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Aug 22, 2008
Well, well. As I reported here, the Number 10 website is a Wordpress site. An almighty row has now broken out because their web designers apparently started with a theme written by someone else - as is common with Wordpress themes - and despite making the site look completely different to the theme, many people have latched onto the Creative Commons licence requirements and how they should have given an attribution to the original theme designer.
I think that would definitely apply if the site now looked like the original theme, but it doesn’t so just how much of the original work remains? It’s a tricky issue.
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Aug 15, 2008
Well, well, well.
I’ve been developing some client sites using Wordpress for a CMS and its ability to be updated from wherever, whenever. It’s a very mature product now and being so widely used there are a number of developers working on various plug-ins and widgets to extend its functionality.
So yesterday I saw a brief news item about the new website for the Prime Minister - Number10.gov.uk - and immediately thought how much it looked like a Wordpress site … and lo and behold it is.
It looks as though my decision to do this sort of thing a couple of years back was a good one and is now something I can pass on as being recommended by the Government!
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Jun 17, 2008
Oh dearie, dearie me!
The developers of Firefox decided to make a bit of a splash when they release Firefox version 3 by announcing they were going to try to make it into the record books for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. To this end, they set up a website at http://www.spreadfirefox.com to announce “Firefox Day” as 17 June 2008.
The first thing that went wrong was that 17 June 2008 starts at different times in different timezones so for those whose 17th started when it was still 16th in San Francisco, they were left wondering where they could download the software until a helpful staffer stated that “Firefox Day” and the record attempt would start at 10.00am PDT (or 6.00pm UK BST).
Now I am not sure what exactly happened at 9.00am PDT - whether people at other browser software providers in the same timezone all started repeatedly hitting F5 on the various Firefox sites, maybe? - but since that time, all the Firefox sites have been reporting errors: too many MySQL connections at the Spread Firefox site and Http/1.1 Service Unavailable errors at the Get Firefox site.
What an unmitigated PR disaster for them!
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Jun 02, 2008
Sorry, no I meant dictate2us: stuartfoster@dictate2us.com although the domain name is registered to a Solicitor gsl@glplaw.com and adminstered by mail@timmyleigh.com who also seems to work out of the same Solicitor’s offices.
You’d think they’d know the rules…
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May 30, 2008
And another regular spammer: Peyter [sic] Clayton, according to his utterly crap website.
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May 16, 2008
…is that they seem to live in some sort of Utopia where spam simply doesn’t exist. Why do I suggest that?
Take a look at their latest product: Google Friend Connect. It’s an application/suite of apps. that can easily add social networking features to an otherwise static website and requires little programming or coding knowledge by the website owner. There’s a video that explains how it works.
All your friends and other members of the public need is a Google Account to be able to interact with your website. And therein lies the problem.
I run a number of message boards and blogs and have noticed more and more of the spam signups/user registrations are coming from confirmed Gmail addresses, i.e. spammers with fire and forget Google accounts. So imagine your spangly new website features. How long before they would be full of comment spams linking to online casinos and drugstores? About as long as it would take for Google to find your site and include it in Google searches, I’d bet.
Such a pity because if that Utopia were to exist, it’d be a fabulous thing.
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May 14, 2008
jilly@mail.win4now.co.uk or help@win4now.co.uk or sales@win4now.co.uk who, along with owners info@dmri.co.uk sales@dmri.co.uk sales@carsource.co.uk sales@vansunited.co.uk, claim to be members of the Spammers Association, sorry the Direct Marketing Association. They used complaints@communicatorcorp.com or info@communicatorcorp.com to send the Spam out for them, probably because they too are members of the DMA.
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Apr 01, 2008
Well WordPress 2.5 has been released so I spent some time over the weekend updating 21 WordPress sites (and at the same time I updated another 6 Gallery installations).
WordPress 2.5 is very nice with a much better interface. Its built-in gallery/multiple file uploader is great - providing you use the latest versions of Firefox/Flash, it seems, as this doesn’t seem to work on some of my browser/platform configurations here).
Automatic plug-in updating is a nice touch too.
It’s also much, much better to be able to ‘upload’ images from a URL rather than coding by hand for this. All it needs now is built-in support for embedding YouTube videos and they’ll be there.
[edited to add]
The IE7/PC issue is fixed with the very latest Flash version and some patching from the WordPress Trac
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Mar 27, 2008
I’ve mentioned before that I run a YouTube Channel to support my adult website. The stats. for the channel are impressive (to me anyway) with 1.4 million video views, but have you ever wondered where those viewers are coming from and how popular your videos are in relation to specific geographic regions?
Well that’s the sort of information you can now get from YouTube Insight. It’s all explained here in the Official Google Blog entry.
Now all we need are traffic sources and we’ll be there…