Technology Tales

This is a useful PDF that I found somewhere: Vi Reference Card. Being a Vi newbie, I find that things like this do help me find my way about.

Here's something that I found while looking into something else: Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. My first impression is that it looks like IE's answer to Firefox's Web Developer add-on, and they do share a lot of functionality. While I am going to stay with Firefox as my main browser, IE's Developer Toolbar will prove invaluable for those occasions where web page rendering is not the same for both Firefox and IE.

Without the means to stop them, I have had to stop using the Accuweather.com website because of annoying pop-up advertisements, the origins of some of which are branded hacking websites by the firewall at work. Even with Firefox, the whole approach is painful, with windows popping up asking to install some utility software onto my home PC. That is certainly something that I am not going to do, since the whole in-your-face approach seems disreputable in any case. It is all very much over the top and I intensely dislike the hard sell mentality and will not be returning: it's an effective way to drive away visitors.

After being away in Ireland last weekend, a pleasant surprise greeted me on my return when I checked up on the welfare of my blogs: my Firefox Google toolbar was telling me of a jump from 0 to 4 for this website, good news indeed. My hillwalking blog also benefited from such good karma; its PageRank has increased by 1. This is where I like to see things going...

This is an observation that surprised me: a title on one of my blog posts was helping to drive my Akismet counter a bit wild as the thing was busying itself detecting and quarantining the rubbish. Since changing the offending title, things have calmed down a bit. For me, that's food for thought...

Apart from a widget that puts a login form onto a blog sidebar, I am not really on the lookout for WordPress plug-ins, but here are two that came to my attention recently. I have found them to be useful; maybe you will too.

The first is WordPress Admin Themer. This allows you to store wp-admin.css in your blog's theme folder, out of harm's way from future upgrade cycles. A neater way of otherwise storing your customisations of admin pages, I keep changing the logout destination to the front page of my blogs, would be a bonus, but the style plug-in is a good step forward.

A possible use to which I was going to put WordPress Admin Themer was to hide some elements of the WordPress dashboard page, but I happened across another plug-in that does just this kind of thing: Dashboard Editor. Activating this gets you an extra admin page where you can select the components that you want to see using the tick (check) boxes. You can even take things further by having your very own dashboard instead of what WordPress offers, or by activating widgets for using with your dashboard. It's all good stuff and I have got rid of extraneous pieces such as Planet News and the getting started section (I have using WordPress long enough that I should know my way around by now...).

I found this WordPress plug-in called Popularity Contest while looking for something else, always the best way to find things. Come to think of it, I can't remember what I was looking for. Anyway, the plug-in polls the popularity of your posts, a very useful piece of information, not that it should deflect from writing about those things about you want to write...

The Windows command has always been the poor relation of its UNIX equivalent, and it appears that Microsoft released PowerShell to remedy this. It seems to offer scripting possibilities beyond what is already available on Windows, and is a free download for XP and Vista. I haven't got to exploring its potential yet, but it is on the to-do list.

On my other blog, a WordPress one that I have hosted myself, I have added the FireStats plug-in so that I can get some idea how many are paying it a visit. It has definitely been useful. It tells you referrer, operating system and browser information as well as what has been visited. While I know that I can look at my server logs to get this information, this is so much easier, and it can be extended to non-WordPress PHP-powered pages too.

Hansel and Gretel Breadcrumb is another plug-in that I have spotted, but given that the blog is set up, it didn't look that useful. If it could be extended to my non-blog pages, à la FireStats, that would be a much more useful situation.

I have just spotted an interesting behaviour in the Recent Posts section on the left sidebar here: the space between the penultimate and final words in a heading is the HTML entity for a non-breaking space, rather than a real space. That means that a browser sees the two words as one rather than two strings and has consequences for text wrapping of these last two words in the phrase. The workaround is to watch the lengths of the last two words, but why things were set up the way that they are in the first place is beyond me.