-
Money Talk Podcast: Bag A Bargain At The Summer Sales - 15/08/2007
-
Eco Cleaning from Channel4.com/4Homes
Cleaning with natural ingredients
-
Mobile mozilla browser. Only for Windows Mobile though, no Symbian version.
-
Versions of Opera for Mobiles, including Nokia symbian devices
-
beta version of opera 4, suitable for nokia/symbian phones
-
NetFront for S60 Internet Browser
Alternate browser for symbian mobiles
-
Info about the S60 browser
-
Mobile browsers and real Web pages
Useful comparison of different mobile browsers, with side-by-side screenshots
-
Nice design for a wordpress blog
-
FeedMarklet - Create an RSS feed instantly, then add content rapidly.
Create your own RSS feed directly from your browser
-
Feeds for various elements of Youtube
-
Ubuntu Unleashed: HOWTO: Right Click-Convert videos to Ipod / Smartphone format Quickly and Easily
Easy conversion of videos to ipod format in Ubuntu. If I end up with a video ipod of some description (I’m wondering what the new nano will be like) I could easily need this.
-
The Man in Blue > Resolution dependent layout
ideas for how to create stylesheets which vary depending on the resolution of the viewer’s computer.
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
I’ve just seen this tip on Lifehacker, about not typing full URLs in Firefox. Basically, you can type just the keyword of the domain name e.g. “lifehacker”, hit CTRL and ENTER together, and it will add on the http:// and the .com . This then made me curious about how I could alter this for my own needs. I’d prefer it to jump to .co.uk. A bit of searching and digging about came up with a solution:
- Type about:config into the Firefox address bar.
- In the Filter bar, type suffix
- You should get a short list of values (probably just the one). The one we are going to modify is browser.fixup.alternate.suffix
- Right-click on this value, and select Modify
- Change the default value of .com to .co.uk and click OK.
- Close the tab, and try it out. If you don’t like it, repeat the process again and change it back to .com
Obviously you can change this to whatever top or second level domain you like.
Today Nokia have announced Ovi, their new internet services brand. Apparently Ovi is Finnish for “The Door”. At the moment, the site is fairly empty, but lists the currently announced areas that it will cover, namely photos, maps, a music store and their reworked version of the N-Gage gaming platform.
With the N-Gage, rather than releasing “gaming” mobiles as they have to hilarious ends in the past, they are now setting it up as a software platform, initially for the N-series of their mobiles (I suspect they will try and get it onto all of them in time). The big change though is that they are going to mimic the Xbox Live system, have downloadable demos of all their games, have online play, and a gamerscore system. All of which can only help improve things for mobile gamers.
There are also promises of more to come in terms of services. It is planned to launch fully in Q4 of 2007, however some of the services in Ovi (such as maps) can be downloaded now, and some may well go into public beta beforehand. So if you’re a Nokia user, it may be worthwhile registering to see what happens over the next few months.
-
My Eclipse was crashing all the time under Ubuntu, this fixed it
-
A List Apart: Articles: Put Your Content in My Pocket
Designing web content for the iPhone. Good points worth noting for content for all mobile devices as well.
-
How to use your iPod to move your music to a new computer
Or how to make things impossibly complex when an ipod is a USB device, and you should be able to move about the music you’ve paid for with a few clicks.
I was just thinking about the applications that I don’t have, that I would like. So I thought I’d write a quick list, explain them, and then revisit them in a few months time to see if they exist. I was going to put SMS notifications for Google Mail for my phone on there, but a quick check just now revealed they have added that since I last checked, so I’m one up for the evening already!
- Firefox Mobile - I have to admit, I don’t mind Mobile Opera. However it does seem a bit basic, and I’m not that keen to have to pay for a browser with more features. I’d like to use what I’m so used to using on my computer, and ideally to be able to extend it to do many other things.
- Decent Nokia software for Linux - I’m lazy, I just want to plug it in, and it to do all that it does in Windows, as that is a rather nice little suite of software. One day.
- A proper movie file browser and player for Ubuntu - What I want is a self-updating catalog of all my movie files, thumbnails (in a perfect world I’d just hover over the thumbnail for a couple of seconds, and it would start playing in the thumbnail itself, so I could identify it if it wasn’t clear), and proper indexing and searching. I’d love something for video that was the equivalent of Amarok for audio. Kaffeine is almost it, but the index/search side lets it down a bit. This may be down to my knowledge of it though.
- A way of syncing contacts between Google Mail and my phone - Again, I want an easy life, and I just want them all to keep up to date, rather than having to maintain two lists.
- An open-source program that edits CSS in a WYSIWYG style - I’ve heard tell that this sort of functionality is creeping into Dreamweaver now. Great, I’d like it for free. Ideally in a way that would plug into Eclipse as well.
- Something that manages podcasts perfectly - I’ve never found this since I started listening to podcasts. It’s always felt that it’s been tacked onto music programs such as iTunes. Amarok does a better job than most, but it still feels like hard work some times. I’m going to think about this more, try and describe what I’d want.
Well that should do me for starters. How about you, what applications do you want that you don’t have yet?
