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If you happen to be a Wordpress geek, I’d love to find out why wp-cron keeps hitting my server all day long… It only does it on this blog, and none of the others I run, so it cannot be a server permisson thing.
I just messed up my theme, and do not have time to fix it, so for the time being I have switched to another theme, Tranquility white 1.2 by Roy Tanck.
Update: I changed the theme a bit, and like it now better than the old one, so I might just stick with it…
Thanks to Ouriel’s very readable blog, I found out about Outbrain, which promises to be a great tool for bloggers of most platforms. Basically it lets users rate your content, and over time it can build a list of recommended article for each and every reader, according to his/her likes & dislikes.
I just started using it on my blog here, and hope you all can give it a workout by rating my posts. I get feedback on what you like and don’t like, and you will get (over time) recommendations and (pretty soon) better articles from me.
Oh, and it only takes a (as in one) click. Thanks for your co-operation.
As a blogger, one soon attracts unwanted attention. Fortunately, there are tools that automatically block spam comments. Askimet and SpamKarma are the two I am employing on this blog.
But of late, there have been coming in new types of comments (and not just here). Genuine comments, but with a link to a commercial web-site. The name is not a real one, but a SEO friendly one.
Rather than just deleting those comments as spam, I am (for now) simply removing the link.For now, I will keep my policy of “do follow” on all comments, just as a little thank-you to anyone taking the trouble of adding to this blog.Â
A good while back I posted a list over (then) available cool domain names. 
Most have been taken by domain sharks in the meantime. Here is a new list, this time with a twist: To avoid that they are snapped up by people who have no interest in using them, I have become a domain shark myself. But a low budget one. Each domain is available for 50 bucks, which won’t make me a internet millionaire, but will cover my expenses. If needed, I can help you get started with your own blog, by setting up your very own WordPress installation, and/or — for a fee — I can do customized work.
So, without any further delay, here is my new list of cool & available .com domain names:
Just leave a quick comment if you are interested, and I get back to you. (The e-mail address you leave will only be visible to me.)
Picture credit: Slap upside the head
Matt Mullenweg of wordpress fame recently did an interview with the Yahoo Developer network. This video could have been better.
As usual in my improve series, I’m not going to talk about the content, but the technical side.
They used a tripod, they used proper white balance.
Nice to have some opening graphics, it gives the whole piece more weight. Though for my feeling, the title should have the same graphic feel and sound as the opening graphic.
There is way too much headspace. Tilt down a bit. Or even better: use 16:9 widescreen format, which works much better for 2 persons.
Change perspective. Flat on is usually boring. In an interview situation, I would move the camera so we see more of the interviewee’s face, while getting the interviewer more in profile.
Get closer. When you see that a person is talking for a longer time, zoom in. Preferably, have one camera locked on a two shot, and then have a second operated camera, that zooms in — and follows — the interviewee. Thus you can cut between those two, hiding those ugly zooms. If need be, then close-ups of the interviewer can be shot right after the interview.
Watch your background. White background is about the worst for a camera, it draws attention. Jeremy’s head gets almost lost in the background.
This is the weirdest miking I have seen in a while 
One huge attention-drawing microphone on the interviewer, and one tiny lavaliere mike on Matt, where no effort was made to hide the cable.
Interviewer and interviewee really should have the same type of microphone, otherwise it just looks ridiculous. Preferably a lavaliere — this would also help the informal atmosphere. And a lavaliere that is hidden under the sweater. If you don’t have time for that, put the wire behind the back of the interviewee.
If you have to use two totally different mikes, do us the favor and use 10 seconds to even those microphone levels in-camera. As it is now, Jeremy is way louder than Matt. If anything, the interviewee should be loudest.
These past weeks I have worked on a couple of web pages. In the course of it I came across some helpful sites that I want to share with you.
Flash Den is a relatively new site, offering mainly Flash files. They have all from small pre-loaders to full webpages. And most of them of an exceptional quality.
