The major failing of Akismet ...

• February 25, 2007
• James Skemp

The major failing of the Akismet plug-in is that you can't determine which IPs, if any, are spamming your site the most.

Akismet needs to have the ability to group by IP, as well as show counts for each IP.

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Online backups?

• February 23, 2007
• James Skemp

I was reading an article the other day, which was discussing a companies backup plan. It's suicidal for companies, in this day and age, not to have some kind of backup plan in place (and, most importantly, tested). Yet, for home users, especially those with important documents on their computers, it's almost approaching suicidal.

There's ways to do these backups by burning to CD or DVD, of course, and even Windows seems to have something built in (or at least my HP computer with a DVD-burner does), but you actually have to run the utility, and put a disc in the drive.

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Not impressed by the WordPress 2.1 feature list

• January 22, 2007
• James Skemp

WordPress 2.1 was released today and, unfortunately, I'm just not horribly impressed by the new feature list.  Granted, it's a short feature list, but I see few reasons to upgrade.  The main reason?  Most of these features look like they're geared towards non-technical/shared-hosting users.

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Browser support for different versions of JavaScript

• January 19, 2007
• James Skemp

After a number of Google searches, I've been unable to find a listing of what browsers support what versions of JavaScript. The few sites I did find were AnyBrowser.com and Mozilla.org. Unfortunately, the information they provide is pretty focused. In this article I'll be going over this information, and trying to dig up more.

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The WordPress calendar is a table

• January 15, 2007
• James Skemp

There's a number of problems with WordPress, as far as accessibility goes. However, the easiest one to fix is the problem with the calendar, which displays in the default theme, as well as many custom ones (I'm sure). It lacks a summary tag.

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Google SketchUp 6 released (?)

• January 9, 2007
• James Skemp

I thought Google SketchUp had been released for public consumption before, but ... Google SketchUp 6 is available in both a free, as well as a pay Pro version, and it's quite impressive. Having played with other tools, like Rhino3D, this is significantly easier, but seemingly on-par, at least for rectangular objects. Go to http://sketchup.google.com/ for more information. While you're there, take a look at the number of bonus packs available, all of which are seemingly free.

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Terragen™ 2 Technology Preview to be released December 15

• December 15, 2006
• James Skemp

Development on Planetside Software's Terragen™ has been extremely slow in the last couple of years. While new versions and news were coming out at a semi-steady pace years ago, visible development dried up. All that changes on December 15 (possibly) with the release of the Terragen 2 Technology Preview. It's almost 7:30 CST, which means December 16 in a number of parts of the world, and there's no sign of the download yet.

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WordPress: Fake user registrations

• December 11, 2006
• James Skemp

For the past couple days I've noticed a rash of fake user account's being created.  I wonder if this isn't meant to be some new way to possibly exploit WordPress. I've kept the original emails I received from WordPress, and am very tempted to delete the accounts.  However, WordPress only seems to allow the deletion of accounts.  What if I want to 'ban' an account/username/email? I suppose I'll have to go find a plugin, or build one myself.

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PHP Forum Software Showdown Part 6: phpBB

• November 25, 2006
• James Skemp

It's that time again. This time, we'll be looking at phpBB. “phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.” Lot's of features, so let's get to it.

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PHP Forum Software Showdown Part 5: PunBB

• November 24, 2006
• James Skemp

Almost there. This time, we'll be looking at PunBB. First, I did donate to PunBB development some time ago. At the time, I liked PunBB, and received some great support. It's been sometime since that time, so I don't know how things stand.

Anywho, “PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.”

In this article, we'll be installing PunBB version 1.2.14, which is the latest version, as of October 15, 2006.

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