Michael Richard Murphy

LetsGoMurphys.com will have planned downtime over the next week or so while we transfer files to the new server as well as wait for the DNS servers to resolve to the new IP address. Your patience is appreciated.

I’m pleased to announce hosting is now available to my design clients! Thanks to Lou for the suggestion and encouragement and of course to the first client willing to sign a contract. He shall remain nameless to avoid any possible future embarassment.

Hosting is on a Linux platform and naturally includes email, FTP access, the Plesk control panel, which I’ve been very impressed with, not to mention about two dozen ready to go scripts and applications just a mouse click away. Some of these include WordPress, galleries, forums, e-commerce, and more.

I hope to post more information by the end of this week.

This recent article at SEOChat.com about Konfabulator is fairly timely considering a conversation I recently had with a coworker.

Because I live under a rock, I only checked out Tiger for the first time recently. While I’ve been aware of this “thing” called Dashboard, I wasn’t aware of the striking similarity to a little app I’ve used in the past called Konfabulator. For those of you that live under a much larger rock than I do, Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets exist in a semi-transparent world on your desktop and present you useful information like the local weather, cpu usage, a stock ticker, etc. Anyhow, I remarked to a coworker how similar the two are and we assumed Apple had either purchased Konfabulator or at the very least licensed the technology. It was shortly thereafter that I stumbled upon the above article that enlightened me.

It seems Yahoo!, not Apple, recently bought Konfabulator to beef up their desktop search in response to competition from Google and Microsoft. Dashboard and Microsoft’s Sidebar rely on consumers having specific operating systems while Yahoo’s new Konfabulator obviously doesn’t. Google’s APIs is still in beta giving Yahoo a huge headstart in this department.

Those of you using IE/Win may notice that I finally fixed the whitespace bug that’s been causing a 2 pixel or so whitespace to appear between the top banner and the navigation elements of this site. Although the fix was so simple, I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself lazy for taking so long to do it. It’s more a matter of actually remembering to do it (I primarily use a Mac for at work browsing or FF/Win at home).

It’s been said bad things always happen in threes.Yet another example: the destruction of New Orleans, the passing of Chief Justice Renquist, and now the passing of Bob Denver. Best known as tv’s Gilligan, Bob died Friday from complications stemming from his cancer treatments. Aloha little buddy.

I think this says it all…