Thank you for continuing to submit your data to my anti-spam systems. I have been able to put your information to very good use, keeping my blogs and email practically spam-free 24-hours a day. The emails, comments, trackbacks, and referers that you submit are analyzed for key spam indicators, which I can then use to automatically block your servers so that your future spam attempts don’t even reach my web server. Eventually, I hope to … Continue reading
design.Principles is sporting a new look. The front page has a three-column layout, while individual articles are two-column. The category and archive listings are nice and compact, and there’s an easy-to-spot “Subscribe” link in the corner of the header. The main additions I’d like to see would be a search box, and an “About” page. Oh, and it’s powered by WordPress.
I may be a little late coming to this party, but Google has introduced Google Blog Search, which limits searches to just blogs (well, in theory, anyhow). The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that GBS provides the search results for your terms as Atom and RSS feeds. It seems that Google is leveraging blog feeds to get structured data, and monitoring ping sites for timely updates. This is something that lots of … Continue reading
I recently upgraded to the new 1.5 beta versions of both Firefox and Thunderbird. So far, I haven’t encountered any real problems. The only thing I regret about trying the betas is that most of my extensions don’t work anymore. I’m hoping that the extension authors will update soon. The new version of Thunderbird has added improvements to the RSS handling, so that hacks aren’t needed anymore. You can import and export feed lists in … Continue reading
Talk Like a Pirate Day is next Monday (September 19), less than a week away. Dust off your eyepatch, dig up that gold hoop earring, and practice growling, “walk the plank!” And while you’re at it, don’t forget to make sure that you have my Text Filter Suite plugin installed on your WordPress blog, and activate your Pirate filter! Speaking of which, if you have an old version of the filters, you should download the … Continue reading
Les Orchard has switched his 0xDECAFBAD blog over to WordPress. In between bouts of actually being busy, I’ve been yak shaving around the idea of executing this overhaul–making lists, researching sites I like, installing WordPress on my laptop. Finally, after a bit of a weekend sprint during which I mangled the default theme a bit to my liking and installed a few plugins, I figured that I’d just throw the switch tonight and deal with … Continue reading
If you’re visiting this site directly (not just reading a feed), and have javascript enabled, then you should be seeing the nifty Red Cross donation banner in the upper-right corner of the page. Brian Alvey explains how to add it to your own site. All I had to do was to upload the image to my own server, paste a bit of javascript into my template’s footer.php, and adjust the image tag to use the … Continue reading
…updates from blo.gs are still hosed.
Tivo Series2 40GB DVR — $50 after rebate! A couple of days ago, I read about a $150 rebate from Tivo. This brings the price of a unit down to the “impulse buy” level. I’m thinking about getting us a 40GB unit. I figure that if we decide that we need more space later, we can just hack a larger hard drive into it. And actually, that may not even be necessary, as I’ve just … Continue reading
It’s about time. After almost 8 years, Slashdot’s HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS… I can’t bring up the Slashcode site right now (they slashdotted themselves!), but I’m betting that they’ll see a pretty substantial bandwidth savings when all is said and done.