Author: Richard

The Trouble with WordPress

| Richard

Now I’m a great fan of WordPress – quelle surprise – using it for a number of blogs as well as some basic CMS based web sites.

But when it comes to posting new messages and restricting their publication, it’s a bit lacking. I have a LiveJournal and have been introduced to a number of good friends even if they are in some cases entirely virtual with no face to face or indeed voice contact … ever! And on LiveJournal I can quickly and easily restrict who can and cannot see individual posts on a per group basis.

With WordPress – at least as far as I can see – the only way to restrict access to a post is by way of password protection. Which is fine, providing the intended readers don’t forget that password, or don’t divulge it to someone else or indeed have the password guessed or hacked by A N Other.

Such a pity.

Teh Shiny is Fettled

| Richard

The additional Kingston 1GB DDR2 RAM SODIMM arrived by courier today from Dabs.com.

I was slightly worried about taking a screwdriver to a day-old laptop and removing the keyboard to get at the RAM slots, but it was fettled within a few minutes, re-booted and is now boasting 1.49GB.

I fettled Firefox last night as well. Then had to install some web server extensions and my FTP program of choice with the FTP site profiles I use.

Now it’s a case of deciding how many and which project management software programs to install.

I’ve also been playing with Microsoft Office Groove as a potential replacement for the good old Offline Files. And the new laptop meant downloading some updated software from Vodafone for their 3G datacard, which looks like an improvement over the old software.

Only problems so far have been the quality of the sound from the stereo speakers – my old Dell Insipron 8100 is much better in this regard – and the mobile ‘drumming’ from the datacard when its communication is picked up by the microphone/speakers.

The position of the vents is better than my old Portégé so you don’t get a toasted forearm when you’re holding it in Tablet mode. Oh and the 5-in-1 Bridge Media slot (which supports SDâ„¢ Card, Memory Stick®, Memory Stick Proâ„¢, xD-Picture Cardâ„¢, SDâ„¢ IO Card) is a nice feature. It’s just a pity that it doesn’t support Memory Stick Pro DUOâ„¢ cards as I’ve just bought one for my daughter’s new Sony digital camera.

What a Difference a Day Makes

| Richard

I looked at another commercial blog the other day and liked its look and feel before discovering its theme was K2 so I downloaded it, played with it and voila!

So I have temporarily (?) abandoned the rather fabby fspring theme from Fredrik Fahlstad (which I am still using as basis for a number of other blogs) and playing with this one for now.

You see, this is one of the great things about separating content from style: you can always modify the style without needing to recreate the content. WordPress and the themes people develop for it just make things easier.

Ryanair’s Headline Prices

| Richard

I will be attending some meetings in Dublin in October/November this year, so I went to look at flights from London Stansted to Dublin.

The Ryanair headline prices are impressive: £9.99 each way!

But then when you look at booking them, you find that with charges added for airport charges, an insurance levy and a wheelchair levy (I’m not disabled), that increases to almost £59.

Would I like any baggage? Well unless I want to stay unwashed for almost a week and wear the same clothes too, I’ll need some baggage at an additional cost of £10.

And according to Ryanair’s charges schedule, there could very well be another £4 for the credit card booking fee – how else can I pay for fights booked online?

So we’re approaching £73 now: slightly different to the £10.00 rates they advertise as “including taxes, fees & charges” on this page…

Misleading or what? In fact, isn’t that a complete lie?

Forced ezboard Account Migration and Advertising

| Richard

I wonder if, with the second anniversary of the ‘launch’ of Yuku rapidly approaching, ezboard, Inc. are finally getting somewhere close to taking it out of beta?

As I mentioned earlier, an old ezboard account of mine has been migrated to a Yuku one without my agreement and without my acceptance of any revised terms of use, etc. Interesting.

Of course, the benefit of doing this to Yuku is that they can claim a larger number of users when trying to sell advertising - whether or not those users are actual, live and regular user accounts or simply dormant ones - and also serve ads. on the users’ profile pages.

Talking of which, I noticed that instead of the regular Google Ads block on a Yuku user profile, there was an ad being displayed for Justin Timblake’s “Futuresex Loveshow“, whatever that may be. Nice for all those users complaining about Yuku’s classification as a dating site by corporate website content blocking providers.

I also noticed that Yuku are once more using OASIS - “Open source Ad Serving and Inventory System” - rather than just the Google Ads they were serving.

Maybe this is a precursor to their finally beginning to share advertising revenues with board owners, as Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc. CEO promised at the Yuku launch. I won’t hold my breath…

Another Unannounced Change at Yuku

| Richard

Back in April 2007, a Yuku user asked “so do we really have 1TB of image space?“ adding that it sounded “ridiculously high, and quite misleading” which was my conclusion too.

However, a Yuku representative replied, saying:

“I thought that there was not actually a limit… so I guess you could say 1TB.

“I have no idea on the actual answer.”

Excellent stuff…

Another Yuku representative then relayed what she had been told:

“You are limited in amount of pictures you can save in a album, but you are allowed to make an unlimited amount of albums. So it really is nearly unlimited.

“I believe we have the right to limit that at some point.”

It fell to another Yuku user to provide the definitive answer to the question - she pasted in part of an e-mail she had received when her board was moved from ezboard to Yuku:

“In addition, we have added some new features:
1. Search - fast and accurate search that works
2. Free Image Hosting - 1TB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
3. Posts Don’t Fall Off the 20th Page - unlimited storage of posts
4. Advanced Private Messaging - 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
5. Profiles With More Customization Options - (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc).”

[emphasis added]

There are further examples of the 1TB storage limit being mentioned in this message board post.

Now then, 1TB is 1,048,576 MB. So when someone apparently ran out of image storage, they raised a query on Yuku and were told that:

“Ok, it should be fixed now. :)

“Log out and then log back in for it to take effect. You should then have 30MB of space for images.”

[emphasis added]

Only 30MB? Of course as the Yuku Help Wiki has been down for a while now, I cannot check there what limit there really is on image storage size.

Fortunately, Yuku came to the rescue recently: an ezboard I once posted on has been migrated to Yuku and so that old ezboard account was migrated over as well - without my agreement, I hasten to add - and an e-mail (with the usual Yuku grammar errors) sent to me, telling me about Yuku:

“In addition, we have added some new features:
• Search: fast and accurate search that works
• Free Image Hosting: 30MB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
• Posts Don’t Fall Off the 20th Page: unlimited storage of posts
• Advanced Private Messaging: 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
• Profiles With More Customization Options: (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc).”

[emphasis added]

Compare that to the details sent out in April 2007. Yes, ezboard, Inc. has reduced the storage allowance by a factor of nearly 35,000!

Funny how they kept quiet about that…