I tested the recently released GMail for mobile application, a java program for your phone to connect to what is probably the world’s best e-mail service, and I couldn’t get it to work. Up to now, hours after I installed it, the phone still can’t open my inbox and I only get a screen that says “loading.”

Gmail for mobile application makes access to your email from your phone easy, if your phone supports it and you can make it work. Click on photo to enlarge.

The installation went fine. I went to gmail.com/app and I was prompted to download the program. I clicked on download Gmail and the program was downloaded in just a few minutes, at such a cheap GPRS rate at 10 pesos.

I promptly entered my username and password. It was torture doing so using the phone keypad as I use a 30-character password. When I clicked on sign in, the phone screen just displayed loading. I waited for several minutes before exiting the application and opening it again, still no luck.

Continue reading ‘Trying Gmail for mobile application…and it’s still loading’

The WordPress team has released a new version of the popular and open source blogging software. The new version, 2.0.5, breaks the WordPress tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians. The team named the release Ronan, in honor of contributor Ryan Boren’s son, who was born earlier this month.

Matt Mullenweg said in his post in the WordPress development blog that the WordPress team suggests that “everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes” (emphasis mine). Here’s a link to the changes.

I’ve just upgraded this blog and a host of others I help maintain to the latest version. I initially thought of uploading only the changed files but later decided to upload the whole thing for good measure. If you’re interested only on the changed files, new WordPress 2.0 maintainer Mark Jaquith has compiled a list.

I have long stayed away from using music players such as iTunes to manage songs in my Sony Ericsson k750i because of the way these software organize the files in the mobile phone’s memory stick.

MEDIAMONKEY is probably the best software to use to manage your phone’s audio library from your PC. Click on photo to enlarge.

I find it more efficient to just use my favorite Windows file manager, Total Commander, to transfer the music files from my PC to the phone. I’ve tried using third-party software to make iTunes manage my phone playlist and they work but not to the extent that they’ve become the primary way I manage my songs. I hate the way synchronization with iTunes breaks apart files in compilation albums into artist sub-folders. You’d have to recreate your playlist by repeatedly clicking on album folders. I’m sure there’s a way to configure this but I’m just too lazy to find out how.

But the first time I tried MediaMonkey, I immediately knew it was a piece of software I could rely on to manage songs and podcasts in my phone. The free (but sadly not open source) music library software is easy to use and doesn’t require a lot of fuzz, hacking or third party applications and plugins to connect to the K750i.

Continue reading ‘Manage songs in your phone, mp3 player with MediaMonkey’

I listened to Michael Arrington’s podcast interview of the guys behind Media Temple last night and their new shared hosting product piqued my interest. If it fulfills even just 80 percent of what the guys behind the service promised then it will be a phenomenal development in the web service industry.

The new product, the Grid-Server, turns the shared hosting services on its head and the Media Temple guys are so gung-ho over the service its chief executive officer said during the interview they’d soon have a 101 percent uptime guarantee where they’d actually pay customers, on top of not charging them for the entire duration of the outage, when they experience a downtime.

The Grid-Server has a different architecture than most current shared hosting plans.

Continue reading ‘Media Temple offers shared grid hosting’

The developers behind the forum software bbPress have announced an official release. The release, bbPress 0.72:Bix, continues with WordPress’ tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians.

The open source software is being developed by the people behind WordPress, led by Matt Mullenweg. I’ve been playing around with bbPress for several months now and I’ve even used it for a couple of forums. It is a great piece of forum software albeit geared towards support forums, what with the checkbox to specify whether a post is a support question or not. It’s blazingly fast and lightweight and comes with search engine friendly urls.

Continue reading ‘bbPress now has an official release’

Photos are best presented with captions or cutlines. The caption adds context to photographs and provides readers such information as the identity of the people in it, where it was taken and any other data not obvious in the photograph.

I used to publish photos with captions by creating an HTML table to contain the image and caption and then floating this within the text by giving the table a left or right alignment. Not only is the process cumbersome but many experts in web design advice against using tables for anything but tabular data.

There is a simpler way to do it.

Continue reading ‘Better photo presentation in your website in 2 easy steps’