Bad News

• My theme didnt quite work.

Good News

• I didnt like the theme much anyway, I only kept it on because of CSS Reboot which is over now.
• My plug-in’s all seem to work fine, even the ones I wrote.
• Shiny new stuff to play with!

I guess that means it is time for a new theme sometime soon…

Richard writes a password management utility called Access Manager and is doing an offer that if you blog about any aspect of security best practice and include a link to him then you get a free copy of the pro version of his software.

Richard “gets it” - He isn’t forcing people to blog specific words about his product without trying it, he isnt even asking you to specifically blog about his product at all. He is offering a way for people to try the software first (the non-pro version) and best of all he is asking people to blog about security best practice and if that isn’t a good idea then I don’t know what is

A cracking example of blogger marketing done right.

Sorry for the delay in getting a compatible release of this up.

I absolutely could not switch back from FireFox to IE at the moment but there are still sites that do not work in FF and so you have to switch occasionally. Up until now, I used the IEView extension which would launch IE for the current page in a new window, this worked but it was not ideal.

IETab is just great, click an icon in the status bar and switch instantly from viewing the page in FF to IE, within the same tab.

Maybe it’s the way I was raised, but I find that I get mad about all the wrong things. For example, when I hear a news report about some serial killer who buried 43 victims in an underground bunker that he constructed beneath his shed, my first reaction is Wow. He built an underground bunker under a shed! I find myself admiring his industriousness and passion in the pursuit of his dreams. That’s clearly wrong.

Then today I read in the November 2005 Reader’s Digest about Marine engineer Richard James who invented the Slinky in 1943 after a tension spring from a meter used to test battleship horsepower fell off his desk and “walked” end-over-end. I hate that guy. I don’t know the full story (that’s why they call it the Reader’s Digest) but it sure seems like he was rewarded for being clumsy. I can’t respect that.

Goodness baked right in, i’ll be amazed if he can keep this level of quality and quantity up but lets hope!

Technorati Tags: Dilbert, Scott Adams, Slinky, Underground Bunker, Serial Killer

This article on how Sony are putting RootKits on systems to force on DRM software that prevents the CD being copied is shocking, I would expect this of the worst Spyware or Malware but not when I put a plain old Audio CD in my PC. It’s not even really about what this is today (although I dont agree with it) but think about where this could lead, thats the scary one.

There is a simple way to avoid this, just turn AutoPlay off for your CD/DVD drive. You can also read more about what a RootKit is and find a tool to help detect and remove them from the ever wonderful SysInternals.

Technorati Tags: RootKit, Sony, DRM, SysInternals, AutoPlay

The timing of CSS reboot this time was pretty fortunate because I have been using a very quickly hacked together version of an existing theme since moving across to WordPress a couple of months ago. I have always tried to keep away from using others designs so CSS Reboot was a convenient excuse to re-do my design.

I wanted to stick with the same basic image of the bench since I based the blog name on a pun around the image (I am a total sucker for a pun!). The image was taken by me at on Lytham Green (right next to the windmill) with a Canon 20D and a Canon EF-S 17-85 IS USM. All of the images that make up the background are made up from that basic image, cloning and healing were used to expand the sky to cope with large resolutions and a levels adjustment applied to an area of cloud to form the darker area at the top. The logo image was written on a Tablet PC using Windows Journal and simply screen captured.

The CSS/XHTML design is integrated into a WordPress theme (obviously) and uses a modification of the catfish technique from SitePoint to get the top and bottom of the image fixed in Internet Explorer as well as FireFox.

It has been tested in IE6 and FireFox 1.0.7, please leave comments if you either have any problems with it or if you like/dislike it.

Technorati Tags: CSS Reboot, CSS, WebDesign, XHTML, Web Standards, Lytham

This is the time consuming bit though, getting it working with IE and integrated as a WordPress theme.

*edit* What a time for COLOURlovers to go offline!!! I need my colour fix!!!

cssreboot

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Technorati Tags: CSS Reboot, CSS, WebDesign

A strange thing happened, I got a license code for their software… I didnt expect that!

I guess one of two things could have happened here:

• If I was cynical
  I would assume that this means that noone is checking the content of the blogs that are posted for this offer and it is just some automated service handing out license keys to anyone who submits a URL.
• If I was not so cynical
  I would think that they read my blog and figured that if I tried the software that I would change my view of their company and maybe blog positively about them when I have used it.

