Network Favicons is a simple WordPress plugin that allows blog owners on a multisite network to upload a favicon to the root of their theme’s directory and have automatically be used as the site’s favicon. This requires a one-to-one relationship between blogs and themes, but that could be as simple as creating a child theme for the favicon if you’re already using the same theme on multiple blogs.
I’ve used many different development styles through the years. For a while I was a big fan of using Coda to develop live on the server. Recently I’m using more of Textmate and Transmit1. And, while I still like the how fast I can move while writing changes straight to the server, I don’t necessarily want to be doing anything that could potentially break a client’s website — even for a short time. The solution to this is pretty simple; run a virtual machine that acts just like the remote server. You can make your changes and when you’re sure it’s right, you can make one push up to the live site. This probably seems pretty obvious, but I’m going to talk about how I have my VM configured so that it works even on a strange network.
We want a virtual machine that has a static address that will work even if we pick up and decide to work out of a coffee shop for a day or, say, a warehouse in Northern California. It needs to act just like a production server, which means it also needs to be connected to the web.
/etc/network/interfaces. Make sure you leave eth0 as a dynamic interface and set eth1 as a static interface for your VirtualBox network. ScreenshotSomething I like to do, just to make this a little easier to work with is to set that address to a local domain in my hosts file. Something like local.dev seems to be popular, but you can name it whatever you want. Obviously if you name it google.com you’ll need to start using Bing or something. 
I realize this was a pretty quick overview of the process, so if there’s anything that was unclear, let me know in the comments or shoot me an email.
Textmate with the Transmit bundle really makes Dropsend amazing. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look for the Transmit bundle for Textmate and check out the secrets of transmit blog post that Panic wrote a while back. ↩
It’s been a month since the Hackathon, but I wanted to put together a list of the articles that were written about it.
On a whim, I decided to limit the amount of time the comment form is available on this site. 2 weeks. I saw a tweet from Fred Wilson1 and read the linked article. I continued to read the article that MG2 linked to and found myself rethinking blogs and comments.
@parislemon you are missing out on a rich experience by dissing comments, commenters, and the dialog that results. parislemon.com/post/152882106…
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) January 4, 2012
This is a place for me to let people know what I think on certain issues when 140 characters isn’t enough, to do product reviews, or write tutorials. I’m not looking for comments from people telling me that my review was super helpful. That’s nice, but send me a note on twitter or send an email. I want comments that add to the article. If I missed a fact or you have an idea on how to do something better, that’s useful. After 2 weeks, the chance of useful comments goes down and the chance of “Good job!” goes way up – especially since I write mostly about technology that could be completely different from one day to the next. And if you really need to talk to me about an article or correct something I’ve said after 2 weeks, feel free to send an email. I’m always willing to have a conversation about the stuff I’m writing here.
It’s important to note that Fred Wilson is an investor in Disqus, which is what I use here. Though, as MG points out in a follow up, he wouldn’t have invested if he didn’t believe in comments online. ↩
After reading MG’s follow up, I don’t think he’s against comments in general, but doesn’t feel that they’re necessary in his case. I know he made a point of saying that comment systems are a facade, but in the last article he admits that comments can be useful on a case-by-case basis. ↩
I run a 256mb Cloud Server from Rackspace. As far as web servers go, you’re not going to find anything with less RAM. As long as you don’t have to deal with a ton of traffic, you can make this work pretty well. It’s taken me quite a bit of testing and research to get to where I am right now, so I wanted to share some of the things I’ve done in the never ending process of optimizing servers and increasing speed.