are hovering over a “sensitive zone”, though I have not tested this extension yet.
3. Use small images. Every pixel counts, so you might also want to use small icons in your location bar. Right click on the toolbar -> “Customize” -> “Use small icons” will exactly do that.
4. Hide menu. The Hide menubar addon will hide the menubar. When you need it, you simple press the “Alt” key and it appears on the screen again.
5. Use fullscreen mode. That’s the most obvious tip. Hit “F11″ to bring Firefox into fullscreen mode.