Now, I read a post from esdaniel that made me think that the CEO of Vista software, Anthony Carrabino might actually care about what people think because he is definately answering e-mail from people about his software, so I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and go with a non-cynical view for now, however a comment by Anthony or someone VistaDB here would prove this.

Technorati Tags: VistaDB, Meme, Blog Marketing

Take a leaf out of the book of a company that is doing this properly and offer people that free copy of your software for just proving they have an active blog and leave it up to them if and what they post about it. You have obviously decided that you can take the revenue hit by giving free versions of your software away to bloggers but this way you will get better publicity out of it because you will get real publicity out of it. You might even learn something about your users, what they like and more importantly what they dislike and as a company will gain credibility too, if I read your press release copied and pasted onto 100 blogs, I will know that is exactly what it is and think, well… I will think (and blog) exactly what I have written here. However, if I see 20 or even 2 people blog about it with real experiences (good or bad, as long as its not really bad, but you do believe in your product, don’t you?) I will be 10x more likely to try it and talk about it.

You had a good idea by using bloggers to get publicity to your new product, however it is not too late to save it from being badly executed. Don’t be afraid to change it now.

Technorati Tags: VistaDB, Meme, Blog Marketing

But honestly, I am a 20 year old woman with large breasts!!!

I would love to see the stats for how many “women” have tried this! I would be willing to bet that the “Make yourself as a character” rather than “Make any character you would like to see strip” came out of the fear of bad mainstream press but to me it just makes the whole thing more bizarre and therefore entertaining

I bet this cost less than a single 30 second TV advert to create and I bet it makes a bigger impact via blogs/msn/aim/e-mail/etc… and the feedback from trackbacks and referrals should be invaluable (Note: If you are from Gap or the marketing agency that was behind this and are checking stats and trackbacks, leave a comment below )

Old marketing is dead? Long live the age of viral strip tease simulations!!!

As promised, I am putting the session slides up here for you to grab if you want to review what was covered or if you missed the session:

• Managing Your Development Process with Groove Forms - (ppt) (pdf)
• Screenshots from the Demo - (ppt) (pdf)

If you would like access to the sample Groove workspace that has a copy of the User Story and Test Case custom forms in it, leave me a comment below (enter your e-mail address, I can see it but the spam bots can’t) or just mail me at dave@dvhome.co.uk and I will add you (Note: You will need a license for Groove, or the trial versionto do this).

Thanks also to Sarah who organised drinks and the dinner after the event, I was amazed how many turned up for that and it was nice to meet the guys who were sitting near me (apart from Phil of course )

I guess that’s it for now, don’t forget to fill in the feedback form and see you all at the next one!

Courtesy of Developer Developer Developer Day 2

Unfortunately, getting everything I want in the main presentation has meant I haven’t room in 30 minutes to cover everything I wanted to (or promised to in the abstract) so I will be following up with some articles here on the blog. I will also post slides and example data after the presentation tomorrow.

If you read this blog and are coming tomorrow, come over and say hi

Technorati Tags: DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper, Microsoft, Groove, Agile Development

Oh and this was posted from its blogging tool

Technorati Tags: Flock, Del.icio.us, Blogging

http://www.bythom.com/apple.htm

These are the reasons I got rid of my original iPod and will never buy a new one.

• Added a tag preview to the options window for checking which flickr pics you will see without having to cache them all or do the post/edit/post/edit thing
• Option to suppress the automatic CSS output, although if you use this then remember to implement the styles in your site CSS.
• Option to hide title and/or footer div’s

So what are you waiting for?
  Download.

Leave a comment if you find a bug with it

Would everyone shut up about the iPod already, please.

Yes it will be huge through market and brand dominance. But is it new, or does it push any barriers back? Hell no, its old news and uses proprietary formats again.

iPod schmiPod

Technorati Tags: iPod

shhh

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Updated release is here:
  Download

See my previous post for a brief description of what this plug-in does and for some examples of it in use.

The reason I am releasing it now is because it now caches better and has a full cache management in options (if you want to update the content for a specific tag).

Anyway here it is:
  Download
  New Version Here

Enjoy, and leave a comment if you have any issues with it or feature requests (for a current list of To-Do items, check inside the php file in the comment at the top).

