WordPress gets high honours

17th November 2008 by David North

I was very impressed to read WordPress’s accessibility out of the box. There are a few issues to iron out before AAA is reached but that’s pretty good going I think you’ll agree! So if you are looking for a blogging engine or a simple CMS go for WordPress.

Blogging is dead

13th November 2008 by David North

No this isn’t in reference to my recent lack of posts for which I can only apologise - most of my spare time (of which there isn’t enough of) is spent with my 12 week old son. A pretty good excuse I think you’ll agree so don’t be too hard on me.

An article in Wired says Blogs are so 2004 says blogs are overcome with a “tsunami of paid bilge” so “Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”

Hmm a little overreaction methinks. The Internet as a whole is full of paid and unpaid bilge so maybe that should be shut down?

Really it’s all a case of quality control which is also going to be the case of the other technologies mentioned in the article such as Twitter.

How do I find blogs? Well it isn’t a conscious decision on my part; I simply find them on my travels around the web. If I happen to surf onto a post of interest I will look at other posts in the blog and if they’re really lucky and I like what I see I’ll subscribe to the RSS feed. I’m the quality control and my quality control is tight - I subscribe to about 50 feeds in total which I don’t consider a lot as I’m a pretty heavy Internet user. This list is constantly reviewed if I don’t like the way a blog is going I hit the delete button - not really that difficult. Recommendations I like too as that web is a rather large place.

It’s just the age old web spam issue which the search engines are constantly fighting anyway - blog or webpages alike it makes no difference.

Flash cookies are a threat to privacy

13th November 2008 by David North

I’m not an overly paranoid person and think some of the people who feel the need to delete their cookies regularly are probably taking things just a little too far. If people are tracking me around the web and serving adverts I might actually be interested in - fair play to them! I have nothing to hide and nothing to worry about.

However I didn’t realise that Flash provides a much more dangerous type of cookie that really needs to be addressed.

This Local Shared Object can:

  • Stay on your computer for an unlimited amount of time
  • Store 100 kb of data by default, with an unlimited max
  • Couldn’t be deleted by your browser
  • Send previous visit information and history, by default, without your permission

The big thing I take exception to here are the last two points. Firstly I believe every technology should give the user the ability to opt out, for cookies the option to delete should be readily available even if for the most part it’s only used by a minority. But the second point is truly wrong - this kind of data should be limited as it is in other technologies such as JavaScript.

Come on Adobe just give an opt out button on the next version of Flash player or perhaps just make security settings a little easier to find for your average user?

Steve Jobs is dead!

4th October 2008 by David North

Well he isn’t actually but it’s a similar sort of headline that was taken seriously and reported by CNN. It would seem a blog reported Mr Jobs (High godness of Apple) had a heart attack and CNN broadcast this causing a drop in Apple’s share price.

A little bit irresponsible of CNN not to get this confirmed after all don’t believe everything you read online. It would also seem there are investigations to see if this story was published with the intention of pushing down the share price.