My first port of call was to use Thorsten Hartmann‘s th23 Domain mod, which enables users to log in to your forum from different domains. The mod is no longer being updated, but I can confirm that I have it running with the current version of phpBB (3.0.8). As long as your two (or more) domains or addresses point to the same location, this mod should allow the user to access the forum as if he’d used the default address. In fact, with a little php wizardry at your disposal, you could use the mod as the basis for having your forum displayed differently depending on the web address used.

After making sure I had the forum running currently from two addresses, I then did the standard thing and followed the official guide to moving your forum over at phpbb.com. You may be able to skip certain sections of that guide depending on whether or not you are actually moving server.

Updating links

Once your forum is working correctly under the new domain, one final alteration you may need to make would be to update all those backlinks in your forum posts to point to the right place. Simply run the following SQL queries (using phpMyAdmin or otherwise), replacing the addresses OldDomain.com/forums and NewDomain.com/forums with your relevant old and new forum web addresses.

UPDATE phpbb_posts SET post_text = replace(post_text,  'www.OldDomain.com/forums',  'www.NewDomain.com/forums');
UPDATE phpbb_posts SET post_text = replace(post_text, 'www.OldDomain.com/forums', 'www.NewDomain.com/forums');

You may need to run this twice if you also allowed access to your forum via a different subdomain (e.g. both OldDomain.com/forums and www.OldDomain.com/forums). And whilst not strictly necessary, the same principal can be applied to updating backlinks in private messages and forum signatures.

UPDATE phpbb_privmsgs SET message_text = replace(post_text,  'www.OldDomain.com/forums',  'www.NewDomain.com/forums');
UPDATE phpbb_privmsgs SET message_text = replace(post_text, 'www.OldDomain.com/forums', 'www.NewDomain.com/forums');
UPDATE phpbb_users SET user_sig = replace(post_text,  'www.OldDomain.com/forums',  'www.NewDomain.com/forums');
UPDATE phpbb_users SET user_sig = replace(post_text, 'www.OldDomain.com/forums', 'www.NewDomain.com/forums');

Fortunately there was an easy, if rather roundabout fix available: simply email the files to my Gmail account, and use the option there to open them with Google Docs. Bingo!

However, the announcement that really put the cat amongst the pigeons has been that the core development team may now be promoting what were formally called canonical plugins, now known as core plugins following the unpublished results of a poll in December. It appears that whilst attempting to address a genuine issue, the very idea of having plugins that stand in the limelight with an official stamp of approval has incensed many community plugin developers.

Some really excellent debate has been held which has, amongst other things, revealed that the initial go ahead for core plugins will be very limited; just three plugins, including an old, out-of-date plugin, a chunk hived off from the core, and a newly developed plugin. Nevertheless, the potential for these core plugins to have wide-reaching effects on the plugin development pool, create stagnation in the community and a greater top-down hierarchy is something that in the eyes of many developers and enthusiasts, has not been addressed.

The Pros

Most of the people arguing in favour of core plugins have the same ultimate motivation as the core developers. They don’t acknowledge the potential negative side-effects of the move, and if they do, they don’t consider them to be negative.

• Reliability. Perhaps the biggest driving issue for this move is that of plugin reliability. Most WordPress users will have come across the problem of using a plugin to such an extent that a site essentially relies on its features, or may even have been built around it, only to find that the plugin developer has got bored of his project, and the next version of WordPress breaks it entirely. Finding a suitable, working replacement may take a lot of time and effort, but will not guarantee that the situation won’t repeat itself.
• Security. Stemming largely from the above phenomenon, users making use of plugins that are no longer maintained by their developers find themselves loath to update their WordPress installations for fear of having their sites fall apart should those plugins no longer be compatible. They voluntarily take the risk of running an out-dated version with potential, known security flaws, unnecessarily making themselves a potentially viable target. Of course, even if that plugin works in the latest version of WordPress, it doesn’t preclude that the unmaintained plugin itself isn’t wide open to abuse, just another potential security hole in an otherwise fairly sound system.
• Support. There are literally thousands of plugins out there, the vast majority written by individuals who developed their plugins for their own special needs, and out of a bit of thought for the community, decided to share their creations with other users. They probably aren’t looking for any form of reimbursement, neither gold nor glory, other than a bit of gratitude. And whilst there may be some of that, they are far more likely to drown in a hail of support issues, bug fixing and feature requests, something they are neither capable or inclined to cope with. Some people post on the WordPress Extend site itself, many ask questions on the release post on the author’s blog, other plugin authors run their own forums, but even these may require that users sign up just to find how little information there is or how infrequently the author actually answers posts. Where exactly can users go then for help?
• Quality. The WordPress Extend repository proudly states that there are over 9,000 plugins with a cumulative 80 million downloads: and the vast majority of those are utter cruft. I don’t think anyone should have any illusions about that. A plugin is obviously more than just what it purports to do on the box, and a good plugin in particular is one that ticks more than just the boxes for functionality. It needs to have accurate and up-to-date documentation, how to install, use and (ideally) uninstall the plugin. There should be an accurate and preferably human-readable changelog detailing the key alterations, bug fixes and feature additions between each version. That’s a lot of work for one man, and I very rarely find a plugin that gets it all right: I’ve seen plugins which link to other pages for an up-to-date changelog that doesn’t include the last two versions, or others which link to a trac page without even the slightest attempt to translate that list in something regular users would likely understand. One popular plugin has documentation that is sadly so incomplete, that users point to posts on other blogs for fuller idea of how to use it.

The Cons

• Labels. Core, Canonical, Official, Godly, call it what you will, all those plugins which make it into the selected few and get the rubber stamp will destroy the efforts of many other plugin developers who weren’t so lucky. Regular users will of course browse through the official lists before turning to true third-party solutions to their problems. In what developers like to call the plugin free market, it really is a case of all plugins are equal, but some are more equal than others.
• Hierarchy. One of the other big concerns from developers is that the move presents an encroachment in an otherwise egalitarian ecosystem. Plugin developers invariably create their plugins to fulfill a particular need, their own or someone else’s. They are the ones with the final say when it comes to fixing bugs, adding features and writing the code. With an official plugin, however, who’s the one who gets the final say when it comes to adding new features? Who’s to decide which code gets included, which issues get priority, and so on?
• Monopoly. A developer sets up a WordPress site and finds he needs something that isn’t covered in the core software, and for whatever reason hasn’t been implemented or implemented well by another plugin, so writes his own and publishes it for others to use. Of course, in all likelihood there are other plugins already available, which may approach the issue from different angles, or with different feature sets. These plugins, however, essentially overlap in terms of their usage, and the ensuing competition should result in more well-rounded plugins that are up-to-date, flexible, reliable and secure. Only the fittest survive. At least, in theory. With these official plugins, all of this competition goes out of the window, technically more proficient plugins with better features and tight code, will be overlooked by users in favour of the canonicals.

A personal take

In case it wasn’t already clear, I would have to say that despite the objections, everytime I’ve gone through the arguments in my head I’ve come out in favour of the core plugins idea. One of WordPress’ greatest strengths has definitely been its flexibility and easy extensibility. As one critic of this decision wrote, the bar for entry is low, it doesn’t take a coding genious to install WordPress, decide he needs something extra, and write a plugin to cover it. Recent updates have also made the WordPress repository so much more accessible; users can now search for and install plugins right from the WordPress installation.

Yet the quality and reliability of those plugins remains a major issue. I’m not even referring to those coding one-offs with barely a hundred downloads that presumably make up the vast majority of the plugin repository.¹ Many of the more well-known solutions out there still fall at one or another hurdle as already mentioned, whether it concern support, timely updates or documentation. To say nothing of the millions of potential issues of interoperability.

One of the more interesting complaints that a number of developers had was that of having a top-down hierarchy dictating what goes into which plugin, something that I found entirely fallacious. As it stands, the vast majority of plugins I’ve come across are developed by a single person, with occasional patches sent in by more able users. They are the ones who decide what happens, what gets fixed, what gets included, when things are released. And if they decide to give up on the project, for us mere mortal users we can only hope that someone equally competent will pick up the reigns and provide support and future updates. Sadly, that isn’t necessarily going to be the case. The idea of the core plugins brings at least some stability to proceedings, a guarantee that updating WordPress won’t bring everything to a crashing halt, and the knowledge that the entire project doesn’t revolve around the mind of a single man. It’s the very principle that has ensured WordPress itself has grown from strength to strength, why should it bring nightmares to the plugin world?

