Time Zone plugin for WordPress

I’ve discovered today that WordPress ignores time changes due to Daylight Saving Time — sigh.

Google brought me to Kimmo Suominen’s solution: Time Zone plugin for WordPress.

Firefox Ads blocking solution

Want to get rid of all that annoying ads on every web page you go?

Install that 2 Firefox extensions:
* AdBlock Plus
* Adblock Filterset.G Updater: adblock filters auto-updater

And restart your Firefox browser to get the Ad filtersets updated. You’re done!

Temporary email address

Need a temporary email address for web site registration or whatever? Go to Jetable.org, type your real email address and they will give you a temporary generated email alias.

You can set the time validity of the address (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week). Easy and usefull!

They also provide you with a Firefox extension.

Debian APT shortcuts

On my Debian GNU/Linux systems I’ve defined system wide shell aliases to ease the use of APT commands. Here they are:

# apt-cache
alias asearch="apt-cache search"
alias ashow="apt-cache show"
alias apolicy="apt-cache policy"
alias adepends="apt-cache depends"

# apt-get
alias ainstall="apt-get install"
alias aupdate="apt-get update"
alias aupgrade="apt-get upgrade"

# apt-get remove
alias aremove="apt-get remove"
alias apurge="apt-get remove --purge"
alias aclean="apt-get clean"

I put these lines in the new file that I saved as /etc/profile.d/aliases.apt , so the aliases are then available for every user logged on the system. The aliases are rather self-explanatory:

* To update APT packages db, I now type aupdate,
* to search a Debian package, now I just have to type asearch whatever
* to install a package, I type ainstall pkgname…

What’s that folksonomy thing?

You probably noticed that the trend on web sites is to let you assign “tags” to some contents. These tags are keywords you freely choose for describing those contents.

For example, on Flickr, people give tags to their pictures. On del.icio.us, people tag their links.

By doing this, visitors of those sites can then browse the site content by browsing or searching thru the tags. It’s great — I love this!

Well, I actually discovered last week that this phenomenon is called folksonomy.

The Wikipedia defines it as:

…a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams…

This phenomenon has a social component. When tagging, people are not limited to a set of established keywords, they can actually assign any tag of their choice. So the tag set represents people minds and is virtually unlimited.

Folksonomy based sites use to represent the tag set as a so-called “tag cloud”, where each tag boldness (or font size) shows the tag’s popularity amongs the users: the bigger the tag, the most popular it is.

Usually you can syndicate to any part of those sites, using RSS feeds (by user, by tags, most popular or newest entries…).

Here are some folksonomy based sites which I know and/or use (there must be a lot more — feel free to let me know them!):
* Flickr: place there your pictures repository,
* del.icio.us and RawSugar: social bookmarking sites,
* Readers2: Social list of books, share your reading experience with other people,
* MyProgs: Social list of programs – share your working experience with other people.
* 43Things: What do you want to do with your life?,
* Bank Of Ideas: store and share your ideas (for the moment it’s not working very well. It seems a bit experimental)…

Google definition bookmarklet

Do you know the “define:” Google’s keyword? It’s a powerfull keyword that let you look for word definitions on the web.

For example, yesterday I was looking for the definition of the word misgiving, so I googled it, and it gave me:

* scruple: uneasiness about the fitness of an action
* apprehension: painful expectation
* doubt about someone’s honesty

I find it very usefull. However I still have to open a new google page and type there the define: query, what I find a bit unefficient.

As i couldn’t find any bookmarklet to achieve that for me, I modified one that catches any selected word on the active page and look for it on Google. The result is: Google definition bookmarklet.

As any bookmarklet, just bookmark it and you can use it. Then when reading a web page, if you want to look for a word’s definition, just select the word and click the bookmarklet in your browser bar.

Coppermine badge

I wanted to have a flickr-like badge: I mean a way to have the last 5 pictures that I added to my Coppermine gallery be shown on my blog sidebar.

I especially wanted:
* to display public pictures only,
* to be able to have some pictures not to appear in the badge.

I’ve been looking for an existing WP plugin, but couldn’t get to find any, so i decided to start learning a bit of php to do-it-myself!

I’ve accomplished the first point by using the album visibility field: if visibility=0, it’s a public album.

Then, to discard some pictures from appearing in the badge, i use the keywords. I’ll select only pictures which do not have the “nobadge” keyword. (I’ve defined this special keyword arbitrarily.)

The resulting MySQL query I use is:

SELECT pid,filepath,filename,p.title
   FROM cpg_pictures p, cpg_albums a
   WHERE a.aid=p.aid
      AND keywords NOT LIKE "%nobadge%"
      AND a.visibility=0
   ORDER BY pid DESC LIMIT 5;

Doing the remaining work was rather easy… The resulting “badge” appears in the sidebar!

Post tagging plugin for WordPress

Amazed by Flickr and del.icio.us tagging funcionality, I have been looking for a WordPress plugin able to do the same kind of things:
* Let me _tag my posts_,
* Generate a _tag map_, also called _tag cosmos_ (look at the sidebar’s tags section),
* Let readers click a tag and get redirected to all the post tagged with it

After looking at various plugins, I’ve tried and selected Jerome’s Keywords Plugin, which gives me all that.

One more thing: tags are saved into the MySQL database in the wp_postmeta table.

Surfing del.icio.us’ly

I love Del.icio.us ! It’s a “social bookmarks” manager. Some of the features are :

* Your bookmarks will always be available to you, from anywhere,
* They are public, so anyone can also see them,
* You can tag them with keywords: it’s more powerfull than organizing them into folders (because usually every bookmark can only be in one folder). With del.icio.us, you can assign several tags to them.
* Del.icio.us provides you many level of feeds (top leval, tag level…),

How does it work? Is it eficient ?

Yes, it’s tremendously efficient: From del.icio.us you get an “Add to my del.icio.us” bookmarklet: it’s a piece of Javascript that you place as a bookmark in your browser(s) links toolbar. Then, every time you want to bookmark a page into your del.icio.us, you just have to click on the bookmarklet link in the toolbar. The Del.icio.us page opens, you can then write down some keyword (“tags”) related to the page, and when you save you come back to the page you were reading.

IMHO(In my humble opinion) del.icio.us is one of the thing that make surfing easier…

If you want, you can also place the last addition to your del.icio.us on your blog page, to share your last reading pages with other people — in my case, i use the WordPress del.icio.us plugin to publish my del.icio.us on this page.

What web server does HP run?

This morning i needed to check some HP hardware parts information, so i went to HP’s Partsurfer site.

As soon as the page achieved to load in my Firefox browser, i got rather suprised; look at this:

For those who haven’t noticed it, look at the site favicon. Got it? If not, compare it with this one: ! Kinda funny, insn’t it?

I decided to check what web server was running there, so i queried netcraft, and the answer is:

http://partsurfer.hp.com was running Sun-ONE-Web-Server on Windows 2000 when last queried at 6-Oct-2005 17:06:09

I recognize i was a bit disapointed, as I’d prefer it be running Apache on HP-UX, like www.hp.com.

Anyway nobody’s perfect, is it?