Irish Blog Awards – You can start voting now!

Damien announced this evening that voting is now open for the Irish Blog Awards. I’m nominated in 3 sections:

  • Best Personal Blog (this blog)
  • Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere (for WordPress)
  • Best Photo Blog (for In Photos)

If you’re familiar with the Irish B(l)oggersphere you’ll know a lot of the names, but if you’re not, follow the links to at least a few of the blogs and have a good read. Then decide who’ll get your vote. Vote for me if you think I deserve it!

Thank you to those who nominated me, I’m going to have a peek at the other entries now!

Rate My Post!

From a few brief searches on Google in the past I found that nobody had done a decent “Rate This Post” plugin for WordPress. This evening I went searching again, and came across the Post Star Rating plugin by O Doutor! It’s in Spanish which may cause some problems for English speakers but I figured it out so it can’t be *that* hard. 😉
After a bit of tweaking, I have it running on In Photos and it appears to work ok! That is, when I clicked the stars it worked, I haven’t stress tested it yet!

My Name Is Yu Ming

What language would you learn if you were coming to a little country called Ireland? My Name Is Yu Ming is a film about a Chinese student who learns Irish so he can start a new life in Ireland. Unfortunately most Irish people don’t speak Irish..
Even if you don’t speak Irish you’ll get a kick out of this great little film as it’s subtitled. Go watch it! (Thanks Donal!)

PHP Optimization and Security tips and rant

Andrew van der Stock’s criticism of PHP’s security model. What security? Global request arrays go some way to making applications safer but there are obscure functions and settings which can trip up developers. (via)
PHP Optimization Tricks from Ilia Alshanetsky has one gem I didn’t know about – the ctype extension. It’s somewhat limited but would be faster and less resouce intensive than a regular expression to do simple checks.

While I’m blogging development stuff, here’s mention of a vector drawing library in Javascript!
Yes, newer browsers have SVG support but this will work in older browsers and newer. Cute.

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.