If you write a blog post that links to another blog post (or sometimes just web page) and you have everything set up right, a pingback sends a notification to that target blog with information about your post.

A trackback can be sent even if you don’t link to the target post - you have to enter the ‘trackback url’ of the target blog post in the relevant input field (’Send trackbacks to’) when writing your post - which will give the same result. A blog will generally supply the link location for trackbacks to its posts.
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Yes, well, we can all tell wonderful horror stories about people who never bothered to keep a backup of their site, novel, million images of cats and dogs - and lost everything by hitting the wrong button late at night having had a drink or two - they’re always other people - we do tend to keep a bit quiet about our own slight mishaps …

So, the advantage of storing everything online becomes obvious - IDrive Online Backup provides the usual 2GB storage of docs, photos, media files for free, and a two-stage paid plan divided by personal and business use, starting at $4.95/Month for 150 GB of storage - which is a pretty good deal considering that’s more than my whole hard disk, but then I am a bit behind on hardware solutions …

Basically you’re synching and archiving your files and folders - like a torrent of one - with the options of scheduling, favourites and an Explorer view, exactly as a standard ftp client. It’ll work with Windows and Macs, (unless I’m missing something, there’s no mention of Linux).

It probably ought to noted that the personal unlimited option is subject to the usual interpretation of “fair use” - and that can differ at times. Also to bear in mind, online subscription can involve automated debits.

As trumpeted here - I may be gadget-illiterate but hasn’t this iPhone thing been out for about a year? Why the arrival now?

Or has the memory been upgraded to the dizzy heights of 0.1MB or whatever - allowing these wonders to occur…?

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Maybe - another entrant to the small and select group of Firefox plugins that actually have some value….

Fireshot has a variety of editing tools that let users modify captured screen shots and add text and graphic notes.

Captured image can be saved to disk, copied to clipboard, emailed or opened in a new editor. File formats which are supported contains .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, .BMP, etc.

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So the dreaded word “framework” creeps into the WordPress discussion

Framework, I venture to suggest, often means a serious overcomplication of code in the holy names of consistency, effective MVC, semantic accuracy and a few other buzzwords. I’ve had to sort out a fair few sites that used a PHP framework, where a couple of classes and a MySQL function wrapper would have done the job much more efficiently. Continue reading »

So we’re up to WordPress 2.6 beta 2 - any sign yet of slimming down the jquery and the editor…? - had a client last week who simply couldn’t get the Write Post page loaded on their machine… admittedly a Mac on dialup, the former of which I’m sure makes no difference whatsoever.

I wonder whether there are any indices yet, as to whether the newish wondrous free Movable Type is making any dent in the supremacy of WP…

The pro nay-sayers, of which I would never consider myself one, have as their convention wisdom that 2.5 was the inevitable disaster - what goes up, must come down - the trickle away will surely become a flood…
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Lunarpages have their design contest up and running this year - the deal is, in return for your hard work, you do get some exposure and the few links - and you might even win something as well…

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Having a lot of work stacked up and nothing fun to do, I decided to ignore the work and give Habari a test installation on a localhost, just play around with it for an hour or two and see what the deal was with the core code.

To be scrupulously fair, these vague observations are the product of an hour or so, and of course, not authoritative in that regard. Against this, I have no great love for the present direction of WordPress… 2.5 seems laudable in most ideas, but not quite the finished version at present - there is still the spectre of bloat here, and I don’t think viable competition would do WordPress any harm at all.
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I’ve got a WordPress blog, should I go to the trouble of setting up a (Google) sitemap for it?

No.

Why not?

The clue is in Google’s “locate web pages our spiders might not otherwise find…” - that’s what a sitemap does, and WordPress, if and when set up properly in its permalink structure will do the job just as well. Continue reading »