MacDongle

Yet another Apple-hostile blog post: Why Doesn’t Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero?. Can’t say I disagree.

I like this one’s comparison of Macs to hardware dongles. I like the article even more (and Apple less) when I think of the tight controls Apple is going to place over iPhone applications.

WordPress Mobile Edition

WordPress Mobile Edition
Originally uploaded by gadgetdude.

I just installed WordPress Mobile Edition plugin for this blog. Users using normal desktop browsers shouldn’t see anything different, but PDA users should get a more mobile-friendly version. So far I have only tested it on my PocketPC device; I don’t have a Palm to test it on.

By the way, the screen capture was made on my new PPC6700 running Windows Mobile 5 OS.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0

I have done it, I have upgraded this blog to use WordPress 2.0. One can download WP 2.0 here.

WP 2.0 is not really new to me, since I had previously played with WordPress.com, which was already on the then experiemental version.

The upgrade process was not hard, just tedious. I followed the upgrade instructions while watching a NCIS rerun.

Comment spam

I have been getting increased comment spam in the past week and it’s annoying. Imagine having to moderate 15 comments a day and removing the corresponding notification emails from my email account. I suppose it shows that my blog has reached some kind of online “status”.

I have just installed Spam Karma 2.0 and will see how effective it is in real life. Though I think it’s a bit of over kill for a nobody blog like mine.

Thoughts about new WordPress theme

Yesterday I came across the Blix theme. It is nice and clean, and it has that designer look. So last night I uploaded Blix into this blog and toyed with it for almost a hour.

In the end I decided to keep this existing theme. Sure my 3-column design isn’t fancy, but I made it while learning some CSS tricks. I still like the color combination I chose, all that’s missing are some graphics to jazz it up.

ins:before and ins:after in IE

I have been tweaking my CSS file to format the <ins> tag. Right now in FireFox the inserted text is automatically prefixed with the bold string “[Update] ” and posfixed with the insertion date time.

The CSS fragment is like this:

ins:before
{
   font-weight: bold;
   content: "[Update] ";
}

ins:after
{
   font-size: 0.6em;
   vertical-align: super;
   content: attr(datetime);
}

This is how FireFox renders it:

None of this, of course, works in Internet Explorer (at least not without a workaround).

[update @ 2006-01-27 21:48] I am reverted back all such changes. Content is content, it shouldn’t be encoded in the style sheets.

Nice blog design: Wild Mind

A blog with nice design: Wild Mind. Makes me want to dive into my CSS soup and redesign my blog layout.

Then again, I am lazy.

Search for you company in Technorati

Technorati is like a search engine for blogs. Have you ever used it to perform a search on your company? I suddenly realized that I hadn’t done that before, so I did. It’s very interesting to read what (mostly) average bloggers are saying about the entity that gives out your paychecks.

Technorati also has a beta version of their site. It looks much more inviting.

Mobile version of this blog

I may be the only one who has noticed that this blog is not very mobile device friendly. The CSS layout that took me so long to perfect just didn’t fare well on a PDA screen. I thought about hand coding another CSS file that’s optimized for mobile devices, but laziness simply overwhelmed me. So I cheated by using a third-party service Skweezer.

The link to the mobile version of this blog is now at the top of this page.

[update @ 2005-06-12 20:06:57] Turns out my CSS layout isn’t THAT bad on a PDA, so I am removing the link at the top of this page. This does not affect my positive opinion of Skweezer.

What I had done to this blog

Tonight I upgraded this blog to run WordPress 1.5.1, as I had wanted to do.

All imported Blogger posts have been categorized. This was a tedious manual process.

Now I can finally continue with my normal blogging life…