This image makes me smile:

Not only has the Akismet plugin spared me from wading through the filth that is comment spam, but it has done so silently and to an affect I am wholly impressed by. There is another point I am impressed by, in that there have been 1035 spam comments and pingbacks posted to my blog over the last 15 days, which equates to approximately 69 a day. This manner of spamming is something I had not had a grasp of the magnitude of, so I would like to express my respect to the developers involved in Akismet, and my continuing derision to those who spam.

Over the past few months of using OS X, I’ve been in my old swing of using Firefox as my browser. Over the past few weeks, however, I’ve been getting anoyed with Firefox crawling along, taking ages to load pages, and generally preforming poorly.

So, since Opera make a free, ad-free version of their browser for OS X, and since I’ve had it insalled for the past few months owing to various web development, I’m going to give Opera a full “go” as it were.

I found a neat page of Firefox extension equivalents in Opera, and it turns out most of my needs are filled in Opera by default. There’s even a user stylesheet for hiding and selectively playing flash, which is a biggy for me, what with all the Youtubing I do. The only thing lacking is a true equivalent of the web developer extension, which is essential for my various tom-dickery in the web design and layout sphere. But to be honest, I don’t hate Firefox, so a flick back to it for any web development is no problem with me (especially with QuickSilver making launching so quick).

As for daily browsing, i welcome my faster, less bloated web browser to the forefront of my web experience, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve been wanting to reduce the complexity of Yorrike.com for a while now, firstly with the now redundant WP short archive month hack I posted about (below) and now with a totally new take on the colour and structural theme I’ve had running on this site for a while.

I’ll be making more changes and adding a few things here and there over the next day or two, but overall, this is it. Feedback would be appreciated : )

There, I said it. Web Development is a dull combination of reinventing of the wheel, rebranding established layouts and telling people what is and isn’t possible in HTML/CSS.

The only reason I do it is as a job is to make cash, and because I’m reluctantly good at it. As I make my way towards my MSc in Geology, I keep dreaming of a day where I won’t have anything to do with making web pages, cutting new CSS layouts or having someone saying:

I want this site to be a bleeding edge tour de force of the best the net can offer - here’s a jpeg of what I want it to look like, and I’ll pay you $100 - the deadline is tomorrow

And being so desperate for cash, that I’ll take it.

Granted, I have a few projects from people I have the utmost respect for, and I’ll gladly work for them while the going’s good, but in the end, I’m moving on from this life of margin and padding problems and one day I’ll make my money using my brain, studying meteorites.

I’ve been trying to get better control over those pesky archive dates in the right hand menu for as long as I’ve been using wordpress, specifically shortening the month names from their full versions to 3 letter abbreviations.

Even though Wordpress is awesome, it does feature some rather frustrating limitations on displaying things in certain ways, so I took it upon myself to fix the date format and this is what’s involved;

1. Edit your wp-includes/templates-functions-general.php file, and look for the get_archives function (line 298 in WP 2.0).
2. At the top of the function change the the line “global $month, $wpdb;” to “global $month, $month_abbrev, $wpdb;”
3. In the same function, find and change the second line that reads “$text = sprintf(’%s %d’, $month[zeroise($arcresult->month,2)], $arcresult->year);” to “$text = sprintf(’%s %d’, $month_abbrev[$month[zeroise($arcresult->month,2)]], $arcresult->year);” (line 343 in WP 2.0)

And you’ll be left with smaller, nicer looking archive month names in the menu while keeping the longer names when the archives are called for within the page’s content.

In the late ninties / early zeros I considered Javascript as the root of all evil online. But over the last year as Google impressed the web development community with Gmail, a true web application using JS and the increased use of Firefox (a fast, secure browser that has a great implementation of the JS section of it’s DOM), my opinions on the language have dramatically changed.

I now consider JS an essential tool for any web application or web page developer worth their salt. As such I’m always on the lookout for links to cool JS programs.

One script that particularly caught my attention today was Simon Cozen’s Drag and Drop list. Simon’s a christian, but don’t hold that against him, this script is absolutely superb. His application for the script is a playlist, but there’s no limit to the uses such a great piece of code could be put to. Think online Blogfeeds, email contact lists and even the order in which you want articles to appear on a site, be they user defined or admin defined. Just drag, drop and when you’re happy with the setup click save, that’s the only talking to the server it’ll do. So it’s quick even if your connection is slow. You could even whack the settings into a cookie (though this would defeat the access-anywhere benefits of a web app)

It’s not without it’s drawbacks, though, as it’s apparently a bit sketchy in IE, but people seem to be molding it to work within IE’s broken JS implementation. Despite that temporary itch, I am impressed.