Tweaking nipples causes pain

Damien has a knack for really pissing off people. Of course, the people in question, Ace Internet Marketing (nofollow condom applied) stole his content for their own site and then got all stroppy when Damien called them up on it.

Hahaha. This has happened to me more times than I can remember, but I’ve never had the threat of legal action taken against me. Phew. I even made money out of it when the News of the World printed one of my photos. When I bothered to complain at all I’m either ignored (very occasionally), or the content is removed with haste.

One thing I haven’t heard anyone suggest, is that this could be a dastardly evil plan by Ace Internet Marketing to get a few backlinks. What’s scary is that a Google Blog Search or Google Search for that site’s url return very little of the bad press Damien and other Irish bloggers have been giving them. A search for Ace Internet Marketing is rather more successful as Damien has found out.

They should have quietly taken down the post, apologised, whipped themselves a few times in contrition and scurried off to their own dark corner again. Cat’s loose now, let them try and catch it.

Donncha's Friday Links

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an avid photographer.

  • Thomas Hawk was in a train station in San Francisco when a body was discovered on the tracks. He snaps literally *everything* and took a photo of the poor guy who died, but then he questioned if he should publish the photo? I admire how he stands up for his rights on the street. Jeremy Brooks who is featured in the previous link did the same, much to the ire of a shop keeper.
  • In Synthetic technical style in digital photography Doug has quoted a Mike Johnston piece on photographer’s style saying that digital photography lacks a distinctive style, and that it lacks integrity because it can be manipulated so easily. As Mike says in his longer piece, every image can be taken as a separate case, but I disagree that that is a bad thing. I’m not limiting myself to one technical style.
  • Paul Indigo has had some interesting encounters while photographing people on the street, but he’s got great advice if you want to do it yourself.

    This gentleman agreed to pose for me. He wanted to know whether my camera was digital or film. He said he would pose if it was digital but not if it was film. I am not sure exactly what his reasons were.

  • Avant Window Manager for Linux is like the Mac OS X Dock for our little free OS. I haven’t tried it but it looks pretty. This is a nice screenshot with screenlets too.
  • Amber Jack describes itself as, “a lightweight Open Source library, enabling webmasters to create cool site tours.” Take the tour. It’s nice!
  • Barry reveals all, about how WordPress.com serves files and pages that is.
  • This video of Vista Vs Ubuntu Makes me wish I had gone for the higher end video card for my laptop. There’s not a hope in hell the onboard Intel video will handle all the eye candy in Beryl!
  • Go Maith are experiencing technical difficulties but still manage a very entertaining dancer and fiddler!
  • Matt announced the new WordPress.com Theme Marketplace. Some sites unfairly jumped the gun before Matt posted details of the Marketplace on his blog. I love the idea that .org users get the themes for free because they have to be GPLed. That’s great!
  • If you were adding hooks and a plugin system to WP-Cache, where would you put them? wp_cache_get_cookies_values() definitely, maybe at cache generation too? What about the admin page?

What has Web 2.0 done for you then? (via)

PS. I installed Xcache and the Xcache WordPress plugin I mentioned on Wednesday. I don’t think it’s any faster than the Memcached backend I was using but I have one less service running now, and the admin stats page is nice.

xcache stats

Donncha's Thursday Links

  • SMPlayer is a nice front end to the mplayer movie player. .deb packages available for Ubuntu! (via)
  • Gamma Goblin has an innovative solution to the new learner driver laws here in Ireland.
  • Meanwhile, Grandad introduces his how to drive in Ireland series.
  • Recommended tags for WordPress – just one of the new plugins springing up to make tagging in WordPress easier. This Blog Herald post lists lots of other similar plugins too.
  • I really like this picture.
  • Kae got hit by a truck! No damage done thankfully.

    Tomorrow, I’m buying a bike. An upgrade from walking. See, I’m sneaking up on the 21st century, but very slowly.

    It’ll be a BMX, so I can use it in that skatepark that opened recently.

  • Yesterday morning I got another Shelfari invite, but this time from Bernie Goldbach which made me think it was legit as I fished it out of the Junk folder. Not so. As James reports, mass invitation spam is becoming the default because Bernie accidentally spammed his Yahoo address book when he signed up to Shelfari. Bad, bad, bad. I hope Shelfari get kicked for this.

Joseph found this collection of Windows startup screens and sounds. Wow, Windows 3.1. I remember the install disks for that although I can’t remember how many 3.5″ floppy disks it came on now. AFAIR, they ended up being Linux boot disks.

Liking the links?

How many visitors come from Google?

