I’m also keen on taking a look at the Speed Tracer…Looks like a winner to me.

If you have tried either of these, I’d love to hear about it.

This bug affects every content management system using FCKeditior.
Please pass on to everyone writing content on the web

If your using Firefox and Skype (almost everyone is), then most likely you have a Firefox extension that was installed with Skype that messes up content in the portal (and all other content management systems you post to).

If you look around the web there are currently 22,000 calls for help on this issue. It looks like this in your content:

<!–Session Data–>

If you’ve seen this and wondered where it came from, its because you inadvertently have been adding it.

Please stop!

Here is how:

1) open Firefox

2) in the top menu (files, edit…) click Tools then Add-ons

3) in the add-ons window click Extensions

4) Find "The Browser Highlighter" and uninstall it

This will also make firefox faster (according to this guy – http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/871907.aspx)

What is it:
its a piece of unwelcome, poorly implemented software that ebay built and released with skype. It does things like look for Skype numbers on the web page and highlight them. You wont miss it I promise.

This is a short test to see how the insert map feature of Windows Live Writer works. I think I am ready to give this product my endorsement. The push pin is a bit ugly though…I mean come on.

I’m not sure how Polaroid feels about their name being used, but this plugin does and pretty good job of doing what is says it will do. Very nice usability and great results. Here is the link. 

Oh…I looove the caption option. Just so you all know, I inserted the image on the right without the border, dropshadow, caption, or tilt – windows live writer and the polaroid plugin did all the work…very nice.

It does have more padding on top then I want…not sure how to fix that.

Let me list my first impressions as I am using it for this first time…

• Easy to install, unlike a lot of blogging tools that had to be handheld to the remote blogging API, this one found it right way. all I needed was my url and username and password.
• It downloaded the theme…..awesome.
• Great usability – the features are labeled well, and easy to find.
• Looking around now for more…what is this “colorize”..oh…it changes the color of the application….not very interesting, they could have hid that under a menu….
• Spellcheck works
• Preview is awesome…
• Nice category tool
• Easy to set the date
• Plugins….what’s this….105 plugins….one to integrate with Firefox…created by microsoft (!) . Lots of interesting plugins. Seems to be an active community.
• Easy to link to earlier posts…wow.
• Inserting images…wow, adds nice like drop shadow… automaticlly created a thumbnail

I think we might have a winner here.

• Somehow it managed to post with the wrong timestamp. Ok, figured that out, there is a choose date feature…nice.
• I can’t figure out how to insert a blog splitter – as most of you wordpress fans know, WordPress lets you insert a <hr> tag to tell wordpress where to put the "more" button.
• It has spell check, but and suggestions, but clicking the suggestion doesn’t change the text…weird. Oh nevermind, it does…
• It has an insert ad feature, put it takes a loooong time to insert and you can not do anything while its inserting.
• Its Java based and that scares just me a little.
• I really like the droppad tool. This is a floating desktop icon that stays on top of all windows. Select text or pictures and drag them to the drop pad. You can do this over and over, then when your ready, double click it and you will see everything you have collected read for your blog entry. nice.

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Blogs

So what’s the deal? Why are blogs and wikis so popular? Are they really as popular a search term as music and movies? To try and find the answer I looked at the cities and countries where the data comes from. Blogs are dominated by the French and Vietnamese?

The word blog returns 3,510,000,000 results worldwide on Google (that’s 3.5 Billion with a B). My research (consisting of asking Google “blogs popular in france”) returned this article. Although it is already 2 years old, it asked the same questions and reports that users of France’s most popular blog spent over an hour there on average versus just 12 minutes in the US.

French blogs stands out in other measurable ways. They are noticeably longer, more critical, more negative, more egocentric and more provocative than their U.S. counterparts, said Laurent Florès, the French-born, New York-based chief executive of CRM Metrix, a company that monitors blogs and other online conversations on behalf of companies seeking feedback on their brands.

“Bloggers in the United States listen to each other and incorporate rival ideas in the discussion,” he said. “French bloggers never compromise their opinions.”

Wiki

Wiki appears to be crazy popular in Japan. Just look at these results:

Let’s ask the same question. First some anecdotal evidence, like this article about a Japanese government official caught doing something he should not have been on the internet…editing wikipedia articles about the robot toys known as Gundam?
I love this quote:

“The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam,” ministry official Tsutomu Shimomura said.

The agriculture ministry verbally reprimanded five other bureaucrats who contributed to entries on movies, typographical mistakes in billboard signs and local politics. The six employees together made 408 entries on the popular Internet encyclopedia from ministry computers since 2003.

Test

One term I that myself use a lot is the word “test”. When ever think my internet connection may have been lost, I open my browser, and just to make sure I’m not looking at a cached version of google, I type test. I figured I was not the only one so test is pretty high on google’s rankings. The suprising thing is where it is popular.

Note that I graphed it versus, xp and jobs. Both of those show new year increases (one for new christmas computers, the other for new years resultions I imagine).

But look how steady test is, which fits my theory that the term “test” is used to actually test google. Now look at the regions:

The Germans are not only number 1, they dominate with the top 5 cities. What is going on here? It does fit the sterotype.

Why do this? Because otherwise, getting to the point where you can start developing themes or plugins is a pain.

I consider myself a well rounded developer. I don’t play favorites. That means, from one day to the next I may find my self in php, coldfusion, or java. I build prototypes using ext.js framework and also have local versions of Joomla, Conflunce, MediaWiki, and even Websphere portal with WCM, and SAP Portal (I keep those beasts locked away in a WMWare enviroments). But VMware is overkill for something as light Lose Weight Exercise as WordPress.
Here are the steps for setting up a local WordPress dev enviroment with Server2Go.

1. Download Server2Go – there are several versions. To pick the right one, check the requirements of the software you want to run. Since I want to run wordpress – I look at it and downloaded this one - (only ~23MB – nice).
   
2. Extract it somewhere (you can move it later) and and launch the server2go.exe. this starts the server. Any time you want to work in in, just launch it. If you want to change the way it works (like launch firefox instead of IE, edit pms_config.ini file.
   
3. Server2Go will launch IE for you and show the default screen. Now we have to create a wordpress database. So click phpMyAdmin under tools on the right.
   
4. In the Create Database feild type “wordpress” (no quotes) and press “Create”.
   
5. Download the WordPress package and unzip it into the htdocs folder in your server2go folder.
   
6. In your browser type: http://127.0.0.1:4001/wordpress/
7. Follow the instructions onscreen – click the create wp-config.php button, then “let’s go”
   
8. Type “wordpress” (no qoutes) into the Database name feild and submit.
   
9. Then you see this and that’s it! WordPress should now be installed.
10. Once your in wordpress, you can download themes from the internet and unzip them to the themes folder. Once you do, you can see them on the Design page in the wp_admin.
11. I like to find a theme that is close to what I want and modify it. Once you find one you like, create a site in dreamweaver and edit the theme from there. You can save changes to the php files and css and see them in immediatly on the site by refreshing.

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