My Sites & Projects Category

I decided to start using Twitter again today for micro-blogging. Who knows if I'll actually keep it up this time - we'll see.

Anyway, thanks to Twitter Tools for WordPress, my blog posts should automatically show up in Twitter and each night my Tweets (if any) should be posted to my blog.

So, let's see if this works... *clicks Publish*

Update Fri 7:15am: Blog-to-Twitter worked, but Twitter-to-Blog isn't working yet.

Update Fri 7:15pm: Fixed now. All Twitter digest posts go in the Twitter category if you want to filter them out.

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A designer recently told me fluid width layouts are bad because on large monitors a paragraph of text can end up as one long line. I had a look around some web sites and found there's a lot of debate about whether fixed or fluid width is better, but I couldn't find a general consensus.

Anyway I thought I'd try it out - so I've now modified my site to have a maximum width of 950px. I think it looks better on some pages, but not so good on others; I'm going to keep it for now though.

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.me domains opened for public registration a couple of days ago. Today I found this out while reading Digg and so I registered two three-letter domains:

• DJM.me - My initials
• Saz.me - My sister's nickname

(I don't know why, just seemed like a good idea...)

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After reading a book on usability, I've made a few tweaks to my web site. It now has a proper site header, complete with site ID and search box, and breadcrumbs so you know where you are. As an added bonus, there's now a picture of me on every page!

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After nearly 3 months work, I've finally published my new web site: Dave-Miller.com.

There's not a whole lot of content yet, other than everything I imported to my blog, but I've designed it to be as easy as possible for me to publish things in the future. Of course I've said this before and never done it though!

I've also moved my blog, again, from http://blog.dave-miller.com/ to http://www.dave-miller.com/blog/, for various reasons.

Anyway, please let me know what you think of the new design.

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I've finally updated my web site. The content is fairly minimal, just some links to other sites. I used a background image from a holiday to Menorca a few years ago.

Tech bit:
It's XHTML Strict & both XHTML and CSS validate. It even returns the correct "application/xhtml+xml" header to browsers that support it (not IE!). It's been tested in Firefox 2, IE 6, Opera 9, Safari 2, Links 1 and even on my mobile phone!

The email address is obfuscated using JavaScript, and for browsers that don't support that the user can click a form button to prove they're not a robot (because I don't think even email-harvesting robots will bother submitting forms). (I was mildly surprised to find my mobile phone supports JavaScript so doesn't even have to use the form!)

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Non-Technical Summary
I just installed WP Hashcash on my blog to try to get rid of all the spam I've been getting. Hopefully no-one will notice it (except me), but please post some comments and let me know if you have any problems with it. Thanks.

Technical Bit
Akismet catches 99% of spam, but the few that get through are still annoying; and with so many I can't actually check the list for false-positives. I tried just adding a random hash in a hidden field to every post, but it seems the bots do read the HTML (rather than just submitting directly to wp-comments.php) - so that didn't work at all.

This time the hash is computed using JavaScript instead. I don't know of anyone who uses a browser without it (apart from Lynx/Links occasionally when loading a normal browser is too much hassle), so it shouldn't be much of a problem for anyone.

There is, however, some warning being shown by Firebug - "Illegal Character". I don't know why though.

(In other news: I also fixed the XHTML validation errors at last!)

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Having spent much of last week trying to come up with a name for my project, I now would like to change the title of my blog! Primarily because I think I have the word "blog" too many times on every page and Adsense is picking up on that! And also because variations on "Dave's Blog" is just boring!

Anyway, something random. Perhaps technical sounding. Nothing too specific. Any thoughts? Please?

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I after a lot of deliberation, I have settled on the name "PHP Mate" for my software. (Its primary feature is being user-friendly. It's also fairly short and the domain name was available.)

(Web site coming soon... ish)

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I've been working on the design for the GUI part of my third year project. I've kept it as simple as possible, with only one image required (the logo - and even that could be removed), so that:

• It loads fast
• It is easy to change the colour scheme (see below)
• It can be invoked by a custom script (just like phpinfo()) and easily embedded in an application

The title's still temporary until I come up with (or someone else suggests ) a good name for it!

Note: Some images are a little blurred in places - I can't be bothered to change them to PNG now though!

1. The Design

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