December 30, 2006
Morricone To Get Oscar
Ennio Morricone is to be awarded with an Oscar for his achievements. Although he was nominated 5 times he never actually won an Oscar!
Archive | December, 2006
December 29, 2006
Tiger Style Admin Updated
The Tiger Style Admin plugin for WordPress was updated not so long ago.
The latest version is simply beautiful and elegant.
If you are using a CSS2 capable browser I would urge you to grab a copy of the plugin immediately – you won’t regret it.
Why?
When WP Tiger was first introduced the WordPress UI wasn’t that attractive or intuitive, so WP Tiger did a lot to improve that. Almost 2 years later WordPress has evolved and its interface is a lot more user friendly, however it still lacks the polish that WP Admin brings to it.
Once you activate WP Tiger you are presented with an array of attractive and intuitive icons to click on while the entire user interface is wrapped in a warm set of colours and tones.
The plugin doesn’t bring any extra functionality but it does make it a lot more pleasant to work with the existing functions.
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December 25, 2006
Happy Christmas
December 23, 2006
Blog Comment Spam – Again
I was chatting with a blogger earlier today who was having issues with comment spam.
I guess anyone who runs a blog for a while will run into the issue of comment spam and unfortunately there is no perfect solution unless you resort to using captcha on your comments.
So what does work?
Bad Behavior (sic) is pretty effective at stopping the junk before it hits your comment moderation list. The only downside is that some UserAgents that aren’t actually evil may get stopped. This happened to me recently when I was playing with AlertSite’s services. The simplest solution in that instance was to completely disable the plugin while I was testing the service.
Akismet comes with WordPress, but is also available for a lot of other software these days (including Gossamer Threads’ Glinks!). It’s pretty good, though you do need to check the spam queue from time to time, as I keep finding legitimate comments being marked as spam. Why does this happen? I’ve no idea and I haven’t had the energy or the inclination to find out.
Other tricks people have tried include using .htaccess to deny access to their blogs, but in a lot of cases they are simply duplicating the work of Bad Behavior.
What would be better would be to combine one of the antispam tools available with iptables, so you could completely block the HTTP request before it hit apache and thus take the load off the server completely. Of course that would be impossible on a shared server.. but why would that bother me? 
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December 22, 2006
Hosting without any of the BS…
December 21, 2006
OED Special Offer
The OED is on special offer until the end of January. You can get the 20 volume set for a “mere” £499 Stg until the end of January.
They describe it as:
# he 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary is an unrivalled guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words
# The Dictionary traces the evolution of over 600,000 words from across the English-speaking world through 2.4 million quotations
# Historical in focus, each of the OED ‘s entries contain the word’s earliest known use, as well as later examples which help plot the word’s subsequent development in English
# Its quotations are taken from a broad range of English language sources – from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books
# Elegantly designed for maximum legibility and printed to the highest standards on the finest quality paper
I’m almost tempted to grab a copy, though, with my LA trip coming up I can’t really afford to be splurging ….
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December 19, 2006
White Christmas? Grey Maybe….
The weather today has been mucky.
It didn’t start off too bad, but as the day progressed the weather got progressively muckier…
The entire area seems to be covered in a blanket of damp and mucky fog with visibility reduced to a few metres.
It reminds me a bit of Veneto – where you had to contend with freezing fog on narrow mountain roads – lots of fun for all the family!
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December 18, 2006
Microsoft Promoting the Blue Screen of Death??
I think I need a “weird” category for this kind of thing…
Via the open list comes mention of the “BlueScreen Screen Saver (3.2)” …. The screen saver details are quite disturbing:
“Bluescreen cycles between different Blue Screens and simulated boots every 15 seconds or so. Virtually all the information shown on Bluescreen’s BSOD and system start screen is obtained from your system configuration – its accuracy will fool even advanced NT developers. For example, the NT build number, processor revision, loaded drivers and addresses, disk drive characteristics, and memory size are all taken from the system Bluescreen is running on.”
At least someone in Microsoft has a sense of humour
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December 17, 2006
Snap Site Previews
I’ve been asked by website owners about displaying previews / screencaps on browse.ie in the past, but I couldn’t find an alternative to thumbshots et al which are a bit limited in their range of site previews. A lot of smaller sites aren’t available, so it isn’t overly helpful to use their service.
The other day, however, I came across a free service that seems to rectify the situation – Snap Preview Anywhere.
The service works by giving you a thumbnail when you hover over a link to an external site (click to view larger image):
I’ve put it on a couple of directory sites I run, so I’ll see if there’s any feedback from users.
I can’t see this service being of much use to blogs targetting the more technical users, but I can see it being very useful for those targetting the less technically minded who might find the extra bit of “eye candy” to be useful.
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December 16, 2006
DomainFest Booked … Hotel Booked .. What Have I forgotten?
As some readers of this blog know, I’m heading off to LA at the end of January for a holiday. I’ve timed my trip to coincide with Domain Fest 2007, so I’ll be able to combine a bit of work with pleasure.
I’m currently working my way through a mental checklist … as I’m sure I’ll forget something essential if I don’t
Let’s see…
Flight booked
Hotel booked
Domain Fest booked
Guidebook bought The Rough Guide to Los Angeles (Rough Guide Travel Guides)
I’m still trying to see if there is anything special going on in LA while I’m there, but so far, apart from David Copperfield, there doesn’t seem to be anything on that week!
No matter – I intend to have a good time
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