Mark On Tech

Yahoo… it’s finally up, after a long and hard search for a decent domain name. I’ve finally settled on one, in fact make that six markontech.com .net .org and markontechnology.com .net .org. Probably a little over kill but at least they’re mine all mine (queue evil laugh muhahaha). It’s taken me over a year of humming and hawing about trying to get some hosting sorted. I’ve gone through some crazy amount of whois querys but all of which haven’t lead to something that I was happy with. Nearly everything I thought of was taken.

My criteria for the domain name was something short preferably a max of five to six characters something that would be easy to remember and something which (if it wasn’t actually a correct english word) when heard a person would be able to spell it. E.g. boop goop droop You can see there’s a running pattern of vowels in my ideal domain names. Probably something to do with the fact that I may have asked for too many of them from Carol and didn’t know what to do with them (a sure throw them in there and see what happens). The main problem I came across was the sheer amount of domains that weren’t even being used alot of them were just place holders or the usual if you’re interested buy me now for some ridiculous amount of money.

There has to be a better way of organizing the registration process for domain names to actually give domain names to organizations or people who actually deserve them, instead of squatters getting them. I can’t think of one off the top of my head but what would be fun is if there was some sort of competition and who ever won it would be awarded the domain name something like virtual reality or physical ability section in The Krypton Factor. Here’s Gordon trying his best to keep things at a mature level.

I’ve decided on using wordpress as my content manager for the site (initially). I’ve used wordpress before on my local machine for some simple projects, but this is going to be my first large project. I like the way it’s easy to get it up and running fairly quickly and start adding content, it also seems fairly mature at this stage. I used to use the old 1.5 version of wordpress and the transition to version 2 is quite pleasant. The admin side of wordpress is far more intuitive and much nicer to work with. There were a few issues however. I have a confession to make, my spelling is terrible (c’mon I’m a computer scientist) so one of the main features I was looking for was a spell checker.

I had a look at Live Spell Checker 0.4 which claimed to an AJAX powered spell checker which integrated into the WYSIWYG editor of wordpress. Sound great I thought not much configuration it said just throw it into the plugins directory in wp-content. It produced some errors when I tried to activate it. I had a look around and found a newer version 0.6 so I tried that. The install went ok and it appeared in the editor “cool” I thought looks promising but it didn’t work. I tracked down the problem to what I think is a with the server I’m using. Live Spell Checker uses pspell the php spelling utility and seems to fall back to gnu aspell if it doesn’t find it. When I ran it timed out so initially I thought the godaddy servers don’t have it installed, it did seem strange that they didn’t have aspell installed its a fairly standard tool. It was at that point I gave up I had already waisted 15 mins on trying to get it working and I was irritated at the two versions not working straight out of the box.
It does look like as if the wordpress are developing a spell checker for the next main release of wordpress which is 2.5. Then I realized that the new version of firefox has spell checking as standard. Downloaded the new version and bingo, spell checking on the fly… groovy!

One of the other things was the ability to embed flash based video into a post. Wordpress rips out all the embed HTML so i stumbled across WPvideo which allows you to embed your youtube, yahoo, google and metacafe videos by enclosing them in video tags.

I’ll see how wordpress turns out but I’ll can imagine that I’ll write my own probably using java and rife, mind you I’m learning ruby on rails and it seems pretty similar just depends on performance issues then.

So what can you look forward to on markontech.com, well other than my utter ramblings about nothing too important. I intend to impart the little knowledge I have about technology on to the masses. You may find it interesting, you may not the only time will tell.