Want stripes on your web site? Ajaxian has a link to a nice web site which will create a striped tile for you. The site’s easy to use and free… the only downside is that you don’t get a live preview of your stripes.

If you use this, just make sure they don’t make your web site look fat.

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You’re working on a web site and you need some icons for your feeds – now! After all, what web site in 2007 doesn’t have at least one feed? Yes, yes, you can always go to someone else’s web site and grab their icons – if you’re really unscrupulous you’ll link directly to them until they notice and redirect your link to goatse.

But if you want a variety of feed icons in a variety of formats (including Photoshop), the place to go is – ta da! – http://www.feedicons.com/.

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The Apocalypse blog got 2104 spam comments today!

Fortunately, Akismet caught most of them. 14 were sitting waiting for moderation. By the time I marked them all as spam, I’d received 4 more.

If you don’t know about Akismet, it’s a built-in Wordpress plugin that detects and filters spam. It works by comparing comments with spam comments collected by other blogs. The spam is separated from the “good” comments and is automatically deleted after 15 days.
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Our bank is a small local bank. In general they’ve been very good to deal with. They offer a web interface through which we can access our account, pay bills, etc. The web interface is nothing special… it works, it has a couple of quirks and unnecessary page reloads.

Recently they decided they needed to beef up security. I ran into this on my own personal account a while back, and was unhappy about it. Now they’ve done it to our business account.

The security mechanism consists of them asking three questions and requiring answers to them. Then, in the future if they decide that you might be accessing the account from a different computer from the one you usually do, they may ask the questions and block your access to the account if you can’t answer them.
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So I had my Wordpress theme worked out using the “3 Column Fluid Layout” that I mentioned in an earlier article, and I tested it with Safari, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 6 and it looked the way it should. I skimped on testing it with Internet Explorer 7 because I didn’t have space on my MacBook Pro for another Parallels disk image for IE 7. So, of course, it worked poorly with IE 7.

What was I thinking? What, IE 7 might have a bug?

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Wordpress.org is now providing its own directory of plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. Plugins extend the functionality of Wordpress, providing support for doing everything from AJAX-y comments to social bookmarking to spam detection. There are thousands of Wordpress plugins out there. If they’re not the backbone of setting up a Wordpress blog, they are at least the tatts and piercings.

Until now I’ve used http://wp-plugins.net/ for most of my plugin searching (or I’ve just used Google). I’ve even found a few authors who’ve had a nice set of high quality, useful plugins. It will probably take a while before Wordpress.org catches up to the previously existing plugin directories, so I’d suggest not giving up if you’re looking for something and don’t find it at Wordpress.org.

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Of course almost everybody loves Ajax, but as web page tech evolves it brings with it a whole host of new problems as pages bloat out, carrying with them their own assortments of secondary files: CSS and Javascript libraries that they depend on. Imagine an subroutine call which, every time you called it, required libraries many times its size to be loaded and linked in – this is what’s going on when you load modern web pages.

prototype.js is likely the most popular Ajax implementation out there, and getting it skinny will certainly help load times for web pages depending on it. Ajaxian points to a collection of compressed prototype.js files.

Via: Ajaxian » Compressed versions of Prototype
[tags]prototype, prototype.js, compressed, ajax[/tags]

The Wordpress 2.1.1 distribution was cracked recently and a couple of files were tampered with. The malicious version was only online for a few days; the original version was safe. But if you’ve installed and are running Wordpress 2.1.1, the Wordpress maintainers strongly advise that you update to version 2.1.2 instead. Check the link below for their report.

The CVS distribution is intact, so if you installed from it you’re safe.

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