SurfiOnline

Last January I mentioned that I was feeling the limitations with my old Sony “point and shoot” digital camera. A whole year went by with me thinking of buying a Digital SLR camera (Originally the Canon EOS 350D) but never getting around to do it.

New years day I completed my order for a brand new Canon EOS 400D DSLR camera (kit with 18-55mm lens) as well as a Canon EF 90-300mm USM lens, 2gb compact flash card, tripod, extra batteries and a DigiMate II-plus image tank (for which I ended up buying a 80gb hard drive for).

The Canon EOS 400D camera and 90-300mm USM lens
After the payment went through and everything it was shipped to Australia (from Hong Kong) and was stuck in customs awaiting clearance (I needed to pay the 10% GST on it – $174.00, before it was released). Customs were going to take a week or so to clear it which didn’t work for me as I’m leaving for my holiday on the 26th. I went to a Customs Broker who, the same day, cleared the item (albiet, I had to pay them $125 to do the clearance for me as well as the initial GST and a Customs service fee). I picked the camera + goodies up today from the Australia Post Internation Gateway Facility.

This camera is awesome.

Though I have a fair amount of knowledge about focal lengths, aperature sizes, f-stops, exposure and all of those other terms associated with an SLR camera, I still have a lot to learn on how to get the best possible use out of the camera. A good learning experience will hopefully be whilst I am away – hopefully I’ll get some great action, landscape and portrait shots.

Anybody have any good tips? I’ve read a few books, visited a few sites (the URLs of which I’ve completely lost) but I’m after any tips others may have (Michele, I’m looking at you too).

And now I’ll leave you with a few new photos on my flickr account from the camera. Hopefully I’ll make better use of my flickr account now too.

Tia, quite possibly the most awesome puppy in the world.

But also quite possibly the hardest to take a decent photo of.

Testing out the zoom on the 90-300mm lens.

… and for something completely random..

Last week I wrote about my customised version of TinyMCE which I whipped up because a client needed a WYSIWYG editor to manage content on their site, that is one without a layout that does not suck.

My solution:

A nicer looking TinyMCE editor which is easier to use too.

Several people requested I release it so that is what I’m doing.

View an online Demo

Download surfi_tinymce.zip

The download archive contains instructions (readme.html) on how to implement and customise the appearance of the editor to how you’d like.

As far as I know, it is completely compatible with the following browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox 2.0
• Internet Explorer 6
• Internet Explorer 7

I’d love to see what layouts people come up with, where they’re using my modified TinyMCE theme and any bugs they have to report or suggestions for things they’d like to see.

Wow, two posts in one day. Something must be wrong with me.

With MyBB we want everyone to have the best possible “out of the box experience” as possible. An “out of the box experience” is the experience a user has with MyBB directly after they’ve installed it – after all, first impressions do count.

MyBB 1.4 is becoming more and more intelligent. We recognise what users want, that they want to have a functional system which they enjoy to use and requires little time and effort to configure.

The “Search Engine Friendly URLs” option in MyBB 1.4 is an example of how MyBB is giving you want you want right out of the box. For those who don’t know, search engine friendly URLs convert big long URLs in to much shorter and easier to type URLs. They’re also very beneficial to search engine optimization and improving your page rank. This is a feature users have wanted us to support for a long time and have had to rely on plugins to provide the same functionality however with varying results.

An example of search engine friendly URLs would be as follows:

Old URL: showthread.php?tid=10&page=2
New and Improved URL: thread10-2.html

Now I estimate that a lot of people will turn to us and ask us how they enable this functionality or do we have it in MyBB at all.

MyBB 1.4 will automatically enable search engine friendly URLs if your server supports them. (Apache based servers only at this stage)

This means that after you install MyBB, if your server supports search engine friendly URLs they will automatically be enabled without you being required to perform any additional configuration.

Of course, we support the automatic detection along with manual overrides to enable or disable the functionality for when you wish to override the automatic detection or disable the functionality completely.

Stay tuned for more information on MyBB 1.4 in the coming weeks (pending we feel like releasing some of our much kept secrets)