Productivity Sauce

Time for a New Puppy: Puppy Linux 4.3

Sep 19, 2009 GMT

Mac OS X Snow Leopard? Windows 7? Forget it. The coolest OS release of the year is Puppy Linux 4.3. By now you already know that I have a soft spot for Puppy Linux, so for me each new release of this nifty little distro is a cause for a minor celebration. And the freshly-baked Puppy Linux 4.3 is no exception. In fact, the previous 4.2 release left me somewhat unimpressed, so I've had especially high hopes for the 4.3 version coordinated by Barry Kauler himself. Let me tell you straight away -- I wasn't disappointed. Despite the minor version number bump, the new release represents "a massive upgrade, right from its very roots to topmost branches." Puppy...

Flogr: Flickr Your Way

Sep 18, 2009 GMT

Flickr is, without doubt, an excellent service for shutterbugs and professional photographers alike, but if you are looking for a more streamlined interface that makes it easier for you to view and manage your precious shots, you might want give Flogr a try. This PHP-powered application doesn't add new functionality, but rather makes essential features more accessible and wraps them into a slick and easy-to-use interface. To install Flogr, you need a server running Apache and PHP. Grab the latest version of the application from the project's Web site, unpack the downloaded archive, and move the resulting directory into the document root of your server. Next, you...

Manage Tasks with myTinyTodo

Sep 16, 2009 GMT

Running a Web-based task manager on your own server makes a lot of sense, but what application should you choose? If you are looking for a lightweight, user-friendly task management tool, you might want to give myTinyTodo a try. This little app is easy to install, it offers all the essential features, and it sports a slick Ajax-based interface. To install myTinyTodo, grab the latest version of the application from the project's Web site, and unpack the downloaded archive. By default, myTinyTodo uses a SQLite database to store its data, but this requires the SQLite database installed and configured on your server. Alternatively, you can configure myTinyTodo to use...

Create a Web-based Photo Gallery in a Jiffy with GMFoto

Sep 11, 2009 GMT

Looking for a quick and easy way to set up a Web-based photo gallery? Consider GMFoto. This application lets you create a snazzy Web-based photo album literally in a matter of minutes.Unlike many popular photo gallery applications, GMFoto doesn't use a database back-end, so it's dead-simple to install and configure. Grab the latest version of the application and unpack the downloaded archive into a directory (e.g., gmfoto). Now open the code/code.index.php file in a text editor and replace the loveunit_com string with the name of the resulting directory (in this case, it's gmfoto). Do the same in the index.php file in the user/00000 directory. The user/00000 directory also contains the...

Build a Personal Social Aggregator with Pubwich

Sep 08, 2009 GMT

Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr -- with new social services popping up almost every day, how do you make all your social activities easily accessible to your friends and followers? Enter Pubwich, a simple PHP script that aggregates data from several popular social services into a single HTML page. To run Publish on your server, you need the Apache server, PHP 5 with the SimpleXML and cURL extensions, and the crontab tool. To install Pubwich, download the latest version of the software, unpack the downloaded archive, and move the resulting folder to the document root of your server. Rename the cfg/config.sample.php file to cfg/config.php and open t for...

Set up a Personal Microblog with Bilboblog

Aug 28, 2009 GMT

There are many reasons why you would want to run your own private microblog, but how do you actually do that? The easiest way is to install Bilboblog, a tiny, no-frills PHP/MySQL-based microblogging engine. Although Bilboblog is described as a microblogging application, it's not a drop-in replacement for Twitter or Identi.ca. It's actually more of a hybrid between a microblog and tumblelog. Similar to a conventional microblogging engine, Bilboblog lets you limit post length, but it also supports text formatting and sports the ability to embed images and videos. Bilboblog's major advantage is simplicity: it works right out of the box without any tweaking and there...

My Perfect Backup Setup

Aug 25, 2009 GMT

For a long time I relied on an external hard drive and Jungle Disk as my daily backup solution. This wasn't the most advanced backup setup, but it did the trick. Recently, however, I added a new device to my local network: a tiny Linux-based server with the silly name Bubba Two. Initially, I planned to use it for hosting my private wiki and testing LAMPP-based applications. But since Bubba Two can be used as a file, print, and streaming server, it made sense to put its functionality to some practical use, and use the server as a central storage for all my documents and files. There was only one problem with this: because Bubba Two is based on a PowerPC processor and Jungle Disk doesn't...