Do block the blog!

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Do Block the blog

A little bit of photoshop work and…

A year or so ago the Pakistani Government decided to block access to the entire blogspot and blogger domains in response to inappropriate content placed there by sick foreigners. This blanket ban meant that a lot of Pakistani bloggers could not access their own blogspot blogs and they started a "don’t block the blog campaign". My opinion on this ban is that it is a good thing. My reasons are as follows:

  • Blogs containing inappropriate content should be blocked. If this can be done so that other blogs are not affected then its better. Otherwise.. well thats life!
  • This ban has forced bloggers to wise up and look to new ways to host their blogs. Some have turned to wordpress.com others to purchasing their own domains and hosting. This is a good thing because they will learn to never rely on anyone else to safeguard their valuable content.
  • Every Pakistani blogger seems to be carrying this "don’t block the blog" badge on their blogs. I don’t like following the crowd. So I say do block the damn blogs!

How to summarise posts in serendipity rss feeds

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By default serendipity places the entire entry body in your rss feeds but not the extended body. If you’re like me you rarely use the extended body when making entries so your feed subscribers can read your entire posts without having to visit your site. This defeats the entire purpose of RSS feeds that are supposed to increase traffic to your site. Furthermore there are a lot of scraper sites out there that use your rss feeds to duplicate your site’s content. A lot of these rightly link back to your site but they still put your site in danger of Google’s so called duplicate content penalty. Supposedly google can’t tell which site was the originator of the content and may penalise the wrong site. So what is an s9y blogger to do? Well hack serendipity of course!

Continue reading →

Sahara Template port for serendipity

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Click to view full sized screenshot

I am releasing a serendipity port of the Sahara template by freecsstemplates.org . This template includes very few images making this a fast loading theme. The designer has made clever use of small variations in colour to create a nice effect. He has also used serif fonts for text which adds to the overall feel of the theme.

The ported version includes a customizable navigation bar and the option to toggle author name display with every entry. You will need serendipity 1.1 or higher to be able to configure these options in the administration suite. Users of older s9y versions can still use this template but they will have to manually edit the .tpl files to customize this theme.

Download Sahara template for serendipity

New features in windows vista

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Anandtech has done a performance review of Microsoft’s new operating system Windows Vista. While Vista’s new Aero User Interface has gained the most attention it has a number of new features under the hood. Some of its new features:

  • First up is the one I find most interesting. Its a feature called superfetch. Basically superfetch strives to maximize the use of system memory by loading your most frequently used programs into RAM. It works by tracking your usage patterns and anticipating your next actions so it works best for users that follow a common routine when using their PCs. By loading your most frequently accessed programs it fills up RAM almost completely. The advantage here is that it speeds up startup times for frequently accessed software. It also means that the more RAM you add to your computer the faster it will run. The downside is that windows Vista uses much more RAM than previous Windows versions and it takes longer to startup as superfetch loads data into RAM.
  • Vista can also make use of your usb flash drives to cache data and programs thereby speeding up your system. This feature is called ready boost.
  • A common criticism of Windows has been that searching for a file on your local hard drive is slower than doing a web search! Windows vista deals with this by indexing the files on your hard drive for near instantaneous search.
  • Parental controls have been integrated into Vista. It allows parents to monitor and filter children’s web surfing activities and set time limits on computer usage. A new games explorer allows users to view information about all the games installed on their system. Parents can use the rating feature of the games explorer to restrict access to games.
  • One annoying "feature" is aimed at improving security but actually makes common tasks much harder. Its called User Access Control and it requires users to supply their windows password when trying to make changes to their operating system. According to anandtech it makes the simple task of deleting a file permanently a four click process.

Despite including new performance enhancing features like SuperFetch Vista takes up more resources and is slower overall than Windows XP. Of course we will all have to upgrade eventually so the good news is that adding more RAM to our computers can boost Vista’s performance.

How to create and mount a CD image in windows

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A cd image is an entire cd’s contents in a single file. Mounting a cd image will allow you to access the contents of the cd as would any other drive in windows. Why would you want to create a cd image? Certain software, including a lot of games, require that you insert their cd into your cdrom drive before you can use the software. Creating a cd image allows you to use this software without having to repeatedly insert and remove cds. In this post I look at how to create and mount a cd image in Windows. Continue reading →