Technorati Tags: WP-Flickr, Flickr, WordPress, Plugin

Once the plug-in is installed, if you were to write <flickr>blue</flickr>, you would get this:

blue

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Tags can be combined too, <flickr>blue, sea</flickr> would give:

blue and sea

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I am not 100% sure how I am going to use it yet, maybe to break up sections of a long post with some colour and images. Maybe once per post at the bottom with a relevant word, maybe just completely randomly.

The plug-in is far from even being close to a beta so I am not going to put it up for download yet. I will when I finish it off though.

*edit* - Looks like there is a bug with it showing the same pics for blue and blue, sea. Told you it wasn’t ready for release!

*edit* - Fixed the bug with v0.2, tags should show correctly above.

Technorati Tags: WP-Flickr, Flickr, Tags, SimpleTags, WordPress

Anyway tonight I noticed a new line in the user-agents logged by Mint - Kinja.

Looks like a new blog search engine but obviously its crawler can read and execute JavaScript, it was bound to happen one day but I dont really see the point as JavaScript is rarely used to affect the core content of a page without user interaction (which it obviously cant simulate) so what do they get from building this into their crawler?

Lets just hope its a while until the spamers bots get wise to this.

spam

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Technorati Tags: Kinja, Blog Search, Blogs, JavaScript

Invite systems (like you did with GMail) are appropriate when you launch a new web based app.

After 15 minutes trying to upload my OPML and then 10 minutes trying to view any of my feeds I am giving up and leaving the site dissapointed by the experience. Yes, I will probably try back tomorrow but this is not a first time experience you should be proud of.

So… learn from… err, well, learn from yourself and do launches like this that are going to get destroyed as the blog buzz spreads and make use of an invite system. It does more than just prevent your servers from falling over, it builds an incredible anticipation and buzz (if the product is good). Remember how crazy things were with the GMail launch?

So if you are reading this, do yourself a favour and don’t visit Google Reader until tomorrow.

via Scoble

• VOIP to a Skype like quality? - tick
• Open standard? (open source is not necessary, just the standard for comms should be open so I am not locked into them forever) - tick
• Secure? - err wait, I cant find that out from their site

That’s where it hit me that they didn’t have a blog, or a news page, or forums, the site looked exactly the same today as it did when I first visited them a few months ago. Where is the news flow, where is the communication. I found myself doubting the company because they were not communicating openly (something which Skype are pretty good at, ironically). The last updated piece of information on their home page was a link to a pretty poor ZDnet article. Not good enough.

Now, it is a much harsher landscape for these products today and more is certainly expected of a company like this in today’s market. Interestingly, this would have been a decent web site for a few years ago, about the time when the other big IM sites were really making a name for themselves. Would certain other networks gain the position that they are today they were only starting out right now? We are filled swamped by proprietary networks that don’t have any way to feedback or to see what the company/department thinks (the only one that actually might have some sort of blog would be MSN messenger but I can’t find one for it, is there one Robert?). Just because it was acceptable back then, doesn’t mean it is today.

The interesting thing for me though is that ended up tonight having seeds of doubt planted in my mind about the integrity of this company, fears for what would happen to the project, and all sorts of other doubts just because they didn’t blog. wow, I even surprised myself.

I am also wondering how many other people feel this way about Skype and eBay (and was it ever worth the multiple billion $$$ they paid for it?

Technorati Tags: VOIP, Skype, Gizmo Project, Gizmo, eBay, IM, Messenger, MSN, AIM, Yahoo

Version 1.1 was created as a user requested that he wanted the script tag to be output in the body of the HTML document rather than the header, I have added this and also changed around the options page so it validates and is much cleaner. As always, leave me a comment if there are any problems.

Current Version
Download: WP-Mint v1.1

Installation
To install or upgrade WP-Mint, simply download the latest release and copy/overwrite the wp-mint.php file in your WordPress plugins folder. Then go to your admin console and activate it from the Plugins options page. If you have installed Mint anywhere except the default location (/mint) then you will need to go to the WP-Mint options page by clicking the Mint button on the Options menu in your admin control panel.

Change Log
Version 1.1

• Added option to output to either the head or body
• Rewrote options page code & reorganised options UI
• Options page now validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Version 1.0

• Added option to turn Mint logging on/off
• Added the Test/View feature to the Options screen
• Re-worded the Options screen for readability
• Tidied up the code

Version 0.1

• Initial Release

Feedback and Feature Requests
I can’t think that it would need many more features but if any would be useful to you then please let me know by leaving a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Mint, WordPress, WP-Mint, Plugin