So you want to move from Blogger to WordPress?  I don’t blame you, Blogger has it’s limitations.

The one’s which annoyed me were:

• not being able to use my own domain (wisefaq.com) with Blogger.
  (yes, I know there are some hacks you can use, but I didn’t want the world to see my underwear was stamped with Blogger).
• not being to use meta strings.
• lack of support.  You’d identify a bug with Blogger, and Blogger support would say that it would be fixed in a ““future”” release.

So I struck out on my own, and have learnt a few things along the way. (more…)

The Troll
A sad individual who lashes out at anyone, for the sole reason of provoking a response.
Troll comes from the adjective Trolling.

The Rager
In some ways, a variant of the Troll.  Can be found promoting the virtues of Open Source Software, when compared to the likes of Microsoft.  Can often be spotted by the use of words like Micro$oft & WinDoze.

Misguided, aka “I pity the fool”.
Responding to a posting, where they don’t have all the facts.  Often these are newspaper readers.

Unhappy customer
Not that you’d see these on a normal blog, but you can spot these characters as they are having a bitch about a product or service.
Such as Europcar.

This idea for this post came from the US Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment flowchart.

Computer Associates used to recommend excluding particular processes and directories from eTrust anti-virus scanning.  This, I found, was very important with Microsoft SQL Server, as it would cause a significant performance hit.

You would do this via setting the following registry keys, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ComputerAssociates\eTrustITM\CurrentVersion\Realtime

szExcludeProcessNames

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According to Bruno Terkaly, you have three main choices:

1. Traditional Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
   Dates back to all the way to the early nineties.
2. Visual Studio Tools for Office.
   Really hit its stride and office 2007. It probably represents the best option moving forward today. It tries to be all things to all people.
3. The COM Add-In is probably the most powerful, yet the most difficult option of the three.

I’ve borrowed the above words from Bruno.  You can read all about those options in his blog post.

1. They are used to denote a missing letter or letters
2. They are used to denote possession …
   however, if there are two or more things the apostrophe comes after the ’s’
3. Apostrophes are NEVER ever used to denote plurals!

You can read the full version over at The Apostrophe Protection Society, which is where I first saw it.

Update: here is a poster which illustrates it very well.

I was chuffed that someone linked to my “What coffee drink is that” post.  I first saw the chart at another blog, so I grabbed a copy of it.  My post wasn’t that great, but I liked the chart.  So did someone else.  They linked directly to the image on my server.

The thieving bastard.

2 reasons to direct link (hot link) to a image:

1. save bandwidth on your server, as the web browser will load the image from someone elses server, and/or
2. you’re a lazy bastard.

So what this meant was that every visitor to their website, was downloading the image from my website., and they didn’t know it.

It wasn’t that this thieving bastard couldn’t store the image on his blogger site.  He was just lazy.

I can now understand why Andy was so peeved (link NSFW).  And while Andy’s BBC image is a good one, I’ve decided to show this image to hotlink-ers:

The technical jiggery-pokery is done by modifying .htaccess to block hotlinking.

Instructions to do that can be found here:
How to Embarrass RSS Scrapers Who Hotlink to Your Images

Link Checker is designed to crawl though your blog, verifying that the links you’ve linked to are still there.

Now my utility of choice is Xenu, and I blogged about it here.  Not that there is anything wrong with Xenu, I just noticed Link Checker* and thought I’d give it a spin.

So, the results?

Took about 10 minutes to scan 2385 links, which seems ok.

Now you can leave the plugin Activated, and every 72 hours (default), when you login to the Admin panel, it will run.  I’m going to de-activate it, and only run it every couple of weeks.

* first heard it while looking at Pelf Nyok’s Pelf-ism is contagious blog.  If you’re interested in turtles, it’s worth a visit.

Using sex to sell IT services really turns me off.  It makes me think to myself:

“Is their service so poor, that they need to get my attention some other way.”

I’m sure Domain Names you will get people who do think it’s appropriate for you to advertise this way, as you keep doing it.  Just like America’s GoDaddy:

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Cause unknown

The Pantone Matching System is a wonderful idea.  Imagine being able to say “I want that exact shade of red on my poster.”  And actually get it.

That, in a nutshell, is what the Pantone Matching System is about.  It’s a system of describing colors, so the color you ask for on your commercially printed page, is what you get.  That makes it very popular with the print industry.

The Pantone Matching System was first created in 1963, and Pantone have jealously guarded their intellectual property rights ever since.  They particularly dislike attempts to create conversion charts.  Not that I blame them, color charts are a big part of their business.

Now the picture of the Elephant and the Mouse is from a site which did offer a PMS <->RGB lookup.  Pantone told them to stop.

And they did.

(Much to his regret, Dale has neither printer’s ink or graphic designers flair, coursing though his veins.  He is very grateful to have spent time working as the IT guy for a large printing company.)