Technology Tales

I have taken what some might consider a retrograde step: I added code to insert my blogroll directly below the widgets section of my left-hand sidebar. The reason for this is reuse of the same ID; it causes my Firefox HTML Validation add-on to issue warnings, and so can hardly be standards-compliant. Ironically, in its native state, the blogroll functions take panes to ensure that each category has its own ID, only for the widgets functions to go and disregard all of this and assign the same ID for each category. To change this in the widgets code involves ploughing through loads of arrays (and functions) and is not something for which I have time when an easier solution is very much possible.

Recently, I posted about using mod_rewrite to block access to your images from all but the websites to which you want access to be available. Following so doing, I discovered that my FAVICON had disappeared from Firefox's address. As it turned out, it was easy to fix and that is covered in another recent post.

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.