It’s been a week+ since the relaunch. It was a busy week, both in DayJob, and with the new site.

The Weekly Review is (hopefully) recurring summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

With the twins going into day care (starting Sep 1), I just went from half-time to full-time in DayJob. Coincidentally, we had a hectic week in DayJob, creating a new demo from scratch with 1 week notice (gotta grab opportunities).

Being 7 months old and starting day care, the boy decided he’s all grown up, so it’s a good idea to start sitting on his own!

Blog posts from the last week

1. I relaunched the site on my 30th birthday.

2. I explained my process for working on side projects.

3. I shared a tip on baby formula temperature.

4. I introduced the website side project.

5. I started a new series on better software construction with SCons.

In the coming weeks, I plan to continue writing on the website side project, and the SCons series. The best way to be up-to-date with new posts is by following the feed.

Web selections

Bruce Schneier wrote on his blog on the security of password managers. Weak passwords are an epidemic, and password managers are a decent solution. Personally, I’ve been using LastPass for a couple of years, but there are other legit solutions out there. I wasn’t aware that Schneier rolled out his own solution, so that’s interesting.

A list of ~5 million Gmail account credentials was dumped online this week. According to Google Online Security Blog, the leak was not the result of a breach of Google systems. It also seems that most credentials posted were not valid anymore.

Alan Henry wrote a comprehensive article on securing cloud storage accounts on Lifehacker. If you use cloud storage, add this to your to-do list 🙂 .

Apple had a small event the other day. Something about fashion, I think. Humor aside, although I’m far from an iPhone fan, Apple plays a major role in the mobile world, and it affects us all. I think Eric Ravenscraft hit that nail on the head in his Lifehacker article on the less obvious roles of Apple.

This week I learned about the School In the Cloud, born following a TED Talk by Sugata Mitra. His ideas on “Self Organized Learning Environments” resonate with me, and I intend to dive deeper when I get the chance.

Side project updates

As you can imagine, I’m still elbow deep in the website project. As expected, a new site comes with new technical issues. Please, do report issues that cross your path.

A couple of highlights from the last week:

• About a day after the relaunch, I discovered that all my internal links are broken. It seemed that all of a sudden, the WordPress plugin I’m using for cross-post linking decided to change its behavior. I fixed it immediately of course, and according to the Broken Links Checker, I’m clean now. If you spot broken links flying around – please let me know!

• It seems that RSS feeds don’t display featured images. I’m using Google Feedburner for RSS. With the development version of the site, I did get featured images in RSS, so I’m not sure what has changed in production. I hope I find the time to look into it soon.

  • A devoted reader let me know that sometimes there’s quite a delay in the RSS. It can take 10-20 minutes from the time I publish a new post to the time it appears in the feeds. Another thing I’d like to look into.
• There were a couple of posts I published with comments disabled. That wasn’t intentional. Sorry about that. If you come across posts with closed comments, please let me know. Only general pages (like about page and such) and project index pages should have the comments disabled.

• Mentioning comments, I use the Jetpack Comments plugin as a commenting system. I like a lot of things about it, compared to alternative systems. But I noticed a couple of things I don’t like so much:

  • If you submit a comment, and it’s being moderated, you have no indication about it. It looks like it just disappeared. I would prefer that you’d see a greyed out version of your comment, with a message saying it’s going through moderation.

  • Another devoted reader noted that he got a 403 error when trying to write a comment. Unfortunately, I have no idea why that happened, and I could not recreate the issue.

• Yesterday I noticed that an old IFTTT recipe I set up was still active. It was a recipe to automatically tweet any new post on itamaro.com. The site relaunch included redirecting itamaro.com, so the recipe was still firing. I turned it off.

• Often I link to future posts, that are not yet written. To avoid 404 errors with these links, I found a WordPress plugin that displays a customizable stub when a draft post is requested. It worked fine with the development version of the site, but seemed to stop working when I moved to production. For some unknown reason, now it appears that it’s working fine again. I’m not sure what’s up with that.