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My uni seems incapable of setting a single timetable for a term and sticking to it, so they make several “up-to-date” timetables available on their website which are updated daily. However they insist on keeping these timetables in Word and Excel formats, because that’s what they are made in and everyone has Office, right?

Well I have M$ Office 2008 installed on my iBook G4, and it’s painfully slow to open and it hogs pretty much everything. So I spent a while looking for somekind of plugin for Firefox to open Word and Excel documents inside Firefox, like you can do with IE on Windows.

Only one such plugin exists, Word Browser Plugin not surprisingly opens Word documents in browsers such as Firefox, but not very well - it doesn’t like tables. Since I mainly want to open timetables, this is a problem. Apparently no other plugins exist for this purpose so I gave up and continued to use Office to view the timetables.

However a couple of days ago I stumbled accross Quick Viewer Droplet, an AppleScript by Apple. Quick Look is a part of OS X, that allows you to preview documents from within Finder such as Office documents without opening Office or whatever program is used to open them. This in itself partially solves my problem - I could use Quick Look to open the timetables without need to grind my iBook to a halt by opening Office, but Quick Viewer Droplet cuts out Finder and previews files in Quick Look directly, so that Firefox can be set to automatically preview Word Documents and Excel documents!

Amazing, isn’t it?!

As some of you may have noticed, the site was down for like over 2 or 3 weeks in Janurary due to problems with my old web host, but only two webhosts and three servers later it was back! I’ve been meaning for a while to write this post to offer some advice for those looking for budget web hosting based on the lessons I learned through this experience.

If you’re not overly experienced with webhosting etc, be aware that most packages labelled “Business” or even “Small business” have webspace and a transfer limit vastly beyond the needs of a small business.

While the £10 per month most of these “small business” packages cost gets you fantastic support, it’s paying for masses of resources you simply don’t need. From my experience, small business websites manage very nicely with only a couple of hundred MB webspace and as a rule of thumb ten times that amount of bandwidth.

However it seems that many of the webhosts out there are content in basically ripping customers off in order to minimise their work load and maximise their efficiency. After looking into setting up my own hosting company I can understand this decision, but I can’t help but feel that they are relying on the ignorance of the masses to vastly oversell their product.

It’s worth looking for cheap hosting and definitely compare the packages of several hosts but the most important lessons I learned were:

1. Check the host has a physical postal address which is not a PO Box
2. Check they are a registered company in your country (UK residents can use the Companies House Web Check service)
3. Find a package that suits your needs
4. Check they have a similar server configuration to your old server

The first two help to build up confidence that the company is real and can be called to answer your country under your laws for any wrong doings.

See my little rant above for an explanation of the third

The forth just saves downtime and errors when you upload your site. I found one of the servers I was placed on didn’t have su_exec turned on, which to be honest I’d never heard of before, but it meant that my php scripts didn’t have group permissions and could only write to files set to world writable. After I knew of this potential problem, when transferring my other sites I just put a request that they be place on a server with su_exec enabled.

I’m wriitng this post as a warning to other potential customers to UK:Web group, formally UkWebHosting. After using the company for the last couple of years I paid to renew my domain name in December when reminded by email. UK:Web Group took my money but didn’t renew my domain so my website disappeared of the internet in the first week of January. I must have emailed UK:Web group dozens of times, I tried opening support tickets too, but got no reply whatsoever.

I later found some other people in a similar situation and learned that Lee Curtis, the owner/manager of UKWebGroup had attempted to sell UKWebGroup in November and since around that time had not been providing any un-automated services like renewing domain names or replying to support queries, while still accepting money for these services.

All this information used to appear in the form of a topic in a forum upon searching Google for “UKWeb group”, but that forum seems to have deleted the topic, probably for legal reasons, so I’ve set up a group (aptly named UK:Web Group) on Google groups with a copy of the transcript from that forum.

I just hope the potential customers/victims find the information before giving them any more money.

I included SafariPlus in my original list of the best free programs available on OS X and Windows. It’s an InputManager plugin for Safari on OS X, mainly for cookie management but also for blocking flash and gif animations. It’s best feature was however it’s ability to set “favourite” cookies and delete all none favourite cookies upon exiting Safari.

It was one of those gems that you don’t realise you need until you stumble across it, and then don’t realise the value of until you loose it. I mean, the threat of cookies shouldn’t require a tinfoil hat, we know they are mostly used in our best interest to personalise our experience of websites and increase efficiency blah blah, and while there are some organisations that try to use them to track our browsing habits, which can seem a little too infringing upon one’s freedom, at the end of they day despite the possibly selfish and greedy motivations, it’s only so they can provide more suitable content to meet our needs, yes to enable them to make more money, but nevertheless to meet our needs. Yet I still found an empty hole in my life upon discovering that SafariPlus was not compatible with Leopard - I had lost this control.

I searched high and low for an alternative, the best I could find was PithHelment, which is a great plugin for it’s many other features, but it’s ability to delete all cookies on exit by default proved simply not to work (at least under Leopard), so I spent many sleepless nights pondering what to do. Ok I maybe exaggerating a little, I mean what actually is the worst thing that can happen with cookies? The only real problem I can see is loosing control over your own information. Why should a website store information about me for future reference without my permission? …or share my browsing habits with anyone without my permission?

Anyway so I decided to see if there was an easy fix staring me in the face, starting by looking at SafariPlus’ Info file, which I changed it to XML a la the other plugins in my InputManagers folder - Growlmail and SIMBL, which amazingly, after a restart of OS X, did bugger all - so I gave up. However I later installed Inquisitor, and magically SafariPlus worked (…kind of). My guess is that Inquisitor changed the permissions for the InputManagers folder or something similar, but whatever it was - SafariPlus lives again!

(I said “kind of”, because it’s a little buggy - as in you can only save new favourite cookies one at a time by ticking one and then clicking on the Animation policy tab and then ticking the next one and then again clicking on the Animation policy tab and so on, but I can live with that.)

To be fair Inquisitor probably did most of the hacking, but I’d like to think my “hack” of the Info file helped too. So the buggyness is a bit rubbish, but the fact that SafariPlus is once again kind of working gives me hope for the future

(edit: ok SafariPlus isn’t deleting cookies on exit, but you can successfully delete all non favourites manually.)

SafariPlus (184 downloads)