Why damn? The electricity cut out again this morning. Firefox again decided to forget a lot of the recent tabs I had open, though the fact that it is able to recover them at all is a bonus I suppose.
Sorry? I had around 40 tabs open, and the more recent ones were a few posts I intended to respond to, or software products friends had recently published. So if I forget to link to you, leave a comment on your site, or generally not meet any promises I gave, my apologies – just send me a reminder 🙂
Jul 28 2009
Damn And Sorry
Apr 20 2009
Thank You Everyone
I’m currently a little too pished to type out a proper post, but I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone that has taken the time to e-mail/facebook/skype birthday greetings & congratulations. I will try and reply properly to everyone over the next couple of days, but in the mean time THANK YOU.
Everything is fine here, I have spent the day with Ira & Anna and Mum & John in person, and others via online messaging etc. having a good time, and being congratulated on my 30th birthday. I did try and stay sober for AlexC and Seb’s arrival, but they were unexpectedly delayed, so I’m no longer 100% compus mentus. Hmmm, firefox UK dictionary not helping me with Latin (Greek?), sorry.
Brilliant day, superb company, really good to hear from everyone.
Apparently friends have arrived, so I’ll sign off for now. Thanks to all the family and friends that have passed on good wishes and sentiments, most, most, MOST appreciated.
Mar 17 2009
Ethernet History
I happily admit this first link is more for my more geeky friends than the average ChrisMerriman.com regular reader / search engine-source new visitor, but I found The Register’s article on the history of Ethernet quite interesting. Another tab that has been open a while in Firefox on this PC, so I wanted to post it before I forgot. Check it out here.
Oh, and while you’re on the site, if you don’t know whether your nice new shiny little computer is a laptop, subnotebook, ultraportable, ultrathin or a netbook, then check out this article. (Slightly NSFW due to the odd swear word).
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Mar 17 2009
Twitter / Tweet Related Links
A couple of links that have been sat in open Firefox tabs for almost a week now. I need some sleep soon, so once again, please forgive the lack of accompanying text…
Best 80 tweets of February 2009 can allegedly be found here. Some of them made me laugh, others made me go and follow the original authors 🙂
Twitscoop – If you’ve seen a tag cloud before on a site/blog (like the one in the first sidebar here), you’ll get the idea. Basically, a constantly updated graphical display of what people are talking (via twitter, so in fact ‘tweeting’) about, like a list of hot topics. Link here.
Oh, and if you’re not sure what Twitter is, or how you tweet, twitter.com or Wikipedia’s page on twitter would be a good place to start.
[edit]
Just been reading through the Wiki, and it is possible that Twitscoop uses any hashtags present in tweets, rather than scanning each and every message in its entirety.
[edit2]
For any smart arses out there, no I didn’t forget to place this post in the Tweets category – if I’d done that it would appear as an ‘aside’ in this blog, rather than a normal post 🙂
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Feb 15 2009
MyBlogLog Problems
The MyBlogLog widget (far right column, red background with avatars on it) is currently creating itself a 3rd column in FireFox and a similarly rooted display issue in IE7. Therefore, it will be removed until I get around to finding out what is wrong.
Which reminds, anyone else using the xMark WordPress theme have an issue with static PAGES (not posts) dropping their 2nd column to the footer position?
[edit]
Just realised that there are two MBL based widgets in use. I’ve removed the one that had registered visitor’s faces, the ‘recommended posts’ widget has no rendering issues, so is remaining.
[edit2]
Nope, the issue is still occurring within the ‘Meta’ widget. Time to try other stuff. Please excuse any temporary graphical glitches in the mean time.
[final edit]
OK, turns out when I last upgraded the DandyID services plugin, an option was either newly created, or mistakenly defaulted to a different setting. Reverted to normal, cleaned up a few other widget based problems, and finally should be back working again.
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Jan 28 2009
Midwife Post
As we sit here waiting for what may possibly be our last pre-natalmidwife appointment, I decided to see how Opera (a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox) handled the admin interface (dashboard in WordPress’ case) on my phone.
Other than a small issue with occasional graphical corruption when the on-screen keyboard vanishes, and a small issue with text entry alignment, all seems well. Until I swapped to an Orange 3G SIM card, and bought an ‘unlimited’ data bundle, it didn’t seem worth the effort normally.
Nov 28 2008
Entrecard And Firefox Issues?
