Yabfog

Blog spam is becoming a serious problem. This site has been up for less than a month, and already I'm annoyed by one type of blog spam: referral spam. Another kind is comment spam or trackback spam. Good discussion and some suggestions are on the b2evolution forums here, and my referral spam solution is here.

del.icio.us seems like the greatest thing right now. It's a social bookmark manager.

I'm using the following code right now to include a random set of my del.icio.us bookmarks on this page. Discussion here.
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Very annoying. The holidays in Outlook 2002 (aka Outlook XP) only extend through 2005. I guess that's part of Microsoft's planned obsolescence, but I need to schedule beyond 2005, and I intend to keep using Office XP as long as possible. Strangely, Microsoft released a calendar update for 2007, but only for Outlook 2000! Well, even though the Outlook 2000 holiday update available here won't update Outlook 2002, you can use the data in the update to update your holidays. You can download this file, which has updated United States holidays through 2007, and replace your current holiday data. I suggest you backup your current file that this download replaces.

1. Locate the file "outlook.hol" on your harddrive (usually in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\1033)
2. Backup your current "outlook.hol" file (for example, save as outlook.hol_original)
3. Save the new outlook.hol file in this directory
4. Open Outlook and delete all holidays (try viewing by category)
5. From the "Tools" menu, select "Options". On the "Preferences" tab select the "Calendar Options..." button, then the "Add Holidays..." button on the next screen and select the United States holidays

I've made a TrackBack Ping Bookmarklet for Firefox -- and mine actually works! Others I've seen don't use the "post" method, which is required by the TrackBack specification. Here's my TrackBack Ping Bookmarklet. Drag it to your toolbar. Select the URL to which you want to send a TrackBack Ping, then click the Bookmarklet. Fill in your blog information, and click the button. TODO: Add a method to pull your blog information from the TrackBack RDF you should have on your permalink page.

I modified the categorylist plugin for Blosxom. Now it only lists a category if there are posts in that category. I've created my category taxonomy (tentatively) before I've posted in every category, and I don't want a slew of links to (0) posts. Here's a diff of my modification.

I made a couple of modifications to the Writeback Plus plugin for Blosxom. Here's the diff file. Basically, I wanted to have the ability to have alternative writebacks display with a shaded background. In addition, I fixed the removal of the builtin trackback flavour. And I also fixed the annoying always plural usage of "writebacks" (i.e., "1 writebacks") -- the method was taken from Pollxn.

Using Firfox 1.0.3, there seems to be a problem with either the Qute theme or the Googlebar extension (I think the former) resulting is a squished looking Googlebar. Very annoying. Here's a pic. And here's the fix:

/* Less toolbar button spacing */
toolbarbutton {
  padding: 3px 4px 4px 3px !important;
}
toolbarbutton:hover:active,
toolbarbutton[open="true"],
toolbarbutton[checked="true"] {
  padding: 4px 3px 3px 4px !important;
}
toolbarbutton[disabled="true"],
toolbarbutton[disabled="true"]:hover,
toolbarbutton[disabled="true"]:hover:active,
toolbarbutton[disabled="true"][open="true"] {
  padding: 3px 4px 4px 3px !important;
}
toolbarbutton[type="menu-button"],
toolbarbutton[type="menu-button"]:hover,
toolbarbutton[type="menu-button"]:hover:active,
toolbarbutton[type="menu-button"][open="true"],
toolbarbutton[type="menu-button"][disabled="true"],
toolbarbutton[type="menu-button"][disabled="true"]:hover,
toolbarbutton[type="menu-button"][disabled="true"]:hover:active {
  padding: 0 !important;
}