Place of Stuff

Just a quick post.  Pretty much my favourite plugin here has been Commentluv by Andy Bailey.  Unfortunately, enabling IntenseDebate meant that Commentluv stopped working.  However, our favourite programmer/purveyor of fine food has written a Commentluv plugin for IntenseDebate.  Cool, eh?

So we get threaded comments, single sign and Commentluv all in one place.  If you wish to take advantage, there is an extra field under the comment box for you to put in your site URL.

Enjoy.

I have said this many times before: UPGRADE WORDPRESS WHEN PROMPTED.  This one is in the style of “beating you about the head and body and then caning you across the eyeballs“.  Why?  Because a hack has been discovered that makes your older, more stable, more comfortable WordPress.org install very insecure and really you may as well make the password Pa55w0rd – because your older version can and will be pwned.

Now that I have your attention….  Go to Lorelle’s site, Robert Scoble’s site and the WordPress Dev Blog to see details of this new exploit.  If you have version 2.8.4 (like what I do), you are more secure.  As well as upgrading, remove the default admin account and create a new one (reverse order, is good on that one), check for phantom admin accounts and make sure you are using a strong password.  There are other things to do, but that will keep you going for now.

I regularly get comments such as “if I upgrade it breaks all my plugins”, “my theme doesn’t work if I upgrade now” and so on.  You now get to make a value judgment: if you don’t upgrade you could end up no longer owning your blog vs giving up or changing a few plugins or a theme.  Which of these is the worst case scenario for you?

Upgrade now. You know it makes sense.

This is going to be a very non-specific post.  A thread I have been posting in over on LinuxQuestions.org has made me think – and you know what happens when I start thinking?  That’s right, I get sleepy.  And then I get writing.  This being the internet and bandwidth and server space being free or low cost, every day someone decides that they will start up the next killer website/forum/mailing list/IRC channel/blog.  This will be the <whatever> to end all <whatevers> and will bring in the clicks by the thousand.  These people get very excited and start to post links wherever they can find a suitable site.  And then what?

<as a fair man, this is only aimed at people who want to do something to bring in the public – starting any of these things as a personal project or somewhere their friends can hang out online means that these words do not apply>

Continue reading ‘So You Want to Start an Online Community…’ »

I’m not going to do an in depth post on this, mainly because there are already loads of them out there and there will continue to be reviews beyond October.  Just thought you may be interested to know my thoughts on the new desktop OS.  Firstly, in line with XP and Vista there will be various versions of Microsoft Windows 7 – do not get the Home version!!  Home versions are always massively crippled and you’ll spend time hating the system.  I also believe that the Home version is best used on netbook, not on a desktop or laptop.

So, having a spare hard drive, I installed the system on my Dell Latitude D600.  Yep, I accept that this is an older machine, but shouldn’t that mean it would be more supported?  Only outside of Redmond it appears.  The only way to get Windows to recognise and use the sound and video cards was to get the XP and Windows 2000 drivers and install them using the compatibility function.  By the way, the compatibility function worked very very well.  However, in the sense of supported hardware, Linux wins hands down.  The only piece of hardware that is usually not supported out of the box is my wireless card.  Under Windows 7 almost all of the hardware was unsupported – including my ethernet card! Continue reading ‘I Installed Windows 7’ »

Not much to add to this.  Got the link from the b3ta.com newsletter and it is a piece of genius.  A way to block the contextual ads you see when you read your Gmail in the web browser client, without installing any software or browser plugins.  Warning though: following this advice will prevent much comedy from strangely juxtaposed ads and email.

Go to Joe McKay’s site and read up on it.

I have a Twitter address.  But I really disliked having to either open a new tab to view comments and replies or having to keep returning to the site to see what’s going on.  And I won’t be going into the various merits or demerits of Twitter as a site or function.  There are plenty of sites that are happy to do that for me.  So, being the kind of guy I am, I went hunting for a Twitter client so I didn’t have to use the browser.

There are a number of clients out there, so there’s no shortage whatsoever.  Unfortunately, most are written for Mac or for Windows and I run Linux.  So using my brain I went hunting on the web for a client that I could run.  I was running Spaz, but it became unhappy when I upgraded my distro and started running KDE4 – it just sits in the system tray and won’t actually do anything useful.  More on that later.

So, after the jump, I’ll run down the ones I tested and the one I’m on now.  Incidentally, some of my results are skewed by the fact that I believe KDE to be messing me around – some apps run once and then never again.  I am well aware that this is not the fault of the app itself, so I will not refer to the running (or otherwise) nature of the app.  Also, big thanks to the nice people at Adobe.  Many of the apps tested run on Adobe AIR (get it here).  If you remember Klik, Adobe Air is kinda like that but easier to use.  The BBC iPlayer Desktop app runs through AIR which allows it to be cross-platform.  Jump coming up now…

Continue reading ‘Various Twitter Clients’ »