Akismet stats now available online

• May 23, 2006
• James Skemp

Akismet, one great WordPress plugin if you'll be accepting public comments, now has made available global stats on http://akismet.com/stats/. What's scary is the amount of spam per 'ham' (non-spam).

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First Debian install = unsuccessful

• May 20, 2006
• James Skemp

My first shot at installing Debian didn't go quite so well. I'm attempting to install on a HP Pavilion XE734, using pretty much the base system. One addition appears to be a 3Com Fast Etherlink PCI card, from the late 90s ... (3C595-TX).

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AdSense on the spammer sites

• May 15, 2006
• James Skemp

It's about time one of the heavy hitters realizes what some of us smaller hitters have realized a long time ago; cut out a spammer's revenue, you hit the spammer the only place they care about - their wallets.

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The Earth: Blue Marble

• May 15, 2006
• James Skemp

A couple of weeks ago I was alerted to NASA's Earth photography. Really, it's amazing work. visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_set.php?categoryID=2363

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Holidays and birthdays

• May 14, 2006
• James Skemp

My birthday happens to be today, and when I started checking my email this morning, I was presented with 4 different birthday greetings, from 4 different forums. I'm aware that forums have been doing this for a long time, so what struck me is the forums I signed up for, but don't remember doing so :D (That's also a little security-scary¹, but I know I'm signed up with many more that don't appear to be sending birthday greetings.)

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The evolution of the game console's controller

• May 9, 2006
• James Skemp

I can remember when we bought an Atari. It was a used machine, and had a number of games, including the very great Berserker. That's actually the only game I can really remember, other than the impossible E.T. After that, at some point, came a NES. Unlike the Atari, we had one game to start with - Mario and Duck Hunt.

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Content really is key (AdSense)

• May 6, 2006
• James Skemp

I've just updated The Framing Business to work with WordPress. While doing so, I decided to take a close look at just how AdSense is working on that site, compared to just this blog. What I found was actually quite surprising.

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House of the Dead (1978/1980) really isn't that bad

• May 3, 2006
• James Skemp

One of the most commonly used hooks in scary stories is the idea that the main character is deceased, but doesn't know it. As soon as I read the description for the movie The House of the Dead, I pictured the three young boys from Tales from the Hood (1995) and Clarence Williams III (all-around great actor for this genre - see also his role in Miami Vice (in season one or two)).

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Can you judge a philosophy book by it's cover?

• May 3, 2006
• James Skemp

My hypothesis is that you can in fact judge a philosophy book by it's cover. Which is to say;

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The 'easy' way to add the description meta tag to WordPress posts

• April 29, 2006
• James Skemp

According to some people, the keywords meta tag has more relevancy/use than the description meta tag. Unfortunately, this is dead wrong. As I've been able to prove (for myself, at least) this last month, the meta description is quite alive and well. Why people think it's not only dead, but surpassed by the meta keywords (!!!), I'll never understand. (And, by the way, these were August '05, January '06 articles/posts.

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