Peter J S

ProVision Product / Programming

Managed to find some time to get a little more done for the ProVision core code. Today I wrote a new GD visual security code class, my older one was ok, only I wanted to add a border, change letter colour, angle, position etc. So yeah, that turned out quite nicely actually, and the code remained quite small, nothing over complicated.

I also added a setting that allows for the border colour to be changed incase the input borders are customised.

Overall the code is coming along nicely, it’s still mostly core stuff at the moment, I’m spending quite a bit of time on it so when I come to write future components I won’t have to modify any of the core code.

On another note, I had a look at the programming for my forum I was working on, and thought that it got off to such a great start, only I was trying to put too much into it. So what I am thinking of doing is when I get round to it is write a completely new framework, and then start from scratch, but this time I will start extremely basic and then add on to it after. Not sure if I want to continue where I left of with pDBB, been a while since I touched the code. I will most likely just put it up for download so people can have a look at it to get ideas, don’t know yet.

Increase RSS Excerpt / Summary

One thing that was annoying me was the length of the RSS Excerpt for entries. Overall the length is 55 words, which isn’t that much to be honest. Problem is, there is no way to change this from the administration area that I can see. So, I went hunting though the source and found out that it is hard coded in, which is a little disappointing. I really hope WordPress think about including some RSS options so we can have a little more control over our feeds. Anyway, if you want to change yours, here are the instructions….

Goto the folder “wp-includes” and look for a PHP file called “formatting.php” and open it in notepad or whatever you prefer to use. On line 780, look for this…

$excerpt_length = 55;

Change 55 to how many words you want to display in the RSS excerpt. For me, I changed it to 85.

Hopefully that will be useful to someone and save them a bit of time

BigWetFish Hosting

For those that don’t know, I recently (2 weeks or so) moved to a new host because my other host was closing down in March. So I thought I would get it all over and done with and signup with BigWetFish.co.uk as a lot of people spoke highly of it, plus James (aka Webworldx) moved there too. So far in those 2 weeks my website has gone down 3 times that I have recorded, I believe it could be more than that, but it’s only recently I signed up at siteuptime.com to keep on eye on things. So far, I am not happy, I have noticed things going very slow, and I really don’t know what to make of pixelDepth.net, it seems extremely slow for me which could indicate there SQL server is not up to par with active dynamic websites that use a MySQL database.

Maybe it’s just me, I’ll give them a little more time to see how things go since it has been just over 2 weeks. I’ve seen no reports on the forum from other customers saying there website is down.

My blog seems fine, seems to load fast enough, maybe is my shoddy programming at pixelDepth ;).

Update: Make that 4 times now.

WordPress 2.1 Ella

So WordPress has released a new version which includes some really good features.

One of them I am happy with is the autosave feature they have added. Now you will no longer lose a post you are writing, it gets saved automatically every so many seconds or so. So many times I have wrote a post out only for my connection to go down and the page timing out, but now if it were to happen, I can retrieve a saved copy. Cool Stuff.

There are loads of other things, which I won’t list, I will just link you to the official blog entry.

http://wordpress.org/development/2007/01/ella-21/

What to do?

Today I thought about what to do with pixelDepth, right now I am not sure what the future holds for it. I am considering closing it down and starting something completely new. I have no time to write tutorials, and there are much better places to go to find them. Until I think of something to replace it with, it will remain open, and if do wipe it, I will let all the members who have submitted tutorials know before hand in case they wish to grab a copy to post else where. But yeah, so many things going on right now, I just don’t have the time for it.

If anyone else has a better idea for it, let me hear them.

Akismet has protected your site from 461 spam comments

One thing I can’t stand, and that is spam. So a few months ago I installed the Akismet plugin for WordPress, and it has done an awesome job at catching those spam comments. Haven’t gone though all the spam comments it has captured, but from what I have seen it appears to be pretty accurate at catching them, so hopefully no legitimate comments have been removed

If you don’t have it, you can download it from here, I highly recommend it.

http://akismet.com/

Microsoft Gets Help With Vista

This seems to be a hot topic right now, Microsoft and the NSA (National Security Agency) working together to increase the security of the Vista product. While I see this as being awesome for consumers like me who want to use a secure operating system, how will companies feel about it? Considering that the NSA are in the line of intelligence gathering they may avoid using it for anything sensitive. What surprised me either more is the NSA doing it for free, surely this will put people off from purchasing the product?

How do we know if it is truly secure, maybe the NSA have left a backdoor so they can spy

In one way it is good, but in another it could potentially be bad for Microsoft.

For Windows Vista Security, Microsoft Called in Pros

Tabs In Textareas

I made a script that can put tabs into textareas, it was going to be for a tutorial, but it ended up longer than expected. Probably not a script I would use myself, as a lot of people use the tab key to change focus, but you can change the key easily enough. Script also allows for more than 1 textarea on the page.

Click here for example and source

Script is open source, can do what you like with it if it is of some use, lol.

Lee Mack

Lee Mack is a comedian, never heard of him before until James sent me a link on MSN. I must say, he did make me laugh most of the time, and best of all, it did not get boring. Sometimes when I watch Lee Evans perform, it can start to bore me, but that could be because of the length of the performance, Lee Mack was just performing for around 30 minutes, but it’s 30 minutes well spent watching them.

Lee Mack - Live At The Apollo - 12/09/05 - Part 1 of 3
Lee Mack - Live At The Apollo - 12/09/05 - Part 2 of 3
Lee Mack - Live At The Apollo - 12/09/05 - Part 3 of 3

pixelDepth Alexa Ranking

Was just looking at pixelDepth’s Alexa ranking, thought it would be interesting to know where I was in the rankings. I remember looking at my ranking about 3 months ago, and it appears I have moved up from 1,086,115 to 806,025. Obviously it’s still not great, but it’s moving up slowly, and you need to remember not everyone uses the Alexa toolbar that is building the stats.

Top 5:

#1 yahoo.com
#2 msn.com
#3 google.com
#4 baidu.com
#5 youtube.com

Am surprised not to see eBay in the top 8, it was positioned at 13.