The Appeal of a Blog: It's About Usability
Reading the morning paper, I noticed yet another ad that said something to the effect of “Company X now has a Blog!”. While it’s certainly no news that blogging has made a mainstream breakthrough these last few years, I found myself wondering: why is this exciting? Why is it worth ad-space? Well the answer is [...]
Wikipedia vs. Citizendium: Fight!
My favouritest lexicon, Wikipedia, has a competitor. One of the co-founders of Wikipedia—Larry Sanger—has forked the project into something he calls “Citizendium”. Yeah, it’s like citizen + compendium, real clever. The idea is that of a new Wikipedia, but without the “problems” with the inherent openness of a wiki. That is, not everyone is allowed [...]
Designing Cachable WordPress Sites
With the advent of social networking—especially sites like Digg—making sure your WordPress website is cachable can mean the difference between a surge of new visitors, or a database server crashed. In this case, “cachable” refers to server-side caching; allowing a caching mechanism (either the built-in caching system or WP-Cache) to serve cached files instead generating [...]
Arboretum Illustrations
Illustrations from “Arboretum” installment.
March 2005
Gmail + POP3 Mail, One Week Later
Just last week, I learned that Gmail can now download my regular POP3 mail to the Gmail interface. Previously, it only worked the other way around, meaning you could download Gmail messages via POP3 to your standalone mail client. Well I essentially jumped right in and made Gmail my mail client of choice. It now [...]
Form-Mail Spam Woes
There’s no target too small for spam, apparently. Chiming in to agree with me is Mr. Cabanillas, who apparently has experienced the exact same result these past few days. The last line of spam defence, form-based emailing, is now being targeted by overly complimenting spammers. What’s there left to do? I can’t use Akismet on [...]
iPod Shuffle + iTunes Mini-Review
iPod Shuffle I got myself an iPod Shuffle for christmas. My previous mp3 player was an aging FrontierLabs NexIA, so the gift was a welcome surprise. The iPod Shuffle is a tiny 1GB mp3 player. It has shuffle and sequential modes, no screen, and options for play, pause, forward, backward and volume up/down. To add [...]
Gmail + POP3 = Joy
Apparently as of February 2007, Gmail is not only open to the public, but has a new feature which I’ve been hoping/waiting for since April 1st 2004. That feature is called “Other Accounts“, and basically means you can download your non-web based emails, from your server, to Gmail, via POP3. Why is this so great? [...]