Colin McCann Dot Com

I am the technical administrator for a decently sized vBulletin forum that is hosted on a system offering a lot of performance at the cost of some storage space. I also have hosting and a number of domains on a system that offers less performance, but ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and storage. Lastly, I have a strong need for peace of mind, and off-site database backups seem like a nice way of getting a bit of that back. (continue reading…)

Why would you need a linkerizer? Well, some stuff is hard to directly download. This makes it easy. You can also send requests to this page via either POST or GET. Go ahead and give it a try.

Also, if you’re using Firefox, you can make using this little script even easier. Right-click in the text-entry field and select the option “Add a Keyword for this Search” — The Name can be whatever you like, and I’ve found “link” to be a good value for the Keyword. Hit “Add” and you can use it right from your address bar. Prepending any location on the web with the word “link” will route that location to this script.

For example: “link http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif” will take you to:

http://colinmccann.com/utility/linkerizer?url=http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

Enjoy. If you’ve got any suggestions as to how this could be improved, feel free to say so in the comments.

I’ll cut right to the awesome. This script runs every minute, checks an IMAP mailbox (that happens to be my work email), and detects if any new messages have been received. If so, all HTML and special characters are stripped (leaving plain ASCII text) from the message body, and truncated to 150 characters. Next, the script sends me a text message through Verizon’s email gateway “from” the original sender’s email address. (continue reading…)

These examples show the difference in handling form submissions between Internet Explorer (version 7 tested) and probably any competent browser on the web (read: everything else). Never mind the fact that this sort of browser behavior is contrary to everything you’d expect. Hope this saves someone the three hours it wasted for me. (continue reading…)

First, let me say that Firefox is totally awesome. My favorite part is that it lets you customize it until the cows come home (or you manage to crash your system). I’ve also set up this wonderful bit of software on a number of computers, and usually give it at least a subset of the following options. This list is mostly for me, but hey, why not put it out there? (continue reading…)

I recently got this all polished up, and it’s working so well I decided I had to share. This little gem allows me to completely do away with setting up a dev server to make changes on a live site, as the functionality is basically created on an as-needed basis. It’s easy, but oh so useful. (continue reading…)