May 28
Forecastfox is better than ever with the lastest version. Sort of at least. There’s been three significant changes as far as I can tell. Two are good and one is either not good or it doesn’t matter.
First of all, the icons are bigger and prettier. They’re much easier to see than the old ones. It [...] [...more]
Posted: under Technology.
Forecastfox is better than ever with the lastest version. Sort of at least. There’s been three significant changes as far as I can tell. Two are good and one is either not good or it doesn’t matter.
First of all, the icons are bigger and prettier. They’re much easier to see than the old ones. It looks good.
Secondly, they’ve added a radar function. This shows up as a circle that shows a little radar screen as a mouse-over. This is a cool feature, though I must admit that the picture they show is zoomed out too far. I can see as far to the west as the Dakotas and well into the Atalantic on the other side. I can also see well into Canada to the North and down to Tenessee to the south. My beloved glove of a state is just a tiny spot in the middle…. it’s hard to see where the rain is. On the other hand, clicking on it will bring you to the full sized map on a web page.
The final change is that the data now comes from accuweather.com as opposed to weather.com. Accuweather hasn’t been forthcoming in releasing their forecast data in the past so I haven’t been a big fan of theirs. Plus, I think their site layout sucks, although come to look at it they’ve done some major work since the last time I was there, so it’s not so bad. I still prefer weather.com though. Oh well.
If you care about the weather at all, get this extension! It’s very very customizable and can be put in any toolbar. I have mine set to show in my menubar to the right of the actual menu items and the left of the “access” icon in the corner. Where there was once wasted space I can now see the current conditions and the forecast for the next week! It’s great.
May 28
Hotlinking is a nasty thing to do to someone. Hotlinking is when you link directly to someone else’s file and display it on your site. Usually this gets done with images, though technically you could do it with any file (including html files). The effect is that whenever someone loads your page, it pulls up [...] [...more]
Posted: under Technology.
Hotlinking is a nasty thing to do to someone. Hotlinking is when you link directly to someone else’s file and display it on your site. Usually this gets done with images, though technically you could do it with any file (including html files). The effect is that whenever someone loads your page, it pulls up an image (or whatever) from someone else’s site, using their bandwidth. In effect, this is stealing their bandwidth.
On a small scale, it’s amounts to just being rude. On a large scale, not only is a rude, but costly (as the site being hotlinked pays extra for excessive bandwidth) and perhaps can bring a server to it’s knees as too many requests come in. The latter happened to Moonbatty earlier this week. That incident is what gave me the idea to write this. If you’re interested in not having something like this happen to you, then read on! It’s fairly easy to completely stop any kind hotlinking.
Of course, on top of being rude and a form of stealing, it’s also a privacy issue for the hotlinking site. This is because all of that site’s traffic will end up contacting the hotlinked site. This then allows the hotlinked site to compile a list of visitors to the hotlinking site if they choose to do so. This isn’t a huge deal really, but it’s not necessarily desirable either.
It can be noted as well that sometimes a site will purposefully allow people to hotlink. Frequently, this happens when they’re giving away banners or icons that link back to their site. A good example is the Firefox buttons page. If you look at the img tag that you’re supposed to copy and paste, you’ll see that the images are actually located on Mozilla’s servers. In this case, they’re saying it’s OK to hotlink these images.
Fortunately, it’s really easy to stop people from hotlinking your images or any other files. There are, I’m sure, lots of pages out there on stopping hotlinking. I’m sure many of them are better than what I’m about to write so I’d encourage you to search around and see what information you can find in addition to this, which is probably sound advice for most things. I’ll refer to hotlinking of images from here on out, though what I say about images can apply to any file type.
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May 28
I’m not sure exactly how, but MT must have rebuilt itself last night at 2:28 because it’s index file was showing on the main page. Then, genius me replaced it with the incorrect index file for WP, so it looked more like a hybrid between the old and the new for a little while this [...] [...more]
Posted: under General.
I’m not sure exactly how, but MT must have rebuilt itself last night at 2:28 because it’s index file was showing on the main page. Then, genius me replaced it with the incorrect index file for WP, so it looked more like a hybrid between the old and the new for a little while this morning. I ended up extracting the original index from the WP zip file and now all seems to be well again.
I’m really not sure how it could have gotten changed in the first place though….I should check my access logs..