To any fellow droppers who pop in, can I ask you to leave a comment if you are currently encountering problems with viewing the entrecard on the right? Recently, I’ve had time outs occur a lot more often (so a “The requested site did not respond to a connection” error message appears, outside the viewable area of the widget). I now find that (in FireFox, but not Internet Explorer) when the widget does load, the image jumps around its original position, very quickly. Anyone suffering the same issues here/elsewhere?
Oct 15 2008
2D TV Style Prediction
OK, to my American readers, apologies, as this post’s title probably doesn’t make a great deal of sense. 2D TV was an ITV satirical show in the same vein as Spitting Image, but portrayed with animation instead of puppets. What do you mean “Spitting Image… Whats that?” go and Google/Wiki away your ignorance 🙂 I’ll wait.
…
Done?
Good, then I’ll continue. Anyway, the following was found on 236.com, and is supposed to be an idea of what would happen in the oval office, should McCain and Palin win the upcoming election.
My thanks to 236 for not making it difficult to embed their work on this site, just a quick view source was enough to find the relevant code, and no amendments were needed for once.
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Oct 08 2008
Don’t Want To Register?
Having just seen a section of a Ray Mears episode I’d already caught before, I wanted to check if he had done any filming in Kazakhstan. Simple enough, chuck in Ray Mears Kazakhstan to the search box in Firefox, and wait to see what gems Google returns. One of the entries looked interesting, so I opened it in a new tab, and checked to see what people had to say with ‘Bear Grylls or Ray Mears – who’d survive?” as the ecademy thread title. I was greeted with a “Join Now or Login to read all comments and to submit your own content, questions and comments.” message. Rather than register at every forum or knowledgebase that may or may not have useful information, I have two approaches to such occasions. The first is to return to the Google search results, and click on the Cached link at the bottom of most search results. This will then open up a page with what the Google bot originally found. This tends to effectively grant full access, as if the search engines can’t see the content, then search results aren’t likely to include the site.
Alternatively, if there is no cached version available, or if the site looks too garbled, I use the BugMeNot add in for Firefox. This checks their database for accounts that have been previously shared by other users, and if a match is found, you can log in without handing over your e-mail address to an organization you don’t know well.
If you use the second method, don’t forget that posting under that account is not a great idea, as anyone potentially has access to the same account, and may also alert the site owners to the fact that the account in question is not strictly genuine any more.
Oct 03 2008
Izea’s RealRank Security Flaw
Perhaps security flaw is over-dramatising the situation, however there is definitely a problem with supposedly private data being easily revealed
IMPORTANT
1) To any Izea/SocialSpark/PayPerPost staff reading this post – I am happy working for you, and DO NOT wish my blog to be removed from your schemes
2) To everyone else, especially those concerned with the way this information is being revealed, I have raised the issue via the Izea support ticket system. However, despite two separate assurances that the problem either didn’t exist, or had been fixed, the issue remains
DETAILS
People who have the ITK code in their sites are able to have their ‘RealRank’ calculated. In essence, this ranking system is designed to replace the (apparently) easily gamed Alexa ranking system. Average visits, pageviews and also relevant inbound links are all proportionately weighed into the final score, with 1 being the best rank, and the higher your rank, the less popular your blog is effectively considered.
The raw data that goes into Izea’s equation can be marked as private, so that only IzeaRank and other already public information is revealed when you look a blog/blogger up.
Or at least that is supposed to be the situation. However, not all pages correctly ‘hide’ this info.
I will use my own blog as an example, as I do not wish to directly publicise other blogger’s info where they wish it be kept private.
PROOF
Visit http://socialspark.com/blogs/chrismerriman-com – this is the blog specific page at Izea’s SocialSpark scheme. Note the (correct) label of ‘Private’ applied to the Daily Average Views and Visitors.
Now visit http://socialspark.com/bloggers/silentlyscreaming/blogs – this is the blogger specific page at Izea’s SocialSpark scheme. Here, both Daily Average Views and Visitors are incorrectly displayed.
Originally, the analytics page for blogs ( http://socialspark.com/blogs/chrismerriman-com/analytics_overview for example) also gave access to the private data.
Should it be required, I’ve obviously kept a screenshot of the problem. I have also tested this problem in both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, with cleared caches and ensuring I was logged out at the time.
I have made the decision to publicise this problem, in the hope it will finally speed up the remedial action required to ensure that private data is kept that way.
[edit added after first comment was recvd.]
I have added a little more information about the actual two way exchange of information that occurred via the Support Ticket system.
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