I use Google Analytics to track visitor numbers to my site as well as a custom written referrers package some of the early users of WordPress.com may remember. That only records 7 days of data because of the data size so when I wanted to know how many visitors come from Google to my blog I went looking at Analytics.

Google visitors in October

To do the same on your site, open Google Analytics and select your site. Click on “Traffic Sources”, then look at the list of top sources. Chances are Google will be near the top of that list. Click on that link and you’ll see a graph like the one above. Done!

Donncha's Wednesday Links

  • Find out what your site’s pagerank is at livepr. Does it matter any more? My traffic hasn’t changed much with the drop in PR.
  • I want to look at the xcache and eaccelerator wp plugins. The wp-hackers thread looks promising! Ryan’s working on a new caching module and says he has managed to load many pages with 0 queries, adding, “I’ve been testing with your xcache backend for the object cache and things are pretty freakin’ fast.”
  • WordPress MU tutorials. Good stuff.
  • Tom says a hacked version of Leopard installs on regular PCs now. He just announced he’s off to Spain next year. Good luck! You’ll be missed!
  • If you thought your library needed updating or that the librarian was too strict, it’s worse in Beijing.

    I once seriously considered starting to borrow books from NLC, but was later very disappointed to find that borrowing certain books there and taking them home to read required at least a postgraduate degree if a card-holding borrower wishes to do so. They include imported foreign-language books.

  • XSS? Cross site scripting? What’s that? If that means nothing to you, read xss hacking exposed. The new $wpdb->prepare() function makes protecting SQL queries in WordPress much easier now. via
  • Ryan blogged about Haydn’s Gallery ICA where in Kinsale he and I have prints on display. If you’re in the area, pop in and say hi to Haydn!
  • Lloyd writes about many of the great contributors to WordPress in WordPress 2.3 Heroes. If you use WordPress, take a moment to read about the people who made this major release possible.

With the release of WordPress MU 1.3 yesterday I can once again concentrate on other WordPress projects. Apart from some interesting WordPress.com priorities I really need to get that caching plugin out the door.

WordPress MU 1.3

Finally, after what seems like an age, the download page has been updated with the new WordPress MU 1.3 release.

WordPress MU is a multi-blog version of WordPress which runs on millions of blogs all over the world. The major blogging site, WordPress.com uses it as do many others.

This is a sync of WordPress 2.3.1 which includes native tagging support as well as many bug and security fixes.
WordPress MU specific features include:

  • Better admin controls for the signup page. It can be disabled in various ways.
  • Upload space functions have been fixed.
  • The signup form is now hidden from search engines which will help avoid certain types of spamming.
  • Profile page now allows you to select your primary blog.
  • Database tables are now UTF-8 from the start.
  • If you’re using virtual hosts, the main blog doesn’t live at /blog/ any more.
  • The WordPress importer now assigns posts to other users on a blog.
  • A taxonomy sync script is included in mu-plugins but commented out. It hasn’t been tested much but if your site has many hundreds of blogs it might be worth spending some time on a test server. Replicate normal traffic patterns and see if the server can cope with the upgrade process. If not, then look at the sync script, uncomment it and iterate over all your blogs with a script.

Developers – get_blog_option() will never return the string “falsevalue” again. That bug has been squished and it now returns the boolean value false.

This forum thread on the new release is worth watching. Any problems will surface their first.

Thanks to:
Everyone on the MU forums for your help in tracking down bugs.
ktlee and momo360modena for all your patches. They’re very welcome and a huge help.

Extensive documentation is being built up on the WordPress MU Codex by many people, including Martin Cleaver who bugged me about moving the docs from Trac and about telling everyone that documentation help is always needed.

Donncha's Tuesday Links

There’s nothing like the laughter of your baby to perk up one’s morning after a bank holiday weekend!

Vim's cursor keys work in Mac OS X again

export TERM=linux

Ever since my Macbook died and was fixed again Vim hasn’t worked properly in iTerm.

I’m a big fan of SSH and Screen. SSH to connect to a remote server, and Screen is like a workspace organiser for your SSH session.

First of all the backspace key worked in Vim even when not in insert mode, but worst of all, the cursor keys refused to work and only succeeded in ringing bells in the terminal. Previous attempts at fixing the problem failed but I must have searched for the right terms this time. This review of Mac OS X led me part of the way. Sébastien recommended setting the TERM to “dtterm” but Screen didn’t recognise that. Setting it to “linux” fixes my SSH sessions, and also fixes Vim locally as well!

I added the snippet of code above to my ~/.bash_profile to make the change permanent and everything is back to normal now! I have a vague memory of fixing this before but I wish now I had blogged it then!

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