Recently there was a commenter on the blog that kept leaving a link out to a bad neighborhood. The person would take the time to make a nice decent comment and all. But the link they were dropping was not acceptable by my standards. I do not link out to sketchy web sites from this site! It is just bad mojo and not good for PR, if you catch my drift? On the first blog comment this troll placed, I edited the comment and kindly left a little note in the comment window that said, “Note: Thank you for the nice comment although, I removed your signature link from the comment! It was unacceptable. “

So I went on about my business. Well a day or two later as I was checking comments. I noticed another comment that linked to this same sketchy website. Although this time the anchor text was different. After I noticed this and having remembered leaving the note in the comment, I just deleted the comment this time and went on about my business. Well a day later the blog comment that linked to the same site was there in the blog again.

I decided right then and there that I was going to put up a fence (take some extra measures) to block this troll from making any more comments on the blog. The troll was determined to try and get a link to a certain site from mine! I knew there is way to do this block by using the .htaccess file and adding in a “order allow,deny” statement with an IP address or site domain name. However I than wondered if there were perhaps an easier way to do this? Or thought there should be a way to do this right inside the wordpress admin panel.. Or maybe there is a nice plugin to do this?

Sure Enough! I needed not look any further than right inside the “Discussion” panel area in wordpress. This feature was built right in. The wordpress gurus had this same issue long before me and accommodated their great software with easy measures to rectify the culprit. Right inside the Discussion link from the sidebar there is the Comment Blacklist section and field and using this feature one can block a human from visiting the site. This automatically places the comment in the spam filter. If you have Akismet activated like I do! The comment will never be seen again.

What is nice about this too is how many ways a human can be blocked using this feature. We can enter a word, name, email address, IP or domain name URL in this tool to block any incoming visits that match any parts of the entered critera. This is great because many pesky spammers will naturally use proxy sites to change their IP address.. And these spam heads also sign up and use hundreds of different emails to do their link dropping. Yet many times they only have one or two site URLs that they are trying to plant links to. Here is an example below of how to make the entries on separate lines.

Using the Comment Blacklist those one or two URLs can be easily blocked no matter how many IP or email handles they use. I am happy to report, I never saw that sketchy site link on my blog again.

Important: Be really careful with what words you enter in to be blocked. Because the words used will also be blocked in longer words.. For example, if entered “free” than any comments containing the word “freedom” would be blocked. So you will want to use mostly only unique or full strings for names to block. The words in my example above are just for illustrative purpose. Those are not the words or address I really have entered in my Blacklister. Just be careful what words you enter and put some thought in to the entries. We do not want to block any good comments.

The rich text editor that comes default on a standard wordpress install is not really all that bad.

However, I would often find myself doing or adding things to the raw code or in html mode on the editor to get the desired results.. Doing things in the raw code is not a big deal if a person knows html and how to use it well. But we all like to progress and many times people would rather not have to mess around with the raw html code just to make nicely formated and feature rich posts. After all that is what a ‘WYSIWYG’ visual editor is for, right?

This plugin will add all kinds of extra buttons and functions to the default wordpress editor. It makes the Wordpress TinyMCE editor look similar to the image below.

Advanced Editor

Notice the Font size and Font family buttons? Those two alone make this plugin well worth installing. Plus all the other trick features it adds. Things like adding tables to posts, using inline css styles, a spell checker, find and replace words and more cool stuff too. Like adding captions to words in the text like this for example! Hover over the word and see a popup tool tip!

I highly recommend adding this plugin to your wordpress blog editor. The TinyMCE Advanced plugin is found at laptoptips.ca. The developer did a wonderful job making the plugin and also has a great website with other nice plugins to offer as well.

I have to say, the TinyMCE Advanced plugin adds some great functions to the default wordpress rich text editor and makes it more efficient and enjoyable to write posts.

The WP blogging platform can be used for niche websites, static page type web sites, sales copy letters, sales pitch opt in pages, business web sites, affiliate advertisements and more.

One of my favorite ways to use the power of wordpress is to use custom templates to make parts or pages of the web site unique. I will show you today how to use a page template as a custom template to make a page on Wordpress that can be totally custom. It can have its own characteristics and or features which can be totally different from the main front page of the website.

Here are just a few of the likely scenarios that could be made easily possible by using a custom page template with a new blog page.

• Show a different page header on a page.
• Want a custom sidebar to show content relevant to only that page.
• Want no sidebar on the page, make the content full with.
• Use custom css styles on one or more features on a custom page.
• Want to have different fonts, text colors or title sizes on a page.
• Would like to have the page layout or spacing formated different.
• remove post titles and or date stamps from a post or letter on a page.

The first step is to create a template to use for the new custom page.

1. Login to your wordpress admin panel and in the Theme Editor section look for and click to open the Page Template file, this file is generally a ‘page.php’ or ’singlepage.php file.

2. Copy the code from the Page Template file and paste it in Notepad or a text editor on your local computer, place the code snippet below with your desired page name in the snippet at the top of that file and save it as a .php file with a unique name, like ‘custompage.php’ for an example.

<?php /* Template Name: Graphics Page
*/ ?>

3. Now, with the template code in the new file, upload this new file using ftp or cpanel manager to your installed wordpress theme folder.

4. This file should now be accessible and can be customised from inside your wordpress admin panel in the Theme Editor area you will see the new template file there with the name you gave to it in the top code snippet.

