Hawk Wings » hawk wings

The Long Sleep

Tim Gaden — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:07:40 +0000

So, I’m thinking about starting Hawk Wings up again.

It’s been a while. I’ve missed it. I wonder, after all this time, if anyone else is still missing it too.

At first, I’ll be busy on the back end. While I’ve been gone WordPress has jumped from 2.5 to 2.8. There are 924 comments backed up in the moderation queue.

But I’ll quietly plug away and posts will soon be appearing again.

I”m looking forward to it.personal, hawkwings, hawk wings, sleeper ariseSimilar Posts:

An apology to regulars

Tim Gaden — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:15:21 +0000

Hawk Wings, as you know, is supposed to be a blog focussed on Mail.app with an occasional nod to other interesting apps or developments in the worlds of email and productivity.

Ideally, I aim to post one interesting “Not Apple Mail” thing and two Mail related items a day. At least, that’s the plan.

Today, for the first time in a long while, it didn’t work out that way. The only news was non-Mail.app news.

NetNewsWire does a fantastic job of scouring the Web for me. But when nothing appears, I usually restrain myself from making it up.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow.mail.app, apple mail, news, productivity, email, hawk wingsSimilar Posts:

Hawk Wings serves 1,000,000 pages. Thanks.

Tim Gaden — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 09:56:37 +0000

This afternoon a parcel arrived from Springfield, Virginia packed full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Hershey S’mores and something new to me, Nestle Butterfingers.

So, as I am feeling extra well-disposed to the USA tonight, it’s a pleasure to thank Hawk Wings’ many American vistors (more than nine out of ten Hawk Wings pages go to the United States) for a little Hawk Wings’ milestone.

This morning while I was invigilating a Greek exam, Hawk Wings served its millionth page since I worked out how to install mint . Small beer by some standards, but amazing to me. w00t!

Thanks for visiting. I hope that you enjoy the site as much as I do.

And thanks, too, to the people at TextDrive , “a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web”, who have saved me from myself on a number of occasions.

Of course, if you have enjoyed Hawk Wings a lot and benefited from some of the stuff here, you can always make a donation towards the next million pages.

Options include the PayPal button on the blog’s front page or since you would be doing me a favour, I can bring the button to you:

Or send Hershey’s chocolate. Man cannot blog by bread alone.mail.app, apple mail, hawk wings, personal, hershey, milestoneSimilar Posts:

Hawk Wings: First birthday, problems

Tim Gaden — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 13:43:38 +0000

Apologies. I’ve been so busy writing for money this week in the other place that I haven’t had much time to post on Hawk Wings. (The first week of the month is always the worst).

Last Friday was the site’s first birthday. It’s come a long way and got a lot more focussed than the first post promised.

Entirely by coincidence Hawk Wings celebrated by breaking through the 10,000 mark in Technorati’s blog ranking system. (Like Daniel Jalkut I find Technorati disturbingly addictive. No doubt that’s part of the secret to the site’s success).

It’s a questionable measure of quality, but it means there are now only 8,965 blogs you would rather be reading than this one. ;-)

It’s been a fun year for me. I’ve learnt a lot about blogging, about WordPress and about Mail and OS X’s other productivity apps. I’ve enjoyed the interaction with the readers more than anything perhaps and the new friendships it has brought.

The blog has done better than it deserves to. While it’s a labour of love and not designed to make a profit, it has landed me other paying jobs, which are starting to affect what I want to do day-to-day. Life-changing stuff.

There are also problems.

Last week I had another email from TextDrive, telling me that Hawk Wings probably needs to move. The email said that Hawk Wings regularly does “about 100K hits daily, with bandwidth ranging in 400 to 800 MB a day.” They started placing blocks on all traffic from particular sites to keep the server alive.

It’s putting to much load on the shared server and making life difficult for other users. Obviously, TextDrive is right; that’s not good and it’s not fair. TextDrive suggests moving to a more robust (and more expensive) hosting solution.

In the short-term, I’ve killed the tag cloud in the sidebar and a few other bits and pieces that increased the site’s demands on the server.

In the medium term, I’ll need to move to another hosting package, hopefully still with TextDrive. I really like its philosophy and the tech support is excellent. But either way, it will mean coughing up more money to keep the site alive.

Quite a few people have donated already. To them I am very grateful.

If you haven’t, I am asking you to help. If you like the kind of things that Hawk Wings posts about, if it has made your email life better or boosted your productivity, consider making a donation to support its future.

You can make a donation via the PayPal button on the blog’s front page or since you are doing me a favour, I’ll bring the button to you:

Here’s to another year as enjoyable as the first!Hawk Wings, apple mail, mail.app, email, productivity, personal, ical, address book, thunderbird, quicksilverSimilar Posts:

Switch to Markdown

Tim Gaden — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 01:26:46 +0000

I’ve switched Hawk Wings to Markdown, partly because I keep reading how excellent it is, partly because I’m playing with the TextMate Blogging bundle and partly because it’s the weekend, so that if I bugger anything up no one will see.

If you see any messed-up posts as a result, please let me know.hawk wings, personal, textmate, bloggingSimilar Posts:

Hawk Wings gets first donation. Celebration.

Tim Gaden — Wed, 31 May 2006 12:53:18 +0000

About a month ago, Hawk Wings received its first donation from a reader.

