Posts filed under 'General'
Most people that start off blogging seem to arbitrarily choose whatever solution they trip across first, or whichever one seems like the least work. I actually started a “home-grown” solution via Flash and XML, which worked fine after I figured out some of Flash’s XML-reading quirks, but it wasn’t a very advanced application from a point of view of functionality. (Text plus optional pic, tied to date.) When I decided to stop producing a static site in favour of a blog, I created some accounts in LiveJournal and Blogger, but gave them up because customisability didn’t seem to be encouraged (or easy to achieve). Even managed to install and try MoveableType as well, just before the big 3.0 license fiasco, and while I did like it, I was a little frightened off by the community “retaliation” happening because of 3.0. WordPress was next in line, and I loved it. Easy install, easy (well, relatively easy) customisation, plenty of great templates, and a vibrant community effort behind it. It took less than two days to produce basically everything that would form a million monkeys typing.
Now, there’s a new entry over at dsandler.org: The past and future of dsandler.org. (Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love WordPress.) He goes over the multiple solutions he examined before finally choosing WordPress:
And damn if it doesn’t work. From a features standpoint, WP includes fifteen different kitchen sinks, but the administrative UI is totally manageable (and the template functions are reasonable, if not always totally consistent) . The third-party developer community is active and prolific, and I quickly found an implementation of almost every feature I had imagined for the site (including next-day/previous-day links). And after a little time with the PHP code, I became pretty comfortable that I’d be able to hack together whatever I needed if I couldn’t find it elsewhere.
November 27th, 2004
Yikes! This is one for the books: a worm propogated by advertising iframes. If you’re using Internet Explorer, and visited certain (very popular) sites in the past few days, then chances are that you have become infected. What basically happened is this: many sites serve up their ads using embedded frames, called “iframes”, within a page. When the page loads, the iframe is created with a call to the advertising service, and the ad then appears in all its irritating glory. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is highly vulnerable to cross-scripting errors using iframes, which allows certain programs to be downloaded and run without you knowing it. Because of a worm on the advertising server, IE can easily become infected, and thus your whole system.
This can affect you unless you are one of the few people running Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP Service Pack 2. (If you don’t know whether or not you have SP2, chances are you don’t: it’s a gigantic download.) If you’re not running this combo, then I’d advise you to get a good anti-virus program (there are good free ones out there, like AVG), the spyware remover AdAware, and Firefox, a much more secure (and feature-filled) browser.
The Register was one of the many sites affected, and has put up a notice about it.
November 22nd, 2004
I’ve actually reached that (yes, very low) threshold of popularity that brings with it that scourge of open blogs, comment spam. Some huckster started posted dozens of comments on several different entries promoting a gambling site, another tried to hawk his virility wares, and a “fun-girl” invited me to her site to watch her perform theoretically-impossible (and illegal) acts on various barnyard animals. As such, I’ve started implementing measures to curb spam, including holding for approval the comments that include keywords like “poker” and “viagra”. I’m not having to look at black-holes yet (I’ve been inexplicably blocked by them in the past because of DNS glitches), but I do have my eye on the pertinent WordPress plugins for future reference.
In the meantime, if you do happen to comment on my assumed need for gambling, hangover cures, cialis, instant college degrees, a larger penis, Congoese lottery windfalls, a second mortgage, or some of that sweet-horse-luvin’, I’m sorry that you’ll have to wait for me to approve the comment before it goes live.
October 29th, 2004
I venture into Internet Explorer so very rarely nowadays, so I didn’t realise that some of my CSS was a bit too modern for IE’s tastes, and hence the problem with the menu dropping below the content on the right. Went into Windows this morning and saw the problem for the first time. I retrofitted the CSS to make it IE-friendly. My sincere apologies to all those folks using IE to view this site (about 30% of you, according to the logs)….
October 27th, 2004
- Red Herring: Wiki wars: Because wikis can be edited by anyone, the potential for bias is certainly a major issue to be overcome by their communities. Red Herring magazine looks at the more contentious issues arising in the Wikipedia (hint: politics, religion, sex).
- Wikinews is a new project aiming to be for news what the Wikipedia is for encyclopaediae. I have no doubt that this could be an incredible resource, but with such a large potential for biased reporting, it would seem best suited to niche areas or fanning flame wars. Not to mention that, unlike something that treats content as mostly static objects (for example, the Wikipedia, while growing continuously, has “anchors” for the further development of each topic), a news site must be updated constantly before people will use it. I guess time will tell whether the critical mass and bias issues are resolved.
- Bushisms from About.com. Updated frequently, plenty of pointers on other Bushism sites. Several people I know put new Bushisms in their email/forum signatures every day.
- Newsforge: Getting Started with OpenOffice.org Macros, essential for office suite power users.
- NewsForge: OpenOffice.org’s integrated development environment, another article taking the concept of in-suite capabilities a notch further.
- Garfield Comic Generator: create your own Garfield strip. Very slick. (Why this is sitting on a government-sponsored health site, I have no idea.)
October 26th, 2004
I’m not sure what started me on this monkey kick. It may have been the ever-humbling statistical anomaly of the monkeys and the typewriter. It may have been the “infinite number of monkeys” in my Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy flashbacks. Hell, it could even have been some thoughts triggered by the uncanny resemblance of George W. Bush to our simian cousins (taken from BushOrChimp.com, which seems to be down at the moment).
Whatever the case, I had a sleepness night on Sunday, and decided to create a “favicon” for the site (the little icon that shows up in the address bar and in bookmarks). I used to design little icons back in the old days, but it was quite a frustrating experience to try to work with only a 16×16 grid now that I’m used to hi-res everything, even on the Palm. It took a few attempts, but I finally came up with something I’m happy with.
It’s been uploaded for the site, and should be appearing in your address bar. Hope you like it.
October 5th, 2004
Every now and then, I’m just going to post some interesting links I’ve stumbled upon, but that I don’t have time to really comment upon. So today’s picks are:
- UnitedEmailSystems - FREE 3GB Email and MORE! : Just in case the 1 Gb accounts from SpyMac and Gmail are no longer enough for you, this service claims to have not only 3 Gb available free for users, but IMAP and POP3 accounts (so you can use a regular email client like Thunderbird, Eudora or Outlook instead of webmail).
- FlexWiki: Microsoft’s Third Open Software Project: The world is just a little stranger today. Microsoft has released its third Open Source project. (Readers of tech news will recall that Microsoft’s aggressive stance against Open Source and Linux has in the past made such headlines as “Microsoft: Linux is a cancer” and “Microsoft declares Open Source to be un-American”. Oh well, if you can’t beat ‘em….) The fact that this seems to be a good-quality wiki means that more Microsofties can leap aboard the wiki bandwagon without fear.
- Wired: Campus Life Comes to Second Life: A glimpse into the future of online learning, where we are represented in a virtual world by avatars. I don’t know… I’d find it quite distracting to be endowed with wings and six arms whilst a creature spawned from Cthulhu was taking notes next to me….
- Philip K. Dick - How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later: A facinating essay from 1978 by the great science fiction author about the nature of reality, and how it relates to science fiction. In this day of virtual everything, it’s more pertinent than ever.
- The Godfather horse head pillow: This will be lost on those people who have not seen The Godfather films. Why don’t I find this as creepy as the boyfriend arm pillow?
September 30th, 2004
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