I’ve added a few new tools to my useful tools section that may be of use to some of you. Here’s a description of each of them.
Escape HTML - If you want to post HTML code on a web site, you have to escape the HTML tags so they’re not interpreted. This tool [...]

I’ve been happy with Akismet, the spam filtering plugin from Automattic. It has caught over 250,000 spam comments with minimal effort on my part. A handful of spam comments get through each week that I have to manually mark as spam, but that’s far better than the hundreds I used to deal with.
I’ve [...]

I’ve made three new additions to the sidebar on this site. I’ll explain what they are. The first two sections come from del.icio.us and the third comes from LibraryThing.
The first section, named “My comments elsewhere”, lists sites where I’ve made comments. I’ll be posting about the process I use in an upcoming [...]

I’ve created a new design for the site. The current one is old and stale and it’s high time for a change.
Before it goes live though, I’d like your feedback. Do you like the color scheme? Is it an improvement over the current design? Is it easy on the [...]

You might have noticed two new additions on the front page sidebar. The first one shows pictures of recent visitors who are registered users of MyBlogLog and the second one shows the most popular outgoing links of the day.
MyBlogLog has provided a way to track outgoing links and ever since I heard about it [...]

I was planning to do something that took about 45 seconds and I wanted to know how long it would take if I did it 15 times. In the past, I’ve also wanted to calculate other things that were time-related and found that a regular calculator wasn’t all that useful. So, I’ve created [...]

I used to make your e-mail address optional when commenting because I never liked giving out my e-mail address but I’m now making it required. I promise not to reveal it anywhere, or to spam you, and if you still don’t trust me feel free to use a fake one, even something humorous. [...]

A while ago I toyed with the idea of sending out notifications of new blog entries and eventually began doing it. However, I have found that they have had an unanticipated impact on my daily blogging, apart from my original concern that people wouldn’t want to unsubscribe. I resolved that by switching to [...]

I’ve been meaning to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress for a while now, and now that I did it, I’m impressed. During my hiatus from blogging while I focused on school, the WordPress developers were busily adding features and improving the code. Nice work guys! I also updated my dashboard [...]

I feel I should explain why I haven’t posted at all this week. Towards the end of the summer I decided to return to school (BYU) to finish my undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I only had two semesters left, so the idea of finishing in eight months was appealing, but the set [...]

I’ve been using version 1.2 of WordPress while the rest of the world forged on without me, so I finally made the plunge and upgraded. The reason I had been holding back was because I had made oodles of changes to the actual code, meaning when I upgraded I would have to either merge [...]

This entry marks a milestone in my blogging career - my one thousandth post.
For bloggers who post more than once a day, it may not sound like much, but I typically post once a day (Monday through Friday). Since my first post about Smartstocks and some gadgets at Altavista way back in December of [...]

I’ve been getting hit with several comment spam attempts today but so far none have gotten through. Fahim, the author of WPBlacklist e-mailed me and helped me get it configured correctly and now it’s working like a charm. I’m currently running WPBlacklist 2.6, the latest release that I know of, which automatically deletes [...]

I had over 1,000 posts in Movable Type that were archived individually, by month and by category. When I switched to WordPress I changed the format of the permanent links to include the date and title instead of the non-portable post ID (which, by the way, MT does not include when you export your [...]

I just switched from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve been thinking about doing it for quite a while, and the last straw was when it started taking 10-15 seconds to post a comment. I had a little over 4,000 comments and that seemed to be too much for MT to handle.
It’s going to [...]

I’ve been using Atomz search for over two and a half years and I had no complaints. Then I got an e-mail from them where they explained that were going to start displaying Google Ads with my search results. To keep me happy they said I could now index 750 pages instead of [...]

I currently have 84 drafts of posts in Movable Type right now. There’s also another entry that is a draft that has over 100 ideas for entries that weren’t developed enough to create a draft from them.
Does anyone else do this or am I alone in my draft-happy state?
My basic method is this; whenever [...]

I’ve moved my site to a faster server with more features (the same provider), but there may be a few glitches during the transition. Please bear with me as I work them out, and let me know in the comments if you notice anything that isn’t working correctly.

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t made any posts recently. I’m on a vacation and won’t have regular internet access until this Saturday so I won’t be very talkative until then.

Two sites were linking directly to photos of my motorcycle, so I swapped the image with one that said, “Please don’t link directly to my images. You’re stealing my bandwidth” I left it for a few days but they didn’t change it. I considered writing rude things about them, thinking it would [...]

I have dispensed with all images that used to be on each page. There weren’t that many, but they didn’t add much value to the site. The page loads faster now, and the function of the images have been replaced by text. I realize that the images would have been cached in [...]

From a MetaTalk post I learned that a user was artificially inflating his MeFi contribution index. I was going to remove him from the list, but Matt took care of the problem by banning him from MeFi.
Since I was already looking at the code, I made three minor improvements. The first is that [...]

I’ve rewritten some of the navigation code for the site in order to make it more usable. If you notice something that doesn’t seem to be right, please let me know in a comment. There’s still some more work to do, but I believe it’s headed in the right direction.

I have been making infrequent entries this week because of vacation and the absence of internet access at home. I’ll be back to work on Monday though, and my roommate has resolved one of the two problems with the connection at home. The other problem is with the wireless access point that refuses [...]

