Author: Jeffro

Jeffrohttp://jeffc.meEnjoy writing about, talking about, and helping others with WordPress
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Forum2pt0 Launches And More

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First off, how was your Thanksgiving? Mine turned out great if you take out the dangerous driving conditions that developed. Some lake effect snow formed over Lake Erie and as I was traveling through the snow belt on the turnpike, things became dicey at times but I managed to bring everyone home including myself, in one piece.

As for the blog. Sorry I haven’t been doing my regular rounds of postings. This holiday week has screwed me up in terms of getting things done. I am hoping that starting Monday, I can get back on track and start delivering the content you guys want. However, I did manage to get one thing done, that being the forum.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have made the switch from PHPBB to VBulletin forum software. VBulletin in my eyes, is worth every dollar. It’s a powerhouse of forum software that I hope you guys will enjoy as much as I will. At any rate, I managed to find a somewhat related forum theme that looked good called RedandBlack developed by GFXStyles.com. I’ve also installed a few plugins such as the Top 5 Stats plugin which highlights Top Statistical areas of the forum near the top to help keep us all abreast as to what’s happening on the forum. I’ve also installed a GIVE THANKS plugin. If you have any forum experience what so ever, you’ll know that people make forum posts all the time that only contain the text THANKS or THANK YOU. Instead of creating a post or replying with a thank you, you can click the Thanks button which will thank the user for you. This will help keep the forum posts on topic and should aid in keeping the discussion clean.

Screenshot Of The Forums

Other features of this forum include the Subscription options. As a registered member of Forum2pt0, you’ll have the ability to subscribe via email in a multitude of ways. For instance, you can subscribe to a particular post, to a particular thread, to a particular forum topic, or to the entire forum. Alternatively, if you want to subscribe to the entire forum via RSS to keep tabs on new posts, click on the following link and add it to your FeedReader.

I’m also working on installing a mod that let’s you add your own blog’s RSS feed as a part of your profile. This will display a link to your last blog post that is shown to the public on every post you make. If I can successfully install this mod, I’ll be sure to remove the “NoFollow” attribute.

The forum currently covers the broad topics of Blogging, Technology, Jeffro2pt0.com and general Chit Chat.

Over time, I’ll be adding bits and pieces to the forum such as an arcade. What’s a forum without an arcade? Overall, the browsing and posting user experience on this forum is leaps ahead of my previous PHPBB forum. I hope you’ll agree as you check out Forum2pt0 – A Forum About Stuff and register your own account. Be sure to stop by the Feedback Section of the forums and let me know what you think.

Attenda Picks Up Miomi.com Hosting Deal

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Attenda Limited (www.attenda.net), the Always On Managed Services Company, today announced that it has signed a new 3 year contract to host and manage Miomi.com.

Recently named as one of Microsoft’s five UK tech companies to watch in 2008 and heralded as the UK’s answer to Skype and YouTube, Miomi.com has the ambition to democratise time and history by capturing the entire
world’s memories online.

Miomi is a new website that offers a completely new way of viewing and sharing content on the Internet by enabling users to browse through time and make a personal mark on history. Miomi is unique in that it allows people to make history by uploading details of their lives (including photos, videos, audio) as ‘moments’ which they can then link into timelines to tell a story. Featuring content from Microsoft Encarta(c), Wikipedia and multiple news sources, it provides historical and contemporary content that allows users to see their whole life in ‘real world’ context against a global backdrop of world events.

Attenda is implementing and managing the infrastructure to support Miomi’s business critical website applications. The solution is based upon Microsoft technologies with an architecture designed to rapidly scale and flex, in the future, as site usage increases.

Already named one of the UK’s top 25 Web 2.0 startups, Miomi is funded by Brightstation Ventures and is now heralded as the UK’s answer to Skype and YouTube.

Commenting on the contract with Attenda, Jonny Crowe, CEO, Miomi says,

“Our business has been founded on innovation and is set to grow rapidly, so we needed a partner that could support us as we grow.” He continues, “We chose Attenda as our strategic partner for their reputation as a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, with an impressive client list and proven ability to deliver highly available, highly secure web applications managed services against a business-led service level agreement.”

Happy Thanksgiving To You

Just wanted to take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving. If you are traveling, I hope you have a safe trip. As for myself, I’ll be doing a little bit of traveling tomorrow but after that, I’m going to be hunkered down in front of my PC to play Call Of Duty 4. I’ll be eating the traditional turkey and associated side dishes. What will you be devouring at your dinner?

FireFox 3.0 Beta Released

FireFox LogoFireFox 3.0 Beta 1 has been released to the public. It’s available in 21 different languages for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version still has hundreds of bugs in it. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Quality Assurance leader, did say that it is the “most thoroughly tested beta [they’ve] ever shipped” though.

  • Those of you who do decide to throw caution into the wind and give it a whirl should be prepared for poor extension compatibility. Many extensions, especially those pertaining to bookmarks, will probably not function to their full potential if at all.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

  • Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.
  • Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.
  • Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart search bookmark folders, direct typing in location bar searches your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
  • Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
  • Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 300 memory leak fixes, and a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks.

