Jamas

Finally Usable LED Lights From Cree

Up to now my experience with LED lighting has been pretty dismal. I had converted several pot lights in key areas of our hose to LED, but the applications were pretty limits. The cone of light produced was narrow, making it suitable for narrow hallways or above landings. The colour was cold, giving the area an icy blue feeling.

Cree C4 LightWell finally there is an LED light that works better than the halogen pot lights it was designed to replace by the company Cree.  The CR4 Four-Inch LED Downlight is sold in Canada at HomeDepot under their EcoSmart Brand.  It is designed to fit into existing 4 inch pot light fixtures, there is also a 6 inch model. The light quality is excellent, both in colour and how wide the cone is. It actually outputs more light then the 50W halogen bulbs it replaced. It works with a normal dimmer.  Total energy usage per bulb is only 9.5 watts, which means the 4 bulbs I used don’t use as much energy as a single halogen.

The installation process is fairly easy. You simply remove the existing halogen bulb and the internal parts of the pot light. The Cree bulb has a screw in base attached to wires, just screw into the existing socket. Then the bulb is pushed into the pot light housing. Metal tabs grind in to keep it in place. My only snag is that my pot light housing are a little shallow which leave the built-in trim not perfectly flush.

The price tag is fairly hefty, $45 when I bought mine. But the quality is well worth it. My only hope is that the product becomes popular enough so the price really drops.

If you have found another LED bulb that I should try then let me know in the comments below. If you try the Cree bulbs then let me know what you think.

InfiniteWP to the Rescue

It is no secret that I am a big fan of WordPress. In fact I just launched my 22nd WordPress install last month.  The majority of these sites are not mine but I manage them on behalf of family, friends, NGOs and small businesses. For most of these sites I have a collection of 10 plugins I install. Combined with theme and core updates it can take a fair amount of time to keep them all updated. I was in need of some help in managing all of this.

InfiniteWP to the rescue! InfiniteWP is a tool that allows you to manage multiple WordPress installations from a single self hosted location. While not the only tool in this market space, I selected it because its feature set matched my needs and it was free. Many of the other tools had small free packages (1 to 5 sites) but can be fairly costly on a per site basis. While I don’t mind paying for good software, the pay per site model doesn’t sit well with me because many of the sites I manage for community groups on a pro bono basis.  InfiniteWP uses the freemium model, meaning the base features are free while you pay for premium addons. Works great for me!

The base feature set (free) for InfiniteWP is great.  It takes care of all the updating of WordPress core, themes and plugins.  It will even let you hide updates, good for cases in which a plugin has become paid only. You can also install plugins and themes across multiple sites with just a few clicks. Within InfiniteWP you can mark plugins as favourites, which will make my job of deploying a new WordPress site with my standard list of plugins a breeze.  You can also create backups of your sites right from the InfiniteWP control panel. One click admin login in to all of the sites makes getting to the site’s dashboard really easy.

I have yet to check out any of the premium (paid) features, but there are a few that I think would be well worth the reasonable price: Schedule Backups, Backup To Repositories. I am also very excited at what is listed in the coming soon section: Malware Security, Uptime Monitoring, iOS App, Client Reporting.  While there are existing plugins that do much of this, the concept of being able to see all this data in one location is just too good.

Installing InfiniteWP on our VPS was easy, if you do WordPress installs then this will be very familiar. Once installed you have to add sites by first installing a plugin on each site and then inputting a few pieces of information into InfiniteWP, very straight forward process. For all 22 sites the whole operation, from install to having every website updated through InfiniteWP, took about 3 hours. While this might seem like a long time it will in the end save me an estimated 6 hours a month keeping tabs on all those sites.

Now all I have to figure out is what to do with all those extra free hours, maybe a few more WordPress installs!

If you have tried InfiniteWP or another multi-site management tool then let me know your thoughts down in the comments.

 

 

WordPress Plugin Battle: NextGEN Gallery vs EasyRotator

A client asked me to take a look at the EasyRotator plugin for WordPress, they were looking for a nicer way to show images in a post (trying to get rid of the long list of images).  Having used NextGEN Gallery for years I was interested in seeing how both plugins worked for creating a simple slideshow in a post.

For this post I decided to use my collection of miniature photos, you can read more about the process of creating these in the link. I intentionally picked images of different size to see how each tool handled this.

Up first NextGEN gallery plugin. This plugin offers a full image management tool. Images are uploaded into a Gallery. Several Galleries are then combined to create an Album.  The nice part about the plugin is that it gives you several ways to display the images. You can see one such choice on the Gallery page. In this case we are using the built in slideshow option. Once this images have been loaded into the NextGEN Gallery then it is a simple one click operation in the visual editor to add a gallery to a post. The dialog allows you to pick the format as slideshow. You can set in the size, duration and select from several transition effects.

 

EasyRotator is new to me. To work with the EasyRotator you need to install the WordPress plugin and a piece of software on your desktop (using Adobe AIR). This might scare off some users.  To create the rotator you simply click on the button on the visual editor. This launches the local desktop program. It is through the program that you select images and choose a style. The number of templates is impressive. You can also make images link to content which would make the EasyRotator a good choice for creating entry page navigation. There are of course more options in the pro version.  For comparison I picked a fairly straightforward template. The images not scaled by default in this template. I liked that EasyRotator just blended with the theme nicely.

[easyrotator]erc_39_1363311435[/easyrotator]

 

I also picked something a little more exciting. This template scales the images to fill the space, which causes an issue with vertical images.

.[easyrotator]erc_55_1363312230[/easyrotator]

 

While these plugins are wildly different they both can be used for slide show creation.  I think both do a decent job of this. If you are looking for a straight forward slideshow for your posts then NextGEN Gallery would be my suggestion, especially if you want to ability to create a nice gallery page. If you are looking for a little more splash or would make use of the templates for creating a visual navigation then EasyRotator would do the job nicely.

If you use either of these tools or have another favorite method of showing images in a slideshow format let me know if the comments below.

WordPress 3.5

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” has arrived. Featuring an even easier to use media upload environment, which from my quick test is really slick. Many of the people I help with WordPress are visual, the new add media functionality is perfect for them. My thanks to the entire WordPress team who have put out another great release which will be sure to keep WordPress at the top of CMS list.

JOSSA 2011

Well JOSSA 2010 was a few months late, but that is nothing compared to my JOSSA 2011, which is now an embarrassingly 11 months late. I had a pretty good start on my list of software to reward but life seems to have gotten in the way of handing out the money and thank yous. I have decided due to the lateness to skip JOSSA for this year. I have moved my list of great open source software over to my JOSSA 2012 list, which I will make an effort to announce in mid-December.

I have a fair number of people/organizations that I help with website work. This year my plan is to convince each of them to contribute towards the money part of the awards,sweeten the pot for the 2012 winners.