Keystrokes :.

I’m getting rid of drupal and i decided to give a chance to WordPress. I’ve already had some experiences with blog platforms or popular and complex CMS like Joomla , but never really looked close at wordpress, that today looks really more promising than how it seems some time ago.

Hope for the best !

I’m not used to video editing, but I had to convert a movie recorded on my (Snow Leopard) Mac Os  X screen and saved as a ‘.mov’ file, in order to publish it on the web. I asked google before getting  deep into ffmpeg man page, and found tons of unknown-software, tips on using iMovie, and so  on. Actually the iMovie import-then-export solution didn’t look so bad, except exporting the  project movie it got cropped to fit the iMovie project ratio, that can be set to 4:3 or 16:9 only. I  didn’t found any intuitive way to avoid this, e.g. scaling the clip and adding the black border bars  where needed to fit the project ratio. Anyway, in the end i found the simplest solution: QuickTime  Player had the needed feature just in front of me.
Document > Register for the web allow to record the movie in m4v format, so that can published on the web or uploaded to most video-hosting providers without loosing the audio or whatever. Simple and useful

MagicThumb is a nice tool from magictoolbox.com that provide a way to display images  linked to thumbs on a page via javascript. Non-commercial websites can get a free licence  and  use this cool product for free. This is a smart policy for this company, because quality of  their  products are promoted “on field”. On the left there’s an example of how that works. That’s pretty  nice, isn’t it ? Find out more at magictoolbox.com

I’ve being thinking about this option for a while, since I feel again the need to have some sort of  online space but really don’t have the time right now to take up my own cms on the top of my  still  under-never-ending-dev framework for web apps as i wished, so i decided to fall back  again to an  off-the-shelf open solution. Then here I am, getting started in an (hope to be)  simple experience, that may lead to a long and  satisfactory contribution to this messing “ball  of mud” that’s the  network today. Good luck, to me.

Having a directory under Basic Authentication is really easy when using the Apache2 web server.
You just have to define a file with users, passwords and groups, and place some lines in the .htaccess file.
The first goal can be achieved with the htpasswd utility, such as

htpasswd [-s|-m|-d|-p] [-c] <file> <username>

where the first group of options specify the way to store passwords ( -s for sha, -m for md5, -d for crypt(), -p for plaintext ), and -c create a new file. Be careful because the -c overwrite any existing file. If you wish just to add a user to an existing file, care to omit the -c . You can also specify group of users in a groupfile, man htpasswd should help.

Then you need to place an .htaccess file in the folder you want to protect, with something like

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Your authentication prompt message"
AuthUserFile /path/to/user/auth/file
AuthGroupFile /path/to/group/auth/file
Require user username

Use absolute paths for the authentication file or relative paths that are resolved from /etc/apache2.
Here you go, restart the apache web server and your basic http authentication is ready.
Just remember that this is plain-text over the network, and that it’s a pain to maintain, so you should use this only for really poor stuffs with few, unlikely to change users or groups, and most likely over SSL.