Categories
Blog News

Wordfence is the max

I’ve been a happy user of Wordfence on all my WordPress blogs for years now, and I just realised that, while I did do a lot of word-of-mouth promotion for them to other blog people and clients, I never did publicly state how much safer I feel installing their default (free!) Wordfence firewall solution.

So this little blog post just to say that the Wordfence people are absolute good guys, letting people install a free solution, and providing even more improvements if you go for the paying solutions as a few clients have done over the year.

Thanks Wordfence !

Categories
Blog News

I’m neglecting my personal blog…

But then, I’m busy.

Actually my biggest peak is not shown, but somewhere early 2007 or so I had compiled a big list of tips and trick for a HTC windows Phone, and it became very popular. Once I switched to an Iphone I no longer added new content, and you can see that in the decline.

The uptick around march-may 2009 is more visitors because I wrote some articles about flex3 and how to use it (or at least how I used it).

At the end of 2009 I started up my other blog called DataConnect.be and it’s app, Twita. Most of my time is now focused on those sites trying to create an analysis program for twitter.

Categories
Blog News Programming

AIR Badge plugins for WordPress take away all the hard work!

This is soooo cool.

Creating an AIR badge for an Adobe AIR application is a bit of a hassle, but the following 2 WordPress plugins really do take all the work out of it. Any post where you want to add an Air badge, you’re done in 3 minutes.

You’ll need either one of the following plugins:

– The Original plugin, made by Peter Elst, which is easy to use
– The Updated plugin with built-in click tracking (requires a bit more work)

I decided to use the original plugin, and you need to do just 3 things to use it.

  1. install the plugin (in your admin menu, just go to the plugin section and use the “search plugins” button to search for “air badge”
  2. upload your .air file to the server (if you want to use the wordpress “Add Media” uploader, you might also need to install an additional plugin called “PJW mime-config” and add .air to the list.
  3. create your badge by writing the following magic words between the words ‘airbadge’ : application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg

You’re done ! Admire your work (and that of the guy who made it possible, Peter Elst)!

Categories
Apple

Mac OS X 10.6.2 makes sluggishnes go away!

When I upgraded from Mac OS X 10.6.0 to 10.6.1, suddenly my 2006 iMac became a sluggish beast, trashing the disk for every little thing that it needed to do. Changing to another virtual desktop became 10 seconds of pure torture instead of a slick swish… At first I thought this had nothing to do with the upgrade, and thought my disk might be going bad.

Onyx, the all-in-one swiss knife of maintenance tools that I ran found out that I had a disk error. I fixed this by rebooting with the Leopard install disk and using disk utility there to correct the error. But my iMac kept being sluggish. Launching programs became an interminable wait (ok, ok, 10 seconds are not interminable, but they do add up in the long run when you want to get things done !)

Now that I upgraded to Mac Os X 10.6.2 things are suddenly running smoothly once again. I don’t know what happened, but they did something !

Categories
Blog News Windows

A New Theme : my own !

Yesterday I stumbled across a Google Advert (funnily enough, on my own website) advertising a Windows-only program called Artisteer, made by Extensoft. It’s a WordPress theme creator that promises no-fuss, no-muss theme creation, and after downloading the demo and playing with it on my Windows XP laptop for about 30 minutes, I have to agree wholeheartedly that it delivers.

Usually I don’t bother with Windows software, but for this I bought a licence (the standard edition, less than 50 bucks, suited me just fine) and downloaded it to my laptop, which is XP.

I dug up a vacation shot of our turkish holidays, and selected it. It immediately showed me a preview. The title was in the center and clashed. Click and then drag’n change the title, solved. Then I made the page a 1000 pixels wide by clicking and selecting an option. Then I set the color scheme, the gradients, the buttons, the shadow on the buttons, the gradient background, the shadow on the page, changed the layout to a 3-column theme, set the search bar on top and it all came down to selecting a tab in the menu bar and selecting the relevant option.

The simplicity of theme creation that Artisteer offers is really astonishing – at last anybody can whip up a theme without knowing all the php code, without having to search through reams of code to change just that line. So far I have not encountered any bugs, the application is really well made, and the pdf help file was helpful for as much that I needed it.

Future expansions seem to be aimed on providing theme exports for Joomla and Drupal.

All in all, this is one piece of software I can recommend !

Categories
Blog News

Upgrade of WordPress to 2.7

I just did an upgrade to WordPress 2.7. Woooooh, the admin interface has received a totally new look which I really like, you can install plugins from the admin interface, the upgrade process from now on is supposed to be just one click and no need to delete files and upload new ones… All in all a big upgrade.
Hopefully there will be no big security bugs with all these changes…

Categories
Blog News

Upgrade to WordPress 2.5

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 – the interface is a lot more streamlined, but as in any good product that gets an upgrade, there is always an accomodation phase where you suss out where your favourite menu options have gone to.

I took me  10 minutes to find the plugin section again ! I can blame my large 24inch screen though. With my browser window stretched across almost the width of my screen they are completely on the right end of it, in plain view all the time.

I’ve also disabled self-user registration. Since the xmlrpc hack, there are several spammers/robots who sign up and test if they can use you for sending spam. Comments can be made on any of my posts without signing up, so user registration is nog longer needed.

Categories
Blog News

Messing about with the options theme

Oooooh. This looks so cool, with so many bells and whistles, I just have to play around with this.

Please close your eyes, we’ll be back to normal soon enough. Perhaps.

Update : back to my old theme, for now. I just love 3-columns themes.

Categories
Blog News

Upgraded to WordPress 2.3

I just upgraded WordPress to the latest version, 2.3. As usual, the upgrade went smoothly. It’s almost a rule, you take a backup of everything, and then the upgrade goes fine.

You don’t take the backup, and everything goes tits-up.

One thing that I really like is that it seems more responsive, quicker somehow. Plus the plugins tell you themselves (well, most of them do) when a new version is available. Cool !

And of course, finally, FINALLY, we have built-in tagging. Woot!