Personally, I love having the ability to run both Webkit and Safari simultaneously. Webkit downloads daily updates, a small annoyance every day for having two browsers running in their own processes. Firefox feels slow once you start adding plug-ins and extensions into it. I believe Chrome has a great idea, running each tab and window in a separate process. Since Firefox of whichever versions runs as one process, it becomes sluggish even when on a multi-core Xeon there is plenty of free CPU and RAM. Sadly, not even the bookmark manager works in the Mac OSX Chrome dev builds yet.

The beauty of Weave is that as opposed to FBRE backups or Xmarks, it is a Mozilla created project and is compatible with bleeding edge versions of Firefox. That means that all of the same bookmarks and passwords are seamlessly synchronized between the two. With one account, no exporting/importing your files constantly.

On a side note, Xmarks promises to work with Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. I thought about synchronizing all of my bookmarks, but that is what my delicious account is for. In addition, there appear to be downsides to installing the Safari extension. Currently there are very few plugins available for Safari that will run in 64-bit mode. Safari and Webkit are amazing enough that I don’t mind not having ad blocking installed. Plus, I’m using Allbookmarks (free) to show me all of my bookmarks for every browser. The Firefox plugin does add some neat features, but it is bloated for this purpose.

Anyways, how to run Minefield and Firefox simultaneously on your Mac easily!

First, install the Mozilla Weave plugin and setup an account. Synchronize your bookmarks and passwords.

Use Finder or Spotlight and open up Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/

Paste this into Terminal and hit enter: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin  -Profilemanager

Create a second profile. I just called mine “Minefield” for simplicity. Profilemanager help page.

Once your second profile is created, start with your default so your regular Firefox.app will continue to use it. Retry the Terminal command if you are taken into the Minefield profile instead, as you will be able to just re-select the default again.

Download a Minefield nightly build

Mount the .dmg & drag to your Applications folder.

There are more than two ways of running Minefield with the new profile. You simply need to setup an easy way to pass command line arguments to its firefox-bin. Here is how to do it in Automator, although Script Editor from this  MacOSXHints page could be superior. Just depends on how much time you want to spend on it. I’ll assume if prefer Script Editor, I don’t need to explain anything to you

Use Finder and open Automator.app in /Applications/

Select new Workflow and simply select from the Library > Utilities > Run Shell Script

Here you can paste in /Applications/Minefield.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P Minefield &

(Replace the Minefield after -P for Profile with whatever name you called the new Profile.) I should mention that I have my Terminal.app default settings set to close the shell if it exits cleanly. This is a simple preference in Terminal.app that will prevent a window from staying open after passing the arguments to Minefield.

Now all you have to do is save the Automator action as an Application into /Applications. You can even give it the Minefield icon. This is basically just a shortcut to run Minefield with a different profile without using the command line.

Install Mozilla Weave, synchronize, and enjoy having a Firefox with loads of speed and a Firefox with loads of features.

I was rather surprised that Microsoft actually made a client for Windows Live Mesh for Mac OSX Snow Leopard! This is especially surprising since Ubuntu One is Ubuntu only. At least Dropbox lets me synchronize across all platforms. Previously I was using MacFUSE/FUSE Userland sshfs mounting for my Dreamhost backup space.

2GB Free – Dropbox – Mac OSX, Linux, Windows

5GB Free – Windows Live Mesh – Windows & Mac OSX, however the icon stays in the dock which is rather annoying. The menubar icon is the control for Mesh, so the dock icon is extraneous.

2GB Free – Ubuntu One – Ubuntu only, but integrated with Ubuntu 9.10+’s file manager. Since I was reformatting my laptop quite often to try new variants, this let me save important things such as bookmarks or how to get the proprietary Nvidia drivers to work with the Xorg.conf.

I recommend Dropbox because it works on the three platforms I use the most and is often easier than setting up a shared folder on the network.

I decided it was time to redirect the feed to Feedburner so we could use their fun widgets and stats. In order to save CPU, I would often wget the files from Drupal so that Apache just had to serve a static file. This also takes care of that.

There are some important exemptions that need to be taken into consideration. For one, the iTunes store caches data and Feedburner checks every 30 minutes. I wanted the iTunes store to also have the raw XML feed, since Feedburner has a 550K limit on how much of a feed it carries. There are actually two feeds. One for iTunes that just has the podcast media enclosure, summary, and details. The second is an RSS feed that contains the full tracklistings as they appear on the site for use in readers. I decided that I also wanted the Trance Design Facebook page take the feed from the server, since it is quite slow to update and this lets me tier the notifications. Facebook also sends the note to Twitter.com/trancedesign automatically, so the sooner the better. It is actually quite nice to have a landing page at Feedburner so anyone can see their choice of reader in order to subscribe. For the easy-going, there has always been a direct link to the iTunes music store where one may subscribe.

So here are my mod_rewrite rules for the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner/* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !iTMS* [OR]
RewriteRule ^trancedesign\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/TranceDesign [R=302,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FacebookFeedParser* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner/*
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/trancedesign-full [R=302,L]

Finding the user agent for Apple’s iTunes Music Store required some log grepping, and the user agent iTMS comes from Apple’s IP block range. That out of the way, I was then able to use FeedBurner’s Optimize tab and enable BrowserFriendly’s redirection option. This places the original URL in the list for subscriptions, and lets me use FeedBurner to count how many unique subscribers we have while not permanently redirecting the traffic away from the site. Since FeedBurner is not redirected to itself, it will have the most up to date feed from the site.

Now I get some fun widgets to display on the page:
Regular subscribers:
Full Tracklisting subscribers:

It has only been a day since I made the change, and some issues I’ve been having with the site on the new host have made the download URLs sometimes return a 404. I’ve been tracking this down and it seems to have to do with having caching enabled.

I was seeing in my error_log: Premature end of script headers: and internal_error.html in my database log.

Hopefully this fixes the problem, as it has surely been frustrating when somebody tries to download a file and then unsubscribes. I was fairly certain we had at least 600+ subscribers, but since I’ve been putting up mixes of different genres, this could also turn some people off from the podcast entirely. Still, it is nice to have a place to post mixes when I find good ones or when I can get around to publishing a mix.

Since the site is now hosted with Dreamhost, I found a rule on Ravi Sagar’s blog that also helps to see the analog statistics they provide that Drupal and other sites that use rewrite rules prohibit you from seeing.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/stats/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]

I got the gist of this idea from a Perishable Press post, however since Feedburner’s user agent is FeedBurner/1.0 adding wildcards to the RewriteCond was necessary to make it work. Otherwise, Feedburner just pulled the feed from itself.

This will be very fun. :]