But then iTunes for Windows came out and that’s what really made me a iPod fan. Not the iTunes store (which I avoided for the longest time), just iTunes as jukebox software that could manage my iPod. The killer feature for me was the smart playlists. They’ve evolved over time but here’s an overview of a few I have now. Screenshots are from iTunes for Mac but they should apply just fine to iTunes for Windows.

Rating Songs

I rely on the song ratings for some of my playlists so some background is in order. Every song is rated 2 to 5 stars but it’s not true that I like every 5 star some better than every 4 star.

A song with two stars means I don’t like it. It’s probably not synced to my iPod although there are exceptions if I like the song when played as part of an album but don’t want it to play outside the album.

Every song starts with 3 stars. Five stars means I like it more than most for that genre or artist.

Four stars means I liked it more than most. I may rate a song 4 stars instead of 5 if I have too many five stars for the artist.

One star isn’t used for songs, it means it’s spoken word and I’ve already listed to it.

Smart Playlists

Smart Playlists are created by selecting “File -> New Smart Playlist…” from the menu. They can be edited by right-clicking the list and selecting “Edit Smart Playlist”. Click the thumbnails for for full size images.

All Music

For the mother of all playlists I start with one called “Music Only”. This one is set up to only include songs and exclude everything else. If new file types are added I have to change it but at least I only have to change it in one place. All my playlists are set to include only checked items as shown here. If I don’t want a song on my iPod I uncheck it in iTunes.

While “Music” can be selected as a playlist this indicates what iTunes sees as the Music library. In my case this isn’t just songs so I need the Music Only playlist.

List of 5’s (by LRP)

This is an example of a playlist that uses my ratings, the All Music playlist and presents me the songs that I haven’t heard in awhile at the top of the playlist. In this case the “by LRP” means “by Least Recently Played”. The playlist criteria is shown in the screenshot. As you can see from the screenshot it picks files with a five star rating and is limited to my “Music Only” playlist so I’ll only get music.

It’s not checked, but you’ll see it’s set to limit to 700 items based on least recently played. This is a holdover from when my music didn’t all fit on my iPod. Checking the box would limit the playlist to the 700 songs and if this playlist was set as the sync criteria only those songs would sync.

As for the Least Recently Played Piece…

Save the Smart Playlist then sort by the “Last Played” field in iTunes by clicking on it until it’s sorted least recent to most recently play. If you need to add the field right-click the field header bar and select it from the list. The playlist will sync to the iPod in this order (at least it does for my 5G iPod) and any field can be sorted. Click the first column (numbers - no title) to return to manual sort.

I have similar playlists for my other ratings. It’s convenient to listen to songs of a certain rating and change the rating if my tastes have changed.

Best of…

I have numerous “Best of” playlists for specific artists. There are minor differences between the way they’re set up in order to either keep the number of matched songs relatively low or provide enough songs for a playlist. But they’re all basically the same and the screenshot to the left shows the basic playlist. Some artists may be limited to 5 stars while others may include songs from various bands they were in, which is covered in the next section.

Similar to the best of for artists I also have best of genre playlists. Simply pick Genre as the criteria instead of artist.

Grouping

The properties of every song contains a Grouping field on the info tab. This can be used to contain the artist name if they were in various bands. The example shows Buddy Holly entered into a song done by The Crickets.

To create a Best Of collection for Buddy Holly I can use the Group field and avoid some complex nested playlists. Smart Playlists can only “match all” or “match any” which can be limiting at times. The criteria is “contains” because there may be cases where several artists I like are in the same group and I want those songs to appear in each of their own playlists.

Unrated Songs

When I add a song to the iTunes library the first thing I want to do is rate it. So I have a playlist setup to identify unrated songs. This way I can easily play the songs and rate them. No star is selected, if you accidentally click a star you can clear it my clicking at the very left edge of the field.

One thing to keep in mind - if you are playing the list in iTunes and rate a song it will immediately drop off the list, even if it’s playing. If it’s the one playing then all playback stops. To prevent this uncheck “Live Updating” or do what I do and rate the song when it’s done playing. Songs can be rated on the iPod without affecting playback.

Playlist of Selected Podcasts

I like listening to podcasts while driving to work in the morning. I have a smart playlist set up that contains the podcasts I like to start the day with.

Podcasts can be selected by using the Album field.

