Chris’ Blog

When I first started my new job, my boss was telling one of the other guys about a program called “SpaceMonger”. It sounded pretty neat, so I thought I would look into it. I figure this is a good place for me to express how absolutely pleased I am with this program. What SpaceMonger does is create a visual map of what is on your hard drive. It sizes the folders dynamically depending on the size of the content inside the folder or directory.

The official current release is version 2.1.1, however this version is only a trial version of 30 days. (it can be found here) The last free version can’t be found from their official site, but is most easily gotten from snapfiles. I am super impressed with this program for 3 reasons.
1) No Installation Necessary! - That’s right! Just extract it out of the zip file - all it comes with is an exe and a readme file. How much better can you get?!
2) Zoom Capabilities - If you double click a folder, the program zooms in resizing the boxes so that you get a good view of what is in the folder. It also gives you names of the files.
3) Files are Deletable - If you right-click on a file or folder, you can choose to run/open it, delete it, or even view its properties.

This may be a fairly simple program, but it really performs a great service to computer users! So check it out and find out whats taking up all of your hard drive space.

Last night I completed the creation of the RSS feeds for the Book of Mormon - A chapter a day. There are now two feeds. One is the RSS feed described in the previous post, and the other is a podcast. The podcast links to lds.org giving both a link for the text, and the mp3 file as an attachment. This podcast can be subscribed to on Itunes, or any other podcast reader. I also changed the links so if you subscribed to the feeds previously, you will have to subscribe to the new ones. The final change that I made was that the description for the RSS feed for each chapter is now the summary of the chapter. It was quite a challenge to get this all to work, however I now think it is finished and will not be changed again.

So for the last couple of days I spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with the podcast I had created and why it wouldn’t display correctly in Mozilla Thunderbird. I had 3 other podcasts that were showing up great, and this one didn’t. It turned out in the end that the podcast was fine, however when I was testing the creation of it a couple of weeks back, I had used the same links that I used for the real podcasts. When I deleted the subscriptions from the reader, they were being removed from the interface, but all of the information was not being deleted from the files in my profile feeditems.rdf or feeds.rdf. One option was to go through these files, and delete any mention of them, however that was going to be quite a task. What I decided to do was to export my subscriptions to an *.opml file (right click in the reader folder and select subscribe, then click export and select where you want it saved and what you want it saved as). Then I created a new Reader account (tools -> account settings -> add account) and imported the subscriptions back in. This completely cleared out the cached values of the RSS feeds that I had previously viewed. My new testing procedure is to create a separate news reader account for testing until I have the feed working as desired… That will stop this from happening in the future. The biggest problem with importing the subscriptions into a new account was that I had to go through each one and mark them as read because they were “new” messages.

Well, I had this great idea for a new rss feed. It is a chapter a day of the Book of Mormon. This is for those of you who, like me, might struggle some with reading everyday. Right now there is only a text only version, but soon I am hoping to figure out the mp3 urls for each chapter and we can have a chapter a day in mp3! The feed can be found on my list, or at http://www.cjhess.com/rss/BOM.xml Happy reading!

It seems that after some stalling and neglecting my sites, I have now got it setup enough that I can make some posts. I even set up RSS Feeds! I decided to setup 3 feeds. One for all of the posts, one for the general post section, and one for the Tech Stuff Blog. If you haven’t noticed already, I have also updated the look of the site. This took some work as the original, as much as it looked like this site - was not designed anywhere near with what this one has underneath it. It was fun to do, and I had to get some help from Mikey to be able to get it all to work right. Anyway, I like the way it is now - and I’m still perfecting parts of the site - the photo section for instance… - I’m just trying to decide how I want it all to work - oh, and comments for posts…. If you have any comments for now, feel free to submit them, well just hold on to them, or send me an email if you know my email - I’ll get the comments up soon, and a contact form.