Miklb's Mindless Ramblings
chronicling life in a digital world
…and will be hitting Dr Dave’s PayPal later today. The last couple of days, I had noticed I was getting S P A M emails, that seemed legit. But further investigation, revealed that it was bunk. First giveaway was the “Great Site”, but the kicker would be a fishing site commenting on a fishing article. They are searching technorait, or google blog search, and finding keywords and then hitting. So, some what frustrated, I delete, and wonder if Bad Behavior and Spam Karma are working. Low and behold I go to delete some more via SK, and I’m greeted by a message saying it’s not just me with spam getting through, and offering up some solutions, with an assurance that there are more tricks to SK to squash the recent wave of Spammers if it persists. Well worth a trip to Dr. Dave’s site and donate what ever you can, be it a month’s intake of Google Ads, or $10, or more, if you can spare it. I’ve already done so with Bad Behavior, and so should you, especially if you spend any where the time I’ve spent the last two days cleaning 3 blogs of spam. The donation is well worth the time it would save.
The perfect Christmas Gift! The blogsphere! (That term has been played out, hasn’t it?)Anyway, head over to my WordPress Station and read more about the inexpensive options available. be it a $25 a year blog package, or $60 for a full year (including domain registration), it’s the perfect gift for that hard to buy for teenager, or the geek-wanna-be Aunt.
So while doing a design for someone, I came across this site - Linkblox. Among some other flash type widgets, this one presents your links in a compact widget, especially if you have them categorized. What’s nifty about this free widget, is that is uses OPML. While not that familiar with it, a quick poke around the forums, I discovered that the links manager built into WordPress already outputs your links in an OPML file. It’s found in your root WP folder at wp-links-opml.php. The linkblox site simply asks for you to point to a OPML file, your URL, and then outputs a script for you to place in your header and sidebar. One for the header, one for the place you want your widget. So what’s nice, is you can continue to use your “link this” bookmarklet, and keep your blogroll/links in your DB, so if the “linkblox” site disappears, or you decide to stop using it, you still have all your blogroll safely at your site. The advanced customization for the widget gives you quite a bit of color customization, and the site promises this is a work in progress, which is why they are hosting the script, so that can make upgrades seamlessly behind the scenes.
Everyone in the WP realm is talking about it, and soon the buzz around the net will too, Matt and co. quietly released WordPress 2.0 Beta 1 this afternoon. Some have wondered the jump from 1.6 alpha to 2.0 beta, but to me, it seems a logical marketing choice. The buzz among the net the second half of this year has been web 2.0. Why not cash in on the hype? I mean, apps like WordPress helped fuel that buzz, that web application movement, why should they not get in on the action? Web apps like Flock, technorati, delicious, all rely on more tech savvy users, most who now have a blog somewhere. Heck, Flock tied itself into WordPress.com by working out invites to wp.com for those signing up for the developer’s release. So I say to Matt, and those who made the decision, smart move, and may the 2.0 wave continue to further the popularity and development of WordPress. And thanks for sharing.
Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.
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Watching my cousin get married over the web. Ain't technology grand.
Popular Posts
Side Notes
I’m always on the prowl for cheap (read FREE) iPhone apps, and finding a simple source for such is no easy task, at least in my searches. Unfortunately, all the sites I’ve found that cover this type of information are so full of ads and poorly designed, it’s impossible to actually find anything useful. I have however recently discovered at dealmac.com a RSS feed specifically for discounted iPhone/iPod Touch apps.. I can’t say that I’ve actually found any great deals yet through it, (I haven’t had a chance to play the recent “Let’s Golf!” game posted today), but it’s a start. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying for a quality app, and do so with perhaps too regular of frequency, but still like finding a deal when I can, especially on games, which I know I’ll only play a few times, or very rarely.
Do you have any sites or feeds that you’d care to share? Tips on finding apps on sale?
permalinkI was pleasantly surprised this afternoon by a comment left here on the site that my first Habari theme, Mzingi, had been ported to another CMS, WolfCMS. Though I’ve since passed Mzingi off to the official Habari project, and is now owned by the community and part of the official download, it’s a bit rewarding to see it deemed worthy of porting. You can see a demo of it in action as a WolfCMS theme.
It’s also nice they gave attribution on the official site. I’d not heard of the project before, seems like a young project that is a fork of another CMS project, but their site describes the project as something akin to Habari.
permalinkIt’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
permalinkYou’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
permalinkI’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
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Recent Comments
miklb commented, "Nice to know. I certainly don't want to purchase *another* Twitter client on my phone, but if tweetie2 adds it, that would be nice. Guess that makes this a bit ...
" on the post Sharing Flickr Photos on Twitter With an iPhone
Adam commented, "Birdfeed already has "upload to Flickr and tweet" functionality and I understand the same function will be in the next tweetie 2 update
" on the post Sharing Flickr Photos on Twitter With an iPhone
miklb commented, "Travis, thanks for taking time to comment and for the offer, email sent! Rogue Ship sounds right up my alley.
" on the post Dark Nova: Space Trader for the iPhone
Travis Dunn commented, "I just stumbled here from google, and it's nice to see your thoughts on a bygone era of gaming being brought to the iphone. I've a game similar to DN, ...
" on the post Dark Nova: Space Trader for the iPhone
Belfast Web Design commented, "Looking great, thanks so much for this amazing theme mate.
" on the post Harvest Field - A New Habari Theme
Theme Development
I have moved all of my theme development to Beanstalk. If you would like to check out the full svn repository, you can checkout from http://blogworks.svn.beanstalkapp.com/themes.
Recent Changes
- [themes] r140: removing Lucida Sans from font stack
- [themes] r141: tweak, tweak
- [themes] r142: adding postfields to home template for images
- [themes] r143: horizontal box beginnings
- [themes] r139: removing "clock" on pubtime
- [themes] r138: adding some meta to entry single
- [themes] r137: FINALLY, comment form with fieldsets using the core comment form
- [themes] r136: still more tweaking of the comment form. Can't decide what direction I want to go.
- [themes] r135: adding dates to posts in categorized boxes
- [themes] r134: some comments stuff, and some basic styling for (un)ordered lists in entries