5. Assign a new page in wordpress to use this new custom template. Go to Write > Write Page and make a new page with your desired title. Now! In the lower section of the page editor look for a setting field called, “Page Template” and click on that and open the bar to select the new template there. The area and setting in wordpress 2.6 are shown on the image at the left and this is where you would need to select your new custom made template here in this field. Select the new template name and save the page with all your desired content added in to body of the page too of course. This links the new made page to the custom template we made.

6. Now, you can return to the Theme Editor section and select your custom pages templates and make edits to this page by using the custom template file. Sidebars can be removed, header added, page title erased, etc.

When the full capabilities of Wordpress are harnessed, the possibilities are endless. It is not only a good blogging platform, wordpress also makes full scale CMS applications that can serve many different purposes.

Here are a few pictures that show what type of equipment is used in modern day networks.

I can remember the days when this would only happen to those old pens Those pens found in the trunk of a car after five or so years of being there. Yea! An old pen like that might need a little coursing first to make it write. But write it would! The pens were made of quality and to high standards and simply worked and they worked well. When I needed to write something on paper.. I could pick up that old trusty pen and every time, it wrote with out fail, a soft motion would make print and with out the least bit of hesitation. They used to make a mean pen. A pen that actually wrote and scribbling first was not required every time it was needed.. The pens made today! Would not write even one small vowel letter, if from the package more than a few days.

I started to think about this here pen.. This here pen that would not write. And asked myself, why do they even make pens? Why do I even own a pen? The stupid fucking pen will not even write and the pretty package it came in is all I have to show for! It shows me just what greed for the almighty dollar does to the quality of our fine goods. As time and technology progress, we learn to make things with more show than go. The products are made cheaper, with fewer real raw materials. Yet, the consumer pays the same price or more for basic goods that are considered necessary. Have you opened up a package of Hostess® cupcakes or Grandmas® cookies lately, and noticed what’s inside? Inside the package, you will find a morsel that is half the size as once was? There used to be almost a small meal inside this package and now there is contained not much more than a bite.

I previously worked at a company that installed custom kitchens. The owner of the company had a good structured system set up of how we did the jobs. We would completely tear out these old kitchens right down to the bare walls and sometimes to the framing studs. The cabinets, appliances and everything, including the kitchen sink was removed. Than, we would do upgrades to the plumbing and electrical before we would rebuild the kitchen! It was defiantly a job that for the most part, was a series of processes. It had to be done in order of sequence for things to go accordingly.

On the day of the new cabinet arrival, we would spend a good part of that day and sometimes two days depending on volume doing what I liked to call stage work. It consisted of un-boxing all the cabinets, removing all the doors and hardware and putting the doors in a safe place away from the main work area. Then we would mark all the cabinets with tape and a marker according to location and style. This had great benefits when it came time to actually start building the kitchen. For one, it made it much easer to handle the cabinets when mounting them on the wall, because you did not have the door in the way and could hold them up from the inside. For two, this reduced the chances of mounting a cabinet in the wrong place because, the cabinets were all marked on the top side according to style and location. For three, you did not have to go back and forth between these small tasks once you started mounting cabinets on the wall. And finally, you did not risk scratching up the doors while doing the heavy work, which the doors are the most visible part of the finished product.

The other workers thought this staging or prep type work was unnecessary and basically they did not like to do it! (Maybe it was their age, not sure) They just wanted to start mounting cabinets on the wall right from day one of the project. They had no patience. So undoubtedly, I was the one that did this stage or the prep work on all the jobs. I had more of an appreciation for the benefits of this step and how it played in to the overall scope of the project.

Once I had everything staged, which was usually in the living room or a side bedroom, I joined them in the kitchen to help with the more significant work. This work consisted of attaching the cabinets together and mounting the cabinet banks on the walls. This work of mounting the cabinets was made much easer and went with out hitch, mostly because of the earlier prep work that was done! The cabinet doors were retrieved , remounted and aligned only after the heavy dirty work was done.

This is a good example of how planning ahead and spending some time on the small things first, goes a long ways to having a nice finished product. Projects are usually always done on time and with no mistakes. The custom kitchen projects always turned out cherry and the customers were very happy.

The rules of the contest state – “This lunar space vehicle must trek 1,312 feet on the surface of the moon and transport images and real time video back to Earth. The images and video should include panoramic views and portraits of its self.”

Google will pay out $20 million to anyone who can successfully complete this incredible mission challenge by the end of 2012. If there is no one successful by that date, the prize money drops to $15 million until the end of 2014 when the contest will end.

There will also be $5 million awarded to the second place team or individual and $5 million will be given as a bonus to any team that goes above and beyond the minimum contest requirements, for a grand total of $30 million in contest cash prize money.

This will be a very interesting contest or story to follow – Will there be any privately held company or an individual that is up to the challenge?

Source: moneycnn.com

Modern day video graphics cards

The modern video cards provide enhanced support for 3-D graphic acceleration, color space conversion, dual porting, MGEG decoding, EPA Green PC Support, interpolated scaling, digital output for flat panel monitors and application support for powerful graphics software like InDesign, Quark and Auto-CAD.

Here’s one of the logos I put together. On this logo, I used the Ellipse Tool for the sun and also the vector Knife Tool for making some of the fine slices for the smaller pieces.

The thing that I find most enjoyable about doing the designs is how much it gets the creative juices flowing. I am the type of person that gets bored easy with doing the same thing over and over. Repetition gets old and creating art with Fireworks is always a new and motivating experience for me. I especially like that every time I use the program, I learn about a new feature or trick way of doing things with the program. I am glad that I took a little time out and started playing with fire!