I’ve been looking at the Facebook Developers site, and having thought about it a bit, I can see a lot of potential there. What drew me there in the first place was the Facebook-based game Scrabulous. I’ve been playing it quite a bit, and I was wondering how they might add to it. I was interested in setting up a league of fellow players, and wanted somewhere I could record the results. So I started looking at how this might be possible.
What occurs to me at first is that in terms of games, and possibly other applications as well, it shares several elements with the wonderful Xbox Live Arcade. You have a friends list, you can challenge those friends to games, you can suggest new games they might like to play against you, and you can compare your scores with them, and indeed with the best players out there. The scores in particular are a meta level that wraps around ordinary gaming, drives people to play and use the application more. I’ve seen a whole raft of friends get very involved in Scrabulous, many of whom are not computer “games players” at all.
You then get other possibilities, they have a donation advert built into the game, and there is also a service to listen to music as you play. These are the sort of things that are crying out for other sites, developers and artists to take advantage of. Got an album to promote? Build a small flash game, stick some tracks from the new album in as the soundtrack, and sit back and let Facebook’s users promote it for you. The News Feed that everyone has at the top centre of their home page shows (in the main) when and what applications their friends are using. The applications get spread and popularised in a viral fashion. It is in this way that Scrabulous has built up over 350,000 users.
It’s worth thinking of how your site could use Facebook. Maybe it’s just a Facebook group you want, somewhere your users can talk about you. Or it could be that there is an application that you promote at present you could adapt for Facebook. Or even that you could build one to promote your site in some manner.
What does Facebook get out of this? Well for one, they keep people on their site longer. Another benefit though, is that they are building up a massive body of developers creating ways of interacting with their site. They get all their API code tested on a large scale far beyond what they could ever do internally, and they also get the benefit of being able to mirror for themselves creative and successful uses of their site. For instance, they could choose to license Scrabble directly from its owners, mimic all the work of Scrabulous, and then build it into everyone’s profiles when they are created. Suddenly they cut out the middle man, and can potentially claim more traffic and advertising revenue for themselves.
I’m not suggesting that they would necessarily be this evil, but they do get a great benefit from all the 3rd party creative and development work being done for them. Of course this is a benefit that can come from an API in general, but it is rare you see it being utilised by both developers and users on such a large scale. It will be interesting to see what it produces over the next year.
Read The Next Age of Facebook.
If you’ve been using Google Reader for a while, you probably know about using J and K to go forwards and back through stories. Well this is what I use, along with the list view, to read a lot of stories at speed. I audition them for my attention, if they don’t grab it, I’m onto the next. There is one more shortcut though, that I like for this purpose. The humble U.
U removes the list of folders and feeds on the left-hand side of the reader, giving all of the screen space over to the actual stories themselves. I normally tend to view all, rather than view folders individually, so it lets me see more of the stories in one go to make my value judgement without having to scroll. To get the list of folders and feeds back, just tap U again.
Well, I’ve removed the stats package, but if anything the spam is getting worse. So I’ll set up a plugin to see if that stops things, have a separate issue on that host that needs clearing up first, then we’ll see what happens.
On one of my blogs I’ve had a massive rise in comment spam that has got around my Akismet plugin in Wordpress. They aren’t published, as I manually moderate all comments, but it is still a pain. Now my other blogs (on a different host) are fine, so it could be they’re stopping the spammers before they get to my blog. The other possibility is that this problem site has webstats installed in the same directory, and I was reading recently that this is a big lure for spammers (the hits get listed in publicly available webstats without being approved in the blog itself, and it helps their sites visibility).
So I have a couple of solutions available to me. I’m going to do this over a few days out of interest, so the first thing I’m going to do is remove the webstats package (I use analytics now anyway). Leave it a couple of days, see if it dies down. If it doesn’t, there are a couple of Wordpress plugins that bounce spam traffic, so I’ll try one of those.
Has anyone else noticed this rise in comment spam?
I’ve hit this issue before with another php-based product, but suffered it again yesterday when trying to install Wordpress 2.2. What happens is that you set up the wp-config.php file correctly, upload all the files to your webserver, go to the location of the new blog in Firefox, and click on the link to run the install of Wordpress. It tries to save install.php to disk, instead of running the install. If you are using Internet Explorer, you get page not found.
Now I really hit a brick wall with this, it took me quite a while to track down the solution. The mistake I made along the way was thinking it might be down to having an old version of PHP4 on my server. I tried installing Wordpress 1.5, and that worked fine. The fact it did, and upon further examination both my MySQL and PHP installs were suitable for Wordpress 2.0, meant I really couldn’t understand the problem.
I did some further searching for answers, and got a good lead when I looked at my Apache error logs. I found the following:
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted
A quick search on this found me the following page that helped me solve it: Tech-Recipes.com
I just had to alter the following line in my php.ini file to increase the available memory:
memory_limit = 8M
I upped it from 8 to 16 (it’s on a test server, the suggestion was to try 12). Basically up it slowly and try again until you stop getting the error.
This worked, and I could install Wordpress 2.2 fine from there.
General pointers:
- If you haven’t got shell access to your hosting, or the error logs/php install, you will need them to look at the php setup for you
- It’s also worth making sure you have the correct permissions and ownerships on the files first
- Apache was set up and running correctly in my case
Latest Comments
RSS