I have since been trying to persuade him to tell me something about how he uses Mail.app and what he likes and dislikes about it so that I could offer a little profile with the news, but he has proved too shy or too busy to give me anything.

This is all I know: Eelco is a Dutch reader who made a kind donation to Hawk Wings and wants me to “Keep up the great work!”. Thanks, Eelco. I really appreciate your generosity and good wishes.

Of course, Eelco doesn’t have to feel all alone. You could make a donation too, using the PayPal button on the site’s front page in the sidebar to the right of screen.

In fact, if you read Hawk Wings a lot and like the blog’s style and content — a casserole of Mail.app, Address Book, iCal and email in general, spiced with pinches of Gmail and Thunderbird and a productivity jus — and your email life has got better because of it, maybe you should donate.

It would encourage me to continue blogging Hawk Wings, especially now that people are throwing pots of money at me to write about other things.

I should mention too that Hawk Wings received a very kind donation from a scotch-drinking, bearded developer from northern climes some time ago, but he is not a reader; he is one of my teachers.

Also, three developers gave me free registrations for apps that I posted about on Hawk Wings. Which was nice. Thanks.hawk wings, donations, reader support, being thankful, paypal, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, productivity, gmailSimilar Posts:

Hawk Wings gets leaner and meaner

Tim Gaden — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:36:34 +0000

This morning I got a polite but firm email from my web host.

Hawk Wings, it said, needs optimisation:

Your site attracts a lot of visitors which translates to a lot of hits and bandwidth (we’re talking about 100K hits yesterday, and 18 GB of bandwidth used in April). To compare: … In the past four days, your site has spawned almost *two times more* PHP processes than the next nine users combined, on the server. Also, your site used *four times more* time spent in running MySQL queries than then the next nine users combined.

Obviously that’s a nice problem for me to have, but not so nice for the other sites on the shared server.

I teach Ancient Greek in my day job, a skill of limited use when it comes to blog optimisation.

Luckily, Hawk Wings reader and professional web site designer Brady J Frey knew exactly what to do. He whipped through the code and without making too many rude remarks, cleaned it up and made it much more efficient.

It feels faster and leaner to me. I hope it will to TextDrive too. If not, things like the Recent Posts list and the tag cloud will start disappearing off the front page.

Personally, I can’t thank or recommend Brady highly enough. He was fantastic. The professional services that his design company dotfive offers are sure to be even better.hawk wings, textdrive, hosting, mail.app, apple mail, bandwidth, optimization, dotfive, big props to Brady Frey Similar Posts:

Hawk Wings’ greatest hits: Best posts 2005-6

Tim Gaden — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:51:15 +0000

For the record, before the hit count was reset by the move to the new domain, Hawk Wings’ most popular posts ever were:

Top ten things every Mail.app user should have (6904)
MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc (5464)
Talking Mail.app: John Gruber (4311)
202 different Apple Mail icons (3434)
MailTunes: A great idea, but…. (3431)
Talking Mail.app: drunkenbatman (3088)
Mail Appetizer – Notification for those who can’t wait (3078)
Getting Things Done in Apple Mail (2916)
Mail Act-on – Getting sorted, saving time (2787)
Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail (2786)
Mail Forward: AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo! to Apple Mail (2700)
MailTags 1.1 released (2662)
Importing email from Outlook and Outlook Express (2574)
Talking Mail.app: Merlin Mann (2508)
Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part II (2496)

hawk wings, mail.app, apple mail, tips, plugins, GTD, top ten, icons, talking mail.appSimilar Posts:

The Switch

Tim Gaden — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:30:29 +0000

OK. Thanks to Brady’s advice, the domain name switch and redirects seem to have worked. Huzzah!

Still, there are a few things to mention:

I’ve adjusted the feed at feedburner, but if you’re not getting RSS through feedburner, you may need to manually change over your feed to http://www.hawkwings.net/feed/.

Not everything made it over. The comments of the last few days are gone. Sorry about that — no disrespect.

The stats tables for “most popular entries ever” were too big to shoehorn into the new setup which has a 40MB upload limit.

For some reason that I can’t work out, the “Live Comment Preview” plugin is not working.

Given my general inattention to detail and ham-fisted coding, other things are doubtless broken. If you can’t find what you are looking for or something else goes wrong, please let me know.personal, hawk wings Similar Posts:

Taking a break…

Tim Gaden — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 23:08:19 +0000

Hawk Wings (avec les enfants charmants) is off to the beach. It’s Summer down here. I see Gin and Tonics, rockpools, the drive-in, barbecues and John Grisham novels.

I also see dial-up. Updates might be erratic or not happen at all until I get back in two weeks’ time.

UPDATE: Actually, dial-up is not as bad as I remember. Limited posting continues underneath this sticky post.

In the meantime, if you are looking for Mail.app tips and tricks, you could try:

The top ten things every Mail.app user should have — the very best add-ons, plug-ins and resources that no Apple Mail user should be without.

Hawk Wings’ Greatest Hits 2005 — the five most popular (as voted by you) and the five best (as voted by me) entries of last year.

Five great online articles for Mail.app users.

You can also search for what you want using the search field in the top right, or browse using the categories list or tag cloud in the sidebar on the right.

Have a good two weeks. I know I will. Similar Posts: