I found this via a comment on Oxtons site and I think its amazing, infact I am blogging this from a javascript Safari as we speak, superb.

Check out the OSX Desktop recreated in dom script/Javascript and marvel.

Via The Man in Blue

I am writing this on my new mobile phone using the new Opera Mini Java browser. Although at the moment it is only in beta available exclusively to Norway you can download it off of the internet. It is similar to Opera Mobile in functionality, the difference being that instead of the phone trying to process the site and render it on your small screen, operas servers do it instead sending you the page optimized for your screen size.

I finally got my Wordpress.com invite this morning, I haven’t had much time to play with it yet and have done little more than change the default theme. I will however endevour to check it out and report on my thoughts.

One thing that I do like is the ajaxy magic applied to the admin area, especially the write page, more on that later as well.

The side affect of this means that I have an invite going spare, do you want it? Best reason sent within the next week will get it. Entries posted as comments, closing date 28th of this month.

God I bloody hate computers, I know, I am sorry you already know that you read the excerpt and the title, but you know I really do.

My computer, I specifically hate because it’s always Fucked. Normally however I can put up with the broken bits and muddle through, sometimes though it gets really broken and I have to format and reinstall Windows XP. This happened.

For sometime I had been getting the error “NTLDR is missing press ‘CTRL’ + ‘ALT’ + ‘DEL’ to restart” at bootup, however I was able to bypass it by logging into the recovery console and Fixmbr [ing] the MBR every time I restarted, which thanks to a constant stream of critical updates, I tended to do a lot. At this level the problem was manageable, so much so that I couldn’t even be arsed to google for a fix.

Then my admin password stopped working in the recovery console, great now I really am fucked I thought. Not to worry I can simply install XP on my slave drive, use partition magic to re-size my master partition and then copy all the things I needed across to a second partition, format my main partition and reinstall XP. Simple enough, so I did it. spent ages copying everything across.

Then when it cam to the final part of the process, namely reinstalling my main operating system. I whacked my restore disc in (Emachines are to tight to give me a real disc) and let it run through.

When it booted up however something was wrong, instead of simply reformatting the partition and unpacking the image into it; the restore disc had deleted all partitions on my main drive and created itself a fat new one. BASTARD, SHITTY, BOLLOCKS. Everything was gone. Most importantly around 15gig of music, Tonnes of photos all enhanced just the way I like. All my college assignments, which although I have left college over a year, I still liked. And god knows what else. My Diablo 2 saves (good by 100’s of hours of my life). And my Girlfriends C.V, which as you might have guessed was the most important thing on there.

Anyway here’s to Windows XP and its ability to make sure you are always on your toes.

By the way I know this article is very badly written, I am tired and to mad to write it properly. (Yes that is an excuse for me not really being able to write at all).

I have decided to start serving AdSense on this site in an attempt to help my hosting bills. I have gone with the wide skyscraper text only advert on the single post pages, hopefully these will provide useful related content and not just annoying adds.

This is the first time I have used AdSense and so I will be playing around with it for a while to try to find the optimal placing both in terms of aesthetics and click through rates.

I am more and more realising that really my blog should be earning me some cash and so I am going to be exploring was of doing this, what I don’t want to do though is clutter my site with ads that put people off of coming, I want anything that creates me a revenue to be useful to me readers (customers) and make them want to come back.

If the ads annoy you completely and think they should be moved to a different placing then please say so, I am happy to discuss.

Firstly as most, if not all of you will no a certain site has redesigned and re-awoken. With such a celebrity list of creators its akin to having your car created by Ferrari, Lambourgini and Lotus all at the same time. As you may have guessed I like it, far more than then previous version although surely less than the next. I especially like the fancy underlines and everything else. It fits perfectly onto a 1024 res screen and is fixed at that, only displaying 3 of its amply columns to anyone with an 800 * 600 monitor and refusing to be flexible with larger resolutions. More than anything the site seems far more usable and pleasing to use, infact I read the article on PDF accessibility even though it doesn’t interest me in the slightest.

So well done you lot on creating a lovely site, its obvious that a lot of thought has gone into the simple yet perfectly executed front end and I for one am looking forward to more from the infamous A List Apart.

In other news Mr Oxton finally realised how silly he was being and opened his heart to the world, or at least to people who had forgotteon to delete his feed from their agregator. I missed him and am glad he is back even if it is only for one post. Or one week, who knows.

Well there we go how interesting.

I thought of the name by the way and I am rather proud of it, so much so that I can’t imagine why no one else thought of it first, well I suppose someone did as joeblogs.com, joebloggs.com, joeblogs.co.uk and joebloggs.co.uk are all taken, although none of them contain anything remotely like a person called Joe who blogs.

Anyway check it out, subscribe to his RSS feed, make it your homepage; its your choice

Its basically going to be a sort of change log for this site and I will post every time I do something to the site, this will probably be more useful to me than to any of you.

So what have I changed, well in the hope of making my site more user friendly and easy to understand I have stopped heading my RSS feed links with Syndicate and instead with Subscribe, this makes far more sense and is much more self explanatory and hopefully more people will get what it means. I didn’t come up with this myself I read it somewhere a while back , although unfortunately I can’t remember where.

I was doing well, I had wp-gatekeeper installed and thus far hadn’t had any comment spam at all, in fact only one dubious comment since I started; I was happy.

Then I read the post on Bad Behaviour and I thought, wow that would be nice, no spam and less interference with my visitors trying to comment. So I installed it and disabled Wp-gatekeeper. I got spammed, not many, but enough, grr.
I am going to leave it running as it is for another couple of days however and if I continue to get spammed then I will change back to wp-gatekeeper again. Its a kind of experiment, yippee.

Not.

When plugins are so easy to implement as with wordpress, people can get a bit carried away and you end up with sites full of features that don’t really benefit its users, while this might be ok for a personal site that is used as a bit of a web playground; it can have a negative effect on sites that are should be more user focused.

Another more technical problem that arises from the use of plugins is that not all plugins produce code that validates or that follows good web standards practises, this can be very frustrating for web developers who know what they are doing as it means that their sites won’t validate if they don’t go through and sort out the plugins code. It creates a different problem for web masters who have little knowledge or interest in web standards as they can create feature rich site with ease without realising the problems.

Some of the plugins that I would like to see cleaned up are the Intouch plugin which at the moment inserts all the JavaScript and css in-line instead of separating it into a separate file. Also the Livesearch plugin which is very popular at the moment due to its ajaxyness creates non standard attributes to achieve something that can be done easily via JavaScript (a post on how to make the livesearch plugin validate has already been written).

I don’t mean to have a go at plugin developers or anything I mean I use both of the mentioned plugins on my site and they provide features that I am not capable of coding myself at the present time. I am just a bit of a stickler for clean code.