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Sosh Howell

• Sosh Howell
• Swing Dancing
• Digital Development
• Cooking

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Sosh Howell

Hello and welcome to Sosh Howell's website.

Please take a look around to learn more about Sosh and his projects.

My Blog!

My First Song

As I got home last night at around 1am after a fun night of dancing I found Keven, my house guest still up. For some reason we started playing with our Ukuleles and about an hour later we were successfully playing I Can't Give You Anything But Love.

That was the first time I've ever played a song with anyone else before. A very cool experience.

Internal Linking Experiment Results

I know that Google tends to read just the first link it finds from page A to page B. I was hoping that I could use the rel="nofollow" tag to have it ignore the first AB link and move on to the second AB link. However it seems to have just completely ignored both. So I've thought of two possible solutions.

Solution 1:
Place link 2 above link one in the source code and use CSS to show it below.

Solution 2:
Add some GET variables to the end of link 1 to make it appear to be a new page. example /newpage.html?rel=nofollow

I however am going to stick with solution 1. However I would like to test solution 2 at some point simply to see how well it fares.

So Close To Launch

I am getting so close to launching BlueSHIFT CMS.

Its been crazy the amount of work that has gone into it. Absolutely crazy. Yesterday was a 14 hour day and hopefully the last for quite a while.

I've added some awesome new features and cleaned out all the bugs I could find. Basically just trying to polish it up and get it ready for mass distribution.

I've also begun working on the How To and FAQ sections. Since I'm to close to the program and too much of a dork I'm setting up test sites for friends and family to see what is confusing for them and what I need to either explain more or make more intuitive.

If you're interested in having a free site so I can use you for BETA testing, please let me know.

Sosh

Encoding Secret Messages

So I was having problems falling asleep the night before and what does my mind do?

I was thinking of a way to encode secret messages into images. The idea is kind of simple.

You have the following elements

• A Picture
• A Message
• A Passcode

The idea is that you cycle through the pixels in the image. You alter the RBG values of the pixel (or not) so that if the R, G, and B values are even it represents a 0 and odd represents a 1. That way the colors are only changed slightly.You space out the pixels you change based on the passcode so that the changes are spread out and to decode them properly you will need to know the passcode.

So with this you could encode a hidden message into an image. Email it to someone and if they know the passcode, they can run it through the program to decode it. Anyone who intercepted the image would not be able to read the message because

1. they might not realizes there is a hidden message
2. even if they do they would need to passcode to decrypt it

So thats what I was thinking about while trying to fall asleep. In a month or so when I have some free time I think I will actaully write the program. Might make a cool iPhone app too.

Working Hard

I've got a bunch of new exciting items that I've been working on. Mainly the BlueSHIFT CMS. Finally version 1.0 is done. Its some pretty heave duty software for website management including

• Shopping Cart
• Visual Page Editor
• Image Management (easy to put images into content on your pages)
• Calendar
• Forum
• Referral Program
• FedEx Integration
• PayPal Express Checkout

All of that basically means you could have a full eCommerce website up and running in a matter of hours. It will probably be a few weeks before its public release, but you'll be seeing it in use with site such as this one. Plus others like:

• Swing ATL
• HopShop
• Lindy Focus
• Charleston Vacation Rentals

554 mail server permanently rejected message

I am finishing up the email scripts for BlueSHIFT CMS and ran into this little problem.

554 mail server permanently rejected message

It ended up being that I had forgotten to set the from name and address in the settings file so it just didn't want to work without a proper from name/address.

Hope this helps someone down the road.