Amazon MP3 Store

For me, the Amazon MP3 store has become a place to buy music since it’s all DRM-free and in many cases cheaper than iTunes. This smart playlist identifies the music that was bought from Amazon.

My Favorite Playlist

This is my most used playlist. I like the constant refresh of the music I listen to even if it does take several months to get through everything. Still, this playlist doesn’t contain every song. It’s limited to 250 songs so I can still do random play and only get older songs. It also excludes Classical and Jazz since I only listen to those when I’m in the mood for them. It also excludes all those lowly 2 star songs. Some people like shuffle but I prefer this list.

As for where I came up with the 250 number. It’s approximately how many songs I’d have to listen to each week to make it through the entire collection in 6 months.

Additional Playlists

Theses playlists are variations on the above themes so don’t really require any explanation once you see the criteria. Hover your mouse over each thumbnail for the list description and double click it to view if your interested.

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Later I tested FireFox on Windows and Ubuntu and it was fine. Even now that I have the widget last the widget itself is still not formatted as expected. From what research I did it appears that IE has problems with CSS. I’m just getting into CSS and PHP so I can’t absolutely point the finger at IE, but that’s where my money is.

When I got frustrated and tired of working on the problem I went down the rat hole to see what browsers are being used to access my site. According to Google Analytics, here’s the breakdown for the last 30 days:

1. FireFox: 58% (90% of FF is version 2)
2. Safari: 23%
3. IE: 12% (split evenly between IE6 and IE7 except for 1 IE 5)
4. Opera: 3%
5. Camino: 2%
6. Mozilla: 1%

While we’re on the subject of stats, here’s a breakdown of the OS’s (also from Google Analytics):

1. Mac: 53% (74% are Intel, 26% PPC)
2. Windows: 37% (88% are XP, 7% are Vista, 4% are 2000, a handful of ME, 98, NT and Server 2003)
3. Linux: 10%

So only 12% of you need to GetFireFox.

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The free plan includes:

• 1 Monitor
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There are some reguirements on the free account. You need to link to their site (I added a badge to the right sidebar) and you need to agree to receive occassional emails about their services. Plus you can only have one free account.

The way the system works is you specify a primary location (of the four) when creating the monitor. If the site in not accessible from the selected monitor then additional locations will be checked. The locations are San Fransisco, Chicago, New York and London.

The also have Premium and Advanced plans which increase the number of monitors, frequency of monitoring and the type of services that can be monitored.

It’s worth noting that your monitoring services, not servers. So if you want to monitor both ftp, web and email on a server you’ll need three monitors.

I just signed up so I can’t really say if the service is as good as it seems. But, it will be interesting to see how Bluehost does, even though a 30 minute interval leaves a lot of time for unnoticed server reboots.

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The answer was a “301 Redirect”. The 301 is a code that tells search engines and others that care about such things that the redirect is permanent and they should forget about the old URL. (A 302 code means the redirect is temporary and the old URL will be valid again soon.) So… I created a /blog directory on my new site. Then I create a .htaccess file in the directory that has the following line:

redirect 301 /blog http://www.theosquest.com

Now, when anything comes looking for the blog URL it will get pointed to the root directory of the site and they’ll find the page there. This does require that the file and directory structure of the new location be the same as the old location, and in my case it is. Everything below the /blog directory was moved to the root directory. [Updated 4/3: While this worked for URL's I typed into the browser the Google search engine crawler seems to be having a problem with the /blog entries. The .htaccess file probably needs to be modified in the root directory of the site.]

I needed to account for two other changes and the answer was also redirection. I had previously addressed my site as “theosquest.com” but now I wanted to change this to “www.theosquest.com”. I also wanted to enforce that all URLs would be addressed with the “www” even if no one typed them or if I had linked a page using a url without them.

I addition, The OS Quest was now on a server with other domains. While it could be addressed as www.theosquest.com it was also accessible as a sub-domain of the main domain, as in www/maindomain.com/theosquest. I didn’t want this. In short, I only wanted it seens as www.theosquest.com.

The answer to these last two problems was to modify the .htaccess file in the root directory of www.theosquest.com. So I added the following lines to the top of the .htaccess file (all the existing lines were added by Wordpress so I put these above those):

The first two RewriteCond statements address the subdomain issue while the third addresses the lack of “www”.

Information on the 301 redirect and the www/non-www redirect can be found at Webweavers which is where I found the clearest description. The information on redirecting the subdomain was in the Bluehost knowledge base.

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