After seeing Jason’s guest map I’ve decided to add one to my site as well. I’m curious to see who (if anyone) signs up on it. If there are any foreigners reading, now is your time to declare your nationality.
I modified the link in the sidebar to be a target link instead of [...]

I used to add new submissions automatically to my funny lists but some people began to abuse it. It must have been too stimulating for them. I mean, they could post whatever they wanted and have it appear on the page, like magic. I remember two guys in particular who started a [...]

I usually don’t succumb to trendy things, but I saw a link to blog hot or not on daypop and figured I could get some traffic. So, as I join the herd of followers, I have only one thing to say. Moo.
Is my Blog hot or not?
By the way, what does temperature have [...]

Paul is doing a trackback test and since I haven’t done anything with it yet I figured I’d give it a try. Let’s see if it works.

I took a nap at about 7:30 Thursday night but ended up sleeping until 3am Friday morning. I wasn’t tired so I decided to use the time to work on my site.
One of the things I did was remove all the comment links to the entries I imported from my other posting system. [...]

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the archive layout and I haven’t figured out exactly how to make the comments pages be wrapped within my header and footer because they’re CGI’s instead of normal HTML files. The comments will work, they just don’t look pretty. The last thing I know of [...]

This may be the last time I make an entry with my home-grown posting solution that I could call lovable type. I’m now using Movable Type. I wrote a PHP script that converted my old format to the import format MT requires. It would have been really simple, except the MT parser [...]

I’ve added JavaScript to validate the fields in the email form instead of having the server do it. I also have a snazzy little regular expression to make sure the email address is valid. I have received a few emails with invalid email addresses and it’s annoying because I can’t reply to them. [...]

I don’t know how long Yahoo has offered this service, but it looks like they don’t want to be left out of the answering game. Google recently announced their own answering service. This is a change for them to be competing directly. In the search engine arena, Google [...]

I was perusing the files on the server and discovered that I have the old polls that used to be here, but they’re not linked anywhere. They are now linked. I am considering adding the poll again. The reason I stopped was because it’s hard to think up good questions to ask. [...]

I spent a fair portion of this weekend changing the navigation of this site around. My aim was to make it easier to use and for it to give you more information about where you are within the site. Hopefully I have succeeded. I have thought about putting up a page about [...]

I went for a ride on my CBR and the idle is behaving itself. I think the carburetor cleaner is doing the trick. It’s still a little touchy, but hopefully by the end of the tank it will be all cleared out.
Since I wrote my own blogging tool in PHP (not very elaborate) [...]

The “wheel” world - Gives a whole new meaning to rolling out of bed in the morning.
I’ve been trying to find a slick new domain to host this blog because I think it might be easier to remember but I have yet to find a domain that I’m really happy with. I prefer a [...]

I’ve been growing a goatee for about a month now and I’m quite pleased with how it looks. It has filled in quite nicely and I even have a little patch on my lower lip of lighter colored whiskers which gives it a unique look. I’ll have to take a picture sometime.
You may [...]

Aha! I have figured out a better solution to my comment archiving. I’m probably spending a lot of time on something that wasn’t really that important to anyone but me, but at least I’m happy I now have the comments already going into the archive, so on the front page it just [...]

I’ve reworked the comments archive with the intention of making it easier to use. Hopefully I’ve succeeded. I plan on adding a description for each month and something cute and witty to say at the top of the page. I also need to figure out what to do about this year’s comments, since [...]

When I first created a home page 7 years ago I used to spend long hours working on it only to realize that I was the only one using it. I tried to figure out how to get more traffic with little success. It’s nice to see that people are using the designs [...]

I’ve restructured some of the navigation. I still have a bit to do, but I wanted to make every page logically fit under one of the main categories. I also added a Top 25 Songs page and a Top 10 Albums list. It’s really hard to decide what I like better though so they’ll [...]

The two new designs I posted on oswd.org were very well received. They were the two most popular designs for the first few days and I have actually broken into the most downloads list. I think I’ll create a few more designs now that I’m on a roll.

Just completed a new design but I can’t put it up on oswd.org yet because they haven’t gotten DNS to resolve correctly yet. It was working for a short time and I submitted Blue Heron but when I finished with Droll it was back to the old site already so I’ll just post it [...]

I’ve added two new pages to the site. Some riddles and a collection of some brain teasers. If you have any more I’d love to hear them, but please don’t give me the answer because I’d like to figure it out myself.

I have made a lot more changes to the site, but most of them are not visible. The one thing I still want to do is put my CD collection into the database so it will be easy to search and pull up certain artists and such. Once that’s done I’ll be quite [...]

I’ve been making a few small changes to the site and decided to put in a search box (thanks to Google) which should help people find things since I’ve been moving them all around. If you can’t find something, you can email me and I’ll let you know where it’s at.

I have made numerous changes to the site and I have attempted to verify that everything is working, but if you find anything that is either not working or doesn’t seem to be right, please let me know. If you just want to say hi, by all means do so - I promise to [...]

First off, I changed the background color because I think it looks a little nicer and it’s easy on the eyes. I also changed the stylesheets to be more backwards compatible, so if things look different or wrong please let me know. The only problem with testing is that I have very limited [...]

I have changed the design to make it more readable and usable. Let me know if there is anything wrong with it or if you have any suggestions to make it look better. Thanks