Web Hosting with WYSIWYG Editing

March 29th, 2014

I’m looking for a simple HTML web host that is suitable for non-technical users. Here are my absolute requirements:

  1. Must support custom domains (no www.host.com/~username)
  2. Must have a built-in editor that is sufficiently WYSIWYG for someone with zero HTML skills to use. (Google Sites would meet this requirement, for example.)
  3. Must allow me to import an existing site of static HTML pages with all links intact. (Google sites fails this requirement.)
  4. Must not add any sort of header, footer, JavaScript, sidebar, or other junk to the pages. (Google sites also fails this requirement.)
  5. No lockin. All pages must be served in and easily exportable as plain vanilla HTML.

I don’t need databases, JavaScript, or a lot of other advanced features. #1 is commonly met, but everything I’ve looked at so far fails either #2, #3, or #4.

Is there such a product on the market?
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Best of 2013

January 1st, 2014

An idiosyncratic list of the most intriguing, most mind altering, and just plain fun books/movies/games/etc. I read/watched/played in (not necessarily published in) 2013:
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Disk Utilities are Worthless

August 26th, 2013

Yesterday morning I had to hard reboot my Mac Pro when it wouldn’t unlock from the screensaver. When it came back up there were a few question marks in the task bar, some surprising warnings about full disk space from an extension I thought I’d turned off years ago, and unexpected software update messages. I eventually realized that my 480GB OWC Excelsior SSD had died, or at least was not being recognized. This is my primary boot drive, but instead my Mac had booted off another system disk with an older group of apps and Mac OS X 10.6.

Not a disaster; my data is backed up and my home directory never lived on this drive in the first place. I sent a message to OWC support (27+ hours and still no response, by the way) and then fired up Disk Utility. Disk Utility could not see the missing drive.

Next I launched TechTool Pro. Completely worthless. It found a few corrupt files on other drives but had no idea that the SSD drive even existed. And then it occurred to me that this is a common pattern. Although I have about one personal hard drive failure a year, I have never been able to use TechTool, DiskWarrior, Norton (back in the day) or any other such repair utility to fix anything ever.
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What Software do Coursera Instructors Use?

June 20th, 2013

I’ve been out of academia for a few years now, but lately I’ve been watching a lot of random Coursera courses. One meta-thing that’s become apparent is that presentation technology has moved forward since I stopped teaching. So far I haven’t been able to figure out exactly how these courses are put together, and Coursera seems surprisingly tight-lipped about exactly what they’re doing. In particular there are three parts:
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Upgraded WordPress to 3.5.1

May 12th, 2013

Let me know if you see any problems.

Camera Straps Suck

May 11th, 2013

Making a quality camera strap suitable for large, 400mm+ lenses must be harder than making high quality 400mm lenses, because we have many choices for excellent lenses in the 400mm range; and no good reliable straps for those lenses. You may recall that a couple of years ago a Black Rapid RS-7 strap disconnected and dropped my Canon 7D and 70-200 f/2.8L IS II lens onto the street, severely damaging the camera. It ended up costing me several hundred dollars in repairs. That was not the first time the Black Rapid strap dropped my camera onto the ground; but unfortunately I was too stubborn to learn my lesson the first couple of times my camera fell off the strap because the camera wasn’t actually damaged.

Since then, I’ve been using a Carryspeed strap. The original plate was prone to disconnect, and it too dropped my camera on the ground once and almost dropped it several times more. Fortunately, the one time I didn’t catch it before it hit the ground, I was on the beach and the camera fell into soft sand. Since then, Carryspeed has redesigned the plate; and the new plate seems to be somewhat more stable and reliable, so that’s the strap I’ve been using. However, on a recent trip to Costa Rica, a new failure mode appeared. The Neoprene shoulder strap tore several days into the trip, not so badly that the camera fell; but badly enough that I wasn’t comfortable using it any more. Unfortunately I had not brought a spare camera strap with me so I had to shoot off a tripod for the rest of the trip, which was especially inconvenient with a group in the tight spaces of some of the rain forest trails.

Torn Carryspeed Neoprene Strap

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