flevour unplugged

I have been following Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog since its first posts, and I must say was it a good time! His posts gets always to the point, but what I like most is he actually puts in practice what he writes. He then reports back on his goals and his successes and failures.
I think one of his best successes becoming a full time blogger. And a natural thing for a famous blogger is to publish a book. He firstly published a series of ebooks, but they weren’t nothing more than a collection of successful posts.
With Power of Less, he goes over the fence and releases a whole book, in real paper!
If you read this by the end of 2008, head over his blog, to learn a 100% secure way to receive a free gift. Otherwise you can checkout the book at Amazon and earn him and me a penny or two.

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Tonight I activated a shared hosting account at Crucial Paradigm. The process was fast and smooth and you get to pay only 1$ for the first month of service.

I must say they have a very brilliant and responsive contact service, which balances the fact they have very poor documentation and knowledge base articles. In fact it took me 2 hours from filling the first sign-up to have a working account with SSH enabled and a problem resolved by their support staff. This is quite valuable if you realize that also enabling SSH requires opening a ticket with tech support.
This article should be put in the series “info I wish I could find in Google rather than asking the tech support”. If only I had series in this blog. But I feel like a blog is, among other things, a way to share your experiences in such a way that they will be useful to others. If you still don’t know what I mean, I’ll tell you the most visited pages here are “
Drupal: changing “files” directory configuration setting”:http://flevour.net/blog/drupal-changing-files-directory-configuration-setting or Mapping arrow keys in Vim. You get my point?

So I’m simply reposting the reply I got from the tech guy at Crucial Paradigm in case someone in the future needs this info.

500 internal server error

Hello Francesco,

Permission of files were incorrect which caused the issue. We corrected it. Now domain is loading fine from our end. Please verify it from your end.

As a security measure, our shared servers are php-suexec.

I will give more description on this matter.

When PHP runs as an Apache Module it executes as the user/group of the webserver which is usually “nobody”. Under this mode, files or directories that you require your php scripts to write to need to have 777 permissions (read/write/execute at user/group/world level). This is not very secure because besides allowing the webserver to write to the file it also allows anyone else to read or write to the file.

With PHP running as CGI with suexec enabled your php scripts now execute under your user/group level. Files or directories that you require your php scripts to write to no longer need to have 777 permissions. Your scripts and directories can have a maximum of 755 permissions (read/write/execute by you, read/execute by everyone else). PHP running as CGI/suexec is much more secure than the older Apache module method.

But there are 4 rules for php to work fine on phpsuexec enabled servers. They are

1. .htaccess should not contain any php config values. Such php values should be specified in php.ini.
2. Permissions for all the php files must be 644
3. Permissions for all web directories must be 755
4. Ownership must be of the user and not nobody or any other user.

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I just committed the first version of Get Satisfaction module to Drupal CVS. It provides the ability to add the Get Satisfaction widgets to your Drupal sites.
Configuration is one easy input: your company code name. After that you get the infamous “Feedback” tab on your site (you can choose which pages display it or which ones don’t). You also get an input filter to add a feedback page anywhere in a content of your site.

Although I don’t expect this module to be widely used, I don’t see the point of keeping it for myself :)
Hope someone out there enjoys it, I’ll keep an eye on the project statistics!

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I talked about Zoho sign-ing problems just 2 weeks ago and now they seem to have fixed those problems, thanks to Google becoming an OpenID provider. Great news, the login process is now very straight-forward. Only a click is required to login (2 when you first login). Great!

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A couple of days ago I wrote a positive (dare I say, enthusiastic) review of the account creation process at Zoho Mail. Using Google Account you get to sign-up in a super-fast way, but there is “a twist at the end” (citation).

Infact, the next time you want to login you either need to:

• sign-in with Google Account again. This will require you to grant access to Zoho again and again each time you login, making the identification a 3 steps process;

• sign-in with Zoho username (which you have selected when creating your email) and a password (which you don’t have).

As you can’t sign-in with a password you don’t have, you either need to:

• go through the password reset procedure, which you can find in the Zoho Account page. A password reset link will be emailed to you so that you can get to choose a new password. Note that you need to be logged in through Google Account (the only way to sign in you have at the moment), then go to Zoho Account and then choose a very counter-intuitive option (resetting a password you never chose) to start the whole process;

• go through the forgot password procedure, which asks you for an “Email ID” without further clarifications: is it your Zoho Email ID or the one you used to sign-up? Obviously it’s the latter, but nonetheless

We, as web developers, should put more and more attention to improve the experience of our users, expecially those who dare to try new (or easier) identification methods. Yesterday Yahoo published a research on the introduction of OpenID to its users and it contains no good news.

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Today is October 15th, aka Blog Action Day 2008
As I’m busy writing my thesis, I haven’t had the time to write anything deep here. See the Featured Posts section for some insightful articles.
Have a nice day. You too.

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I had a quick inspiration to check out the code Zoho Mail uses to implement the autocomplete feature that amazed me. This allowed me to get familiar with Firebug Javascript debugger.
On Settings->Common Settings->Mail accounts the field “Email ID” calls “confAccount(this)” when an /onblur/ event is triggered on it.
This little function checks whether the email is a valid GMail, Zenbe or Aol address and configures the SMTP/POP3 server addresses and ports automatically.
Have a closer look to the function loading the JS file and searching for “confAccount”.

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I have just finished subscribing to a couple of services. The experience has been overwhelmingly positive, despite the negativity surrounding all of us caused by the economic crisis (for my italian readers, see also WebEpoque’s article).
No, really. If I am here posting this article after almost 3 months of silence and with 10 posts published in the last year, there must be something going on.

Zoho Mail: incredible user experience

Let’s talk about the newly launched Zoho Mail. To get a new email account there (mine is fle.., well, you guessed it @zoho.com) you can go through the standard sign up process, filling your preferred username, password, password again, email address, i-am-not-a-robot-check captcha. It’s pretty straightforward, it’s not hard to find more intimidating registration forms around the web.
But there is a big “or” (_big_ semantically speaking, it’s actually a really small option in the page): you can log in using your Google or Yahoo accounts. I clicked on Google and (since I was already authenticated) I was asked if I wanted to allow a third party service (Zoho) to access your Google Account. I clicked yes. I was sent back to Zoho, which asked for my preferred username. The interface brilliantly suggested “flevour”. Pressed one more button and I was in. It obvisouly takes more to describe the process than going through it for real, I think it was a matter of 10 seconds and I could interact with Zoho Mail.

No email verifications, no boring forms to fill, no Google password handed out to a misterious service. Talk about data portability.
I got my real “whoah!” moment when I visited the settings page and tried to add a new POP account to check mail from my GMail account there (it’s a usual step I take to test a new mail service) The system auto-detects if you are adding a GMail account and pre-fills the POP3/SMTP URL’s and port numbers.

You can see all of this in my freshly video shot screencast (bad resolution, but you can follow the process in the paragraphs above).

All this said, I think I’ll stick with GMail for the moment. I don’t know if I am too GMail addicted, or Zoho Mail looks too Outlook-ish, or a combination of both.

More simpleness. Applied.

I wanted to post a little notice to Twitter whenever I update my blog here, so I landed to http://twitterfeed.com/. Login with my OpenID, quickly setup. Matter of seconds, you are up and running: no boring user registration or whatever. I love how authoritatively they force you to use OpenID and nothing else to register. Kudos to TwitterFeed developers!

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Check picture versus video.

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Instant classic. I guess the Drupal association will need to start debating about immigration laws very soon. It’s getting critical.

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