jonlee.ca

I just spent the last couple hours updating Wordpress and all plugins to their latest versions!  It has been a while since I’ve done that and it seems like Wordpress got quite the overhaul in version 2.7 with some pretty interesting features, the most important one being automatic future updates.  This is a godsend since updating Wordpress up until now has been unnecessarily primitive and tedious.  Hopefully the automatic updates won’t break any customizations I’ve used on this blog.

Unfortunately the new version of the Defensio anti-spam plug-in broke my layout so I’ve gone back to Akismet for now. I also installed Kontera on a few sites since Google Adsense is performing way under par on all my of sites these past few months.  We’ll see if Kontera will supplement it well!

Please let me know if anything on the site is broken!

Happy holidays and a happy new year! I hope everyone got what they want this gift giving season!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of updates the past couple months.  I’ve just been so busy with school, moving, and other projects that I couldn’t find time to write any decent posts.

I received a few e-mails from concerned readers worried about why I disappeared for a couple months without much warning.  I do appreciate the concern and would like to assure everyone that I am back from my short hiatus!

Look forward to more posts coming soon!  In the mean time, Lifehacker featured an article about my DIY Das Keyboard Using a Model M.  Check it out!

Popularity: 15% [?]

After migrating my servers entirely over to PHP5, my SurfHandsFree site stopped working properly.  The problem was that it uses the domxml_open_file function which is a PHP4 function and isn’t supported in PHP5.

PHP5 instead uses the dom extension instead which has more features but isn’t backwards compatible with domxml.

Instead of changing all of my code to be compatible with PHP5 (which is perhaps a better solution), I found a module that basically implements all of the PHP4 domxml functions but using the new dom extension.

All you need to do is to put the provided file, domxml-php4-to-php5.php in the directory of the script (or any directory) and include it at the top of your code with:

<?php require_once(”domxml-php4-to-php5.php”); ?>

A big thanks to Alexandre Alapetite for writing this module!

Popularity: 35% [?]

Sean MacEntree over at smemon.com contacted me a while back because he is participating in a skydive competition for the NCBI charity for the blind in Ireland.  Being the charitable guy I am, I agreed to sponsor a prize for him – one 125×125 advertising button for a full year on jonlee.ca.

Basically, he is trying to raise $1000 for the skydive.  Anyone that donates at least a $1 to his cause will be entered in a draw for a whole bunch of sponsored prizes (including mine!).

Currently, the prize pool is worth over $2500 and you only need to donate $1 for a chance to win!

You can contact Sean if you want to sponsor a prize for his competition.  Not only will you get a few backlinks from his blog, he will even print your logo/URL on the shirt that he’s going to wear while skydiving!

Go over to smemon.com and check it out!

Popularity: 36% [?]

Today, I have surpassed 100,000 blocked spam comments on my blog. This is quite the milestone. Big shout out goes to Defensio who makes one of the best spam filters out there. Akismet works fine for a lot of people but managing and moderating spam comments doesn’t get any easier than Defensio.

A while back I had made a suggestion to them to allow sorting spam comments chronologically by the post to which they refer. Turns out it was already something in the works and it’s magnificent. They provide several ways of finding legitimate comments that were caught by the spam filter without requiring you to browse pages upon pages of comments.

Now if only they can implement an auto-update feature…

Popularity: 14% [?]