My Creations — Category

It has been a long time since I gave serious thought into a new theme for the blog. A new theme tends to make me interested in blogging on it again, and with the dropping number of posts lately, you could say I needed it!

The last new blog refresh was way back in November 2006 and has since taken a life of its own really. At the start of this year I was just trying to come up with something brand new. In the end I decided against it and just give the current theme a major refresh. And here it is…

This theme was actually all about lightening the load, as that is what all my previous version attempted to do. Javascripts and Styles were sent to their own file if possible, and the image load has been greatly reduced. There are small nicities about, for example, try go to a page that doesn’t fit the screen height (a tweet for example), and click on that search link to the right.

Also, the image borders are done dynamically, and are all thanks to this technique from The Shape of the Days. Thanks to the little bit of demo code, I was able to adapt it to apply to images as well as the videos (yes, the videos are now a bit more obvious).

The comment sections have had a major overhaul in a back to the basics way, and now include your Gravatar.

Under the hood, I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.1.

Let me know of problems.

I’ve been a bit slack of late. While my Twitter feed has been going, I haven’t had the urge to write anything on my blog.

I even missed April 21, the day when I started writing in it. I’ve been blogging for pretty much six years now, but I’ve had issues in the past with lost hosts, backups etc. So this is my longest lasting blog. And hopefully, it’ll last even longer.

Another podcast has been added to the Watch These list to the right. Tekzilla is a weekly show focusing on tech and geeky stuff in general, and is full of great tips and tricks. They’ve just started Tekzilla Daily – even more tips and tricks for about a minute each day.

In an interesting twist, the blog spammers seem to have found out a sure fire way to get their message across. By posting comments with random “words” (read: bunch of letters) with the URL they want us all to go to in the URL field. This gets it past Akismet no problems. Hey ho.

So, unfortunately for all you real people that post comments you have one extra form field to fill out. I’ve added reCAPTCHA which will give you two words that you must decipher and your effort in filling in the boxes means you help books to be digitised. I dislike the use of tools that break the user experience, but unfortunately (at least in the mean time) this will have to do and at least it has some other purpose than to just annoy you.

Welcome along to daniels.net.nz! I finally (after many months of talking about it) got a domain name. Along with the domain name comes WordPress 2.2 (means nothing to you really – it just means I’m more secure) and the theme has been refreshed.

There are new things for you. A new comments format (when this theme went live the comments theme wasn’t updated), a related posts section, I now put up the video blogs/shows I watch on YouTube and the like and they are presented quite nicely (if you are on a new web browser that is). MyBlogLog has also been integrated on the right.

If you have linked to my blog please change the URLs to point to www.daniels.net.nz. If you have subscribed to my blog, use the Subscribe link in the upper right of this page.

I bet you were wondering where the search box and subscribe button went on the last site update.

At the moment, there is no change to normal operations though, but there is the possibility. If there are any issues, comment.

Did you know that YouTube does have RSS feeds available? Yes, it’s true! The only thing is, they don’t make this fact very well known, you have to know which page to go to to find out where it is. Interestingly, these RSS feeds are enclosure feeds, as in you should be able to use them in a podcast client (like iTunes) and it’ll download the shows (however, for these I recommend Miro).

I decided to create a Greasemonkey script that exposes these RSS feeds in a better location. It only works on the beta version of the pages (probably won’t make a normal version, but the beta pages are better anyway).

1. If you haven’t already, download Greasemonkey for Firefox.
2. Click here to open the script, and select Install from the notification bar at the top
3. Go to any video, and if you want the RSS feed for the user click on the RSS icon in your address bar.

Clearly YouTube/Google don’t really want average Joe user to use these, but then, does average Joe user use web feeds?

Ahah! Two years ago I started this blog, and today it’s still running. Perhaps my longest running.

This isn’t my first blog. I started blogging in 2002 when I saw it as an alternative to linking news articles to friends in MSN Messenger. Then there were server crashes, breakages, Blogger and LiveJournal until it was settled here.

Thanks to everyone who visits, subscribes to the RSS, comments and especially to Gian and Alastair who provide hosting for this thing. This blog is mainly something to put some spare minutes into (rather than programming useless things for the web).

Here’s to another two!

After yesterday’s question (and no answering), I decided to create a MyBlogLog community.

• Daniel’s View MyBlogLog Community

MyBlogLog is a social networking website centered around bloggers and their readers. You don’t have to have a blog to join a community, as your MyBlogLog profile also doubles as a launchpad for all the other social websites you are signed up to (you tell it your username for each social network you are apart of and it’ll put a link to them up on your MBL profile).

I’ve just finished up some enhancements to the website theme. Hope you like. You may need to Refresh the page to fix some things up (although, it was mainly stylesheet changes rather than layout changes). There is a new page heading style, new subscription buttons and Internet Explorer 6 got some love this time to make it look a bit better.

I was thinking of changing the comments, but maybe another time.

Well, I made a TradeMe microsummary generator for Firefox 2.0 some time back when the feature was first announced. Since then I don’t think it has actually worked, especially now that TradeMe has updated their look.

So, here is a new one.

• TradeMe item price

How to use it:

1. Go to a TradeMe auction page, like this one.
2. Click on Bookmarks, then Bookmark this Page.
3. Click on the little arrow on the Name combo and select the live title.
   
   You may want to put it on your Bookmarks Toolbar.
4. Click OK, you’re all done!

Now it is time to get back to work.