Friday, December 30th, 2005 11:14 am GMT +8

from Performancing:
An interview with John Battelle of FM Publishing,
a new but much discussed blog ad network that’s currently in beta. In the interview, John talks about FM, blog advertising in general, and the integrity of FM bloggers. Enjoy!

I downloaded and installed WordPress 2.0 (from WordPress org) today.

• I donwloaded the zip file and extracted all the wp2.0 files,
• created a new directory wp200 on my host,
• uploaded all the wp2.0 files to yhe new directory,
• copied my old wp-config.php file to the new directory,
• copied my theme across,
• even remembered to copy the .htaccess file (for the mods that enable permalinks).

mmmm not working… time to RTFM….

Once I ran the upgrade script (look at the readme file and search for Upgrade), the ‘copied site’ (under martin-english.com/wp200 ) worked nicely, except some of the links referred to …./whatsup instead of …./wp200.
I then renamed the old site to wp152, renamed wp200 to whatsup and here we are !!

EDIT: I’ve slowly introduced my plugins AFTER the upgrade – i don’t use many – and all three work.

Thomas of Mile Zero has a drum machine. Written in Excel.

Minimum system requirements:

• Microsoft Excel 97 or better
• A computer capable of playing sound

Cnet is reporting that Visa cardholders are at risk again:

A Visa representative said Saturday that no other information was available at this time, including the name of the merchant, the number of accounts involved or when the event occurred.

While this has only made the news on Christmas Eve, I would guess that as with earlier break-ins that this happen weeks ago but only now have Visa decided to go public. Cnet reports a Visa statement::

“As Visa has said before, it’s important that every entity that handles payment card information adhere to the highest data protection standards, such as the Payment Card Industry…standard, to protect the security and privacy of their customers. Visa is aggressively partnering with entities across the nation to broaden adherence to these standards,”

This is meaningless without evidence of action. What they must do is scrutinize their merchants more and demand far greater compliance with more stringent regulations. Merchants who are broken into should be excluded from their program – there needs to be a zero tolerance approach.

From a recent slashdot story ( Does Having Fun Make IT More Enjoyable?)

I practice Tantric IT, wherein you purposely try to postpone job enjoyment as long as possible. They say it fosters a more special bond between you and your employer.

The best way to keep good people is to protect them, challenge them and give them excellent opportunities to get rewarded for working hard for their employer. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that flows from that, but they’re job specific, site specific, industry specific things (like the Joel test).

Respect them as people, not just as a Human Resource (like a piece of hardwaqre)….

Portable Firefox at PortableApps.com is at Release 1.5.  The comprehensive installation notes include

• Copying your local Firefox settings to Portable Firefox
• Installing Plugins (Flash, Shockwave, etc.)

Some of the included features are designed to minimise disk writes and therefore prolong the life of the Flash memory used in most USB devices this would be installed on (although you could install it on any portable device, such as a USB or Firewire disk drive):

• Extension-Friendly Launcher – Portable Firefox Launcher 1.0.8 is now included by default. It will alter the paths to any extensions you install to work relatively.
• Default Profile – A default profile exists within the firefox directory.
• No Default Browser Check – Firefox won’t check to see if it is the default browser on startup.
• Download Prompt – Firefox will ask where to save downloads.
• Download History Cleared – Download history is cleared on exit.
• Browser History Disabled – The history has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.
• Form Info Saving Disabled – Information from forms is not saved.
• No Disk Cache – The browser disk cache has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.

My Google home page has some new entries, courtesy of Google Modules.  If you want to write your own, go to the Google Homepage API – Overview page.

This and the previous post have been made using performancing – an fx 1.5 extension.  I had upgraded to 1.5 a couple of weeks ago (not long after it came out) and since my extensions (Adblock, ColorZilla, IE View, Sage and Greasemonkey) are now all supported, I had no problem adding this one.
I can’t speak about support for other blogs, but the wordpress support is good.  The setup was intuitive (just as well, documentation is non existent).  I use a custom wordpress blog, and all I had to do was click the “Settings” button, enter my http://mywebsite.com/blog/xmlrpc.php, enter the admin user and password, and I was up and posting.  It includes :
categories (just like the wp-admin/post.php? page),
has its own wysiwig and source code editor,
a live preview,
drag and drop of text (including formatting)

UPDATE: No problem so far … I can even pick up a previous post from within the extension and update..

UPDATE2: I’m a bit of tinkerer when it comes to tools like this, so I have no fear of installing software and seeing what happens (I do have backups coming out the wazoo though…);  The only real problem i see with the performancing tool is that (for wordpress, anyway) people won’t believe how easy it is to use…

To that end I’ve thrown some words together – a Dummies version of implementing the extension for WordPress.  The only thing to remember is that if you are running a blog under the wordpress.com domain (like scoble), you are a wordpress.com blogging service, otherwise you are using a wordpress custom service

1. Install the performancing extension.  This does require FireFox 1.5
2. Restart firefox. 
3. The top menu item on your right-click menu is now performancing
4. The first time you select this menu item, you will need to tell the extension where your blog lives.
5. Select the settings tab,
6. Select the blogging service type,
7. Add your API extension.  This should be http://mywebsite.com/xmlrpc.php  -except that if your blog is installed at a sub directory level (like http://martin-english.com/whatsup/ ), then this should be reflected in the name ( http://mywebsite.com/myblog/xmlrpc.php )
8. The next screen asks for your wordpress user (such as admin) and password and validates the connection.

Repeat steps 5 to 8 for each wordpress (or other blogging service) blog you want to access from the extension.
Now, when ever you come across something you want to blog on, or even just to save as a link-list on your blog or within the extension, just right click, select performancing and blog away.
Some generic links include Drag and Drop Blogging and Tabs, Windows and Browsers (other options for the editor if the split window isn’t your thing).

I’m currently working in brisbane, and my hotel only has a dialup line for net (and VPN) access. One of the problems with something like gmail for personal mail is the AJAX behind it is very network intensive. However, there’s a new improved mobile gmail. Some details of the service are detailed here
By new and improved, of course, I mean different from the basic html gmail, for the AJAX impaired browser… I’ve used this previously, as well.

Trying to bookmark something to del.icio.us and this is all I get:

“del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible.”

See here and here.