Check out what’s all new within this beta by looking at the RELEASE NOTES.

Blogger Adds Slideshow Support

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Blogger has added a new tool for their user’s called the “Slideshow Page Element“. This element adds a slideshow to your page that displays photos from your Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Photobucket or any site that supports Media RSS. The photos will appear in your blogs sidebar, fading into one another. The slideshow supports navigation and each photo links to the albums home page. According to Blogger,

Like all page elements, Slideshow requires that your blog is using Layouts templates. Still need to switch? Read our help article on the topic.

Seems like a cool new feature to add to your hosted Blogger Blog.

Bloglines Impersonated By Spammers

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If you received an email from Bloglines over the weekend, you can discount it as spam. According to Bloglines, a little less than 1,000 email messages were sent to individuals over the weekend. The email contained recommendations to various posts on a Chinese blog which were sent via the “send a post to a friend” feature on Bloglines. Many people may have thought this to be an official email as the signature of these emails contained the text “The Bloglines Team”. As it turns out, no one from the official Bloglines Team sent out any of these emails.

Bloglines has since banned the user’s IP address and has suspended the “send email” feature to monitor the situation.

Bloglines sends out email to our subscribers for purposes specific to operating Bloglines (registration verification, change password, change of terms of service and other policies, significant product announcements, etc) Most product announcements can be found on the Bloglines News Feed. We take your privacy carefully and will protect our customers from spam. -Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

New Features Debut On Flickr

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Flickr has unveiled a new feature/project called Places. Places is a Flickr project that makes use of all of the publicly available Geotagged photos. Think of it as a new way to see a massive amount of data that otherwise, may not of been noticed. Asides from being able to see photos of places all over the world, Flickr has also developed an experimental new map which somehow displays breaking news. That is, if an event is taking place somewhere in the world such as The Oscars, chances are, there will be a number of people taking photos which will then show up on this map.

I gave the new map a try and I thought it was pretty cool. The text that appears on the World Map is the name of the event. If you click on the event text, a photo ribbon appears showing all of the photos that were taken at the event. I saw an event that appeared to be taking place in the Pacific Ocean. After clicking on it, I figured out it was a wedding in Hawaii. At any rate, Flickr has succeeded in giving user’s yet another way to kill time.

Wedding In Hawaii

The Switch To vBulletin

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Don’t mind the dust that is being kicked up by the work I’m doing to the forum. Actually, I wanted to let everyone know that I have decided to plunk down $85.00 and purchased a one year lease on vBulletin. I gave PHPBB a shot and although they have made leaps and strides over version 2, I can’t help but feel how spoiled I was when I managed a forum that was powered by Vbulletin. In my honest opinion, Vbulletin is worth every penny. It’s more user friendly, is packed with power and punch right out of the box, and provides an excellent framework for growth. Best of all, most of the things I want to use in forum software is already built into Vbulletin. I don’t have to spend every waking moment of the day installing 100 mods in order to get the functionality that I need.

Everything that was on the PHPBB forum install is now gone. We are starting over from scratch but this is as good a reason as any to do so. I have experience with Vbulletin and I know what it’s capable of. It might take me a few days to get everything the way I want before I re-launch the forums but it’s something worth waiting for.

Back To Blogging Basics

BlogHeraldLogoJason Kaneshiro of BlogHerald has written up an interesting post that describes the amount of de-cluttering posts he’s seen published around the blogosphere. In this particular post, Jason describes some of the ways he has de-clutered his own blog. From cleaning up the CSS code, to uninstalling and removing plugins, to digging into PHPMyAdmin to optimize the WordPress database tables. Jason seems to have covered the gamut, in terms of cleaning up his blog.

When Web 2.0 first began with Google and Craigslist, one of the “innovations” was simplicity itself – empty, uncluttered designs that allowed users to get what needed to be done with a minimum of design elements.

I feel this basic concept has been forgotten recently, what with widgets, ads, videos, monetization, polls, spam, and splogs. Some blogs are so obscured with extra stuff that the content – the post itself – is nearly impossible to find.

It may be time to get back to basics.

As for myself, I don’t think I have overloaded the blog just yet. I’ve come close, but have been able to stop myself before it was too late. In all honesty, unless you the reader feels differently, I don’t think I need to do too much in the way of cleaning. I wouldn’t mind performing those database optimizations and I think I’ll see what I can do to clean up this theme and it’s associated CSS code. Perhaps I can substitute a few more images with CSS colors.

The biggest impact on loading time is from having third party widgets displayed on the blog. The page will only load as fast as those sites that the widgets are pulling data from. I’ve already removed the Google Analytics code from the site because at times, it was causing the site to hang. I’ve thought about removing all of the third party widgets on this site and replacing them with local WordPress plugins that provide the same functionality. However, I can’t convince myself to remove the THREE widgets in the sidebar.

What are your thoughts on the whole de-cluttering issue? After reading the article up above, do you feel the need to rethink your blog and go back to basics? If so, how do you plan on achieving that goal?

Also, I’d like to know if you think my blog is too cluttered. Does it load too slow for you? Is there too much crap getting in the way of the content?