In addition they also have royalty free music loops, some video files and graphics on offer. Plus a few fonts. But their main business is Flash.
iStockPhotos offers royalty free photographs for all kinds of usages. You can chose the size of the picture you buy, and a photo can cost just above $1. They have gained both size and quality, but unfortunately have increased the prices, while lowering the pay-out for the original photographers.
Still, you can easily browse for hours in their exhaustive library, searching for subjects, themes, emotions, colors, even whitespaces. Additionally, iStockPhoto also offers graphics, good vectors, cheap videos and lower quality flash files. One nice feature is that you can save interesting photos in your own lightboxes, leaving them for purchase at a later point. Or you can share your lightbox with a client.
If you have some good photos rotating away on your harddisk, you can start selling those pictures at iStockPhoto. Hey, you even can get some of my photos there.
For the portfolio section of our new webpage I used a donation-ware component by Kevin Miller, called LightWindow. Besides adding that Ajax feel to your website (opening links without having to re-load), it also enables you to play back pretty much any media format around. Lots of options.
And if you use it, send some PayPal love to Kevin, so that he can get his well deserved Power Book Pro.
If you need a cart system for your website and you want to avoid having to pay hundreds of dollars in royalty payments (and probably some monthly fees), Zen Cart is definitely worth a look. Though it has a somewhat messy admin interface, it leaves you space for many tweakings. There are numerous extensions available, such as plug-ins, language packs, buttons and a couple of free templates.
See it live on our company’s brand new (and Norwegian language) shopping site.
Now 1 1/2 years old, this blog has always run on WordPress. Though I’ve had some Windows like experiences, by and large I am impressed by this powerful — and free — tool. So impressed, that I have used it as the CMS for our new webpage.
With the new version of WordPress, I can even be lax with using links. A page that is really located at, say, www.abitofmagic.no/english/services/eng-crew can also be reached by www.abitofmagic.no/eng. The magic happens without me having to do anything.
Of the many good plug-ins around, the one I want to mention today is WordPress automated plug-in, which takes the pain out of upgrading your blog. Which is especially nice when the frequency of those updates increases, and exponentially higher when you have more than one copy of WP running. I’ve used it on most of the 5+ WordPress sites that I maintain, without a single glitch.
One of my favorite blogs on graphic design, BitBox, regularly offers high quality freebies, be it web 2.0 buttons, high res Photoshop brushes or vector graphics.
Pixelpost is to photos what wordpress is to writing. One great software to easily, yet 
beautifully, churn your digital photos into an on-going on-line publication. Lots of followers, translating to many exciting add-ons. Recently they also took the important step of easing the process of upgrading to new versions.
For fun, I am occasionally posting pictures on my pblog over at visualnary.com
Today I was greeted with a rather unusual WordPress Admin screen:
After my recent trouble with the WordPress update, quite a few of the former features of my theme no longer worked. I could have spent some time (which I don’t have) to fix those problems, or I could spend some time (which I equally don’t have) to set up a new layout. Obviously I went for the latter one. Not quite finished yet, but more of a work-in-progress.
Thanks & Kudos go to The Upstart Blogger for the great theme.
I just updated my blog to the newest WordPress, and somehow the database got corrupted in the process. Worse, both my backups turned out to be outdated (even though they were freshly made.)
Result? All posts between July and now are magically gone.
Well, I am working on it, so keep your fingers crossed.
Update: Nope, all posts/comments/edits of the last 3 months are gone. I do have copies of all posts, but then I have to copy/paste each one by one. So there will be some time before this blog is fully functional again.
What do we learn from this? Nothing I didn’t already know: backup, backup, backup. And then: check the freshness of your backup – just because it was created today, does not automatically mean that the data within is fresher than 3 months old…
Anyway, for now I am back on WordPress 2.1 After some additional struggling, this Blog is now 2.3. Still some quirks; Tag Warrior replacement is giving some headaches – how does one display the tags in the loop? And why did the searchbar disappear? We shall find out at a later time…
