Why Desktop Blogging Clients Rock
Way back in a past post , I wrote about my hesitation to implement features that wouldn’t be accessible via desktop blogging clients, which I find preferable to web-based editors.
Here are some of the benefits of a desktop blogging client:
These Dumb Spammers!
Warning: Rant follows!
Since I recently wrote “Spam Gratitude“, the amount of spam I’m getting has almost doubled. Now I don’t know if this is just an unlucky coincidence, or a mind-sick manifestation of the law of attraction, but whatever it is, it provides occasion for studying spam. And what I believe to have found out is:
Spammers must be real morons.
(If you are a spammer, and feel insulted now, your’re welcome. Read on – I have every intention to insult you a couple of times more. 
)
Stop Wasting SEO Juice – NoFollow Links To Flickr
This may not be big news, but I wasn’t really aware of it, and I can imagine there are others who aren’t aware either.
In early 2008, Flickr began NOFOLLOWing hyperlinks in their photo profile pages.
What does that mean?
Spam Gratitude
Most people feel annoyed by comment spam, and some complain very articulately.
Until recently, I used to fret about spam myself. I even started to write a ranting post on spam myself… when suddenly, the light of insight came over me, and I made my piece with it.
To WordPress Or Not To WordPress
This article is sort-of an antithesis to a post called “Why developers should pick WordPress?“. While that post does make some good points pro WordPress, I’d like to show why it is not the whole story.
The Main Arguments Dissected
The mentioned article summarizes the most common pro WordPress arguments:
- It has prominent users (even governmental).
- It is more popular than its competition.
- It is in high (and growing) demand.
- It has a large (and cool) community.
- It is easy to learn.
How To Auto-Collapse TOC Boxes
I’m writing this article in response to a question I’ve got recently, the answer to which I believe will be of general interest.
And the question is:
How to make automatically collapsed TOC boxes.
PassionDuo Theme Defect – And How To Fix It
Recently, I’ve been investigating a strange effect with Sliding Notes: On one site, the notes just did not open when clicked.
A view at the HTML of the aforementioned site revealed that the whole plugin-generated footer section – that is, the JavaScript supplied by the plugin – wasn’t there! Whew! How’s that?
I digged a bit and tracked the cause of the trouble down to a misbehavior in the “PassionDuo” theme, a theme by DailyBlogTips. Read more >>
Sliding Notes Lessons – Beware of HTML Tags In Title
Since I published Sliding Notes, I’ve repeatedly seen people formatting their slider button title italic, and thereby effectively inserting HTML tags into it, like so
[slider title=”some title“]…[/slider]
resulting in: some title»
This is not a practice I’d recommend. Read more >>
Adblock Plus Footer JavaScript Impedance
According to the Yahoo Extreme Web Performance Team, javascript loading should be moved to the END of the page to improve the perceived page loading speed. (And Vladimir Prelovac has provided us with a plug-in that does this.)
However, users of Firefox and the exceptionally powerful Adblock Plus extension, might encounter the opposite effect.
Evolution Of My Blog Categories
You may have noticed that there are no categories on my blog (except the default one, which I renamed from “uncategorized” to “assorted”). It is so by purpose.
The reasoning behind this is based on an agile development principle: Measure, Don’t Guess1, and is also in line with the general advice against including the category in permalinks2.
So, instead of “guessing” my categories, I decided to undertake a small experiment: I’ll wait until I’d have written enough articles, and see what categories naturally arise with my writing. My first checkpoint is at 10 posts, with an option to defer decisions for other 5-10 posts.
- also expressed in the OptimizeLast rule [↩]
- Look for the 5/29/08 update, it explains that you’d be in trouble if you wanted to change your categories later. There are more good arguments in comment #29 to this post on techcounter [↩]