The great alternative that many people seem to be lauding is that of making improvements to the tools available to plugin developers. As already mentioned, recent WordPress updates brought the regular users and the plugin repository much closer together, by making the latter navigable from within the regular WordPress installation. This change, as well as other updates on the repository itself, have ensured that users can see when a new version of their favourite plugin is available, as well as read a changelog (assuming there’s one available), and check to see if the current version will work on the latest version of WordPress.

But these changes need to continue to support good plugin development work, and help users separate out the chaff. One of the most popular plugins on the repository, with well over a million downloads, has has only 800 ratings from users: the compatibility of the latest version with the latest version of WordPress at the time of writing has been reported on by less than 10 users, and there’s no elucidation as to what’s going wrong for the few who’ve reported it to be broken. With that in mind, how are regular users expected to know which plugin to install, when they search for an open or popular term and are presented with a dozen or more plugins? And since these are all likely one-man projects, what will they do when the time invariably comes and the developer gives up on updating the plugin and moves on to new horizons? Actually mentioned facetiously, since one of the contentious issues of the core plugins is that they will be presented on their own page on the WordPress backend, but the idea of having an editor’s choice list of plugins that fulfill a selection of standards for inclusion actually wouldn’t go amiss as an alternative to the current turmoil.

All in all I can only say I welcome the move, and look forward to its repercussions. Attempting to ensure high standards, compatibility, support and open source development are all laudable goals, that neither preclude the disappearance of competition and variety, nor the ability to provide plugins that are commercially supported (just that the open source alternatives might be all the better!). And here’s to a core plugin for creating multilingual blogs, I’ve had enough trouble switching over from one system, to another, to another!

For anyone really interested in the debate, the posts on Weblog Tools Collection and One Fine Jay in particular are definitely the places to look.

1. Some actual statistics on plugin downloads and updates etc. from the repository would actually make interesting reading.

The Internet Trail

An email arrives from a company you’ve never heard of telling you about a change to their user policy. It could very well have been spam, except that the details are actually correct for a change, and you’re not being offered a credit card, mortgage, or a million dollars from a Nigerian general. The email details alterations to a privacy policy you probably never read, particularly since the company name itself doesn’t register. You’ve just stumbled upon your Internet trail, crumbs you’ve scattered around the place registering here and there over the years.

But just how big is your Internet footprint? If you’re a conscientious user who goes out of their way to protect their information and avoid pointless trivia on the Web, it could be that you’ve only left a few grains behind you. But for the rest of us, those little titbits could very well be quite liberally scattered throughout the Internet, potentially accessible to just about anyone with the time and inclination. Whilst the content we’ve created ourselves might be relatively humble, today’s social web has ensured that all but the most camera shy can end up having their pictures online for virtually anyone to see, and references to us can be found with just a few simple searches. But our Internet footprint isn’t just limited to those relevant bits which appear when we’re Googled—which after all is as much dependent on the uniqueness of our names or the fields in which we work—but simply, how many little instances there are of us out there.

Control of information

Just how much information about us is available out there on the Internet can sometimes come as an unpleasant surprise. French magazine Le Tigre set themselves the challenge of publishing the life story of a young French architect based solely on the information it could glean from Internet sites such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. The article appeared in the magazine in December, 2008, and a more tempered version that appeared at the gentleman’s behest can still be found here (in French). Certainly, the man in question was clearly au fait with the new world of social networking sites and the like, but none too concerned about his privacy. Information on his holidays, his former girlfriends, his work and friends, even such information as his mobile phone number and whereabouts were all gleaned from these sites with a scanty amount of detective work. In this case, the man was responsible for publishing a large amount of information about himself on the Internet, but how can any of us stop third parties doing the same? How many of the 350 million Facebook users has a real clue about its privacy settings? And how many of those are friends with people who are conscious about controlling the information available about them?

A captcha of logins

Signing up to a social networking site, you might be forgiven for thinking that at least then you can have some form of control over the information available about us. But there is more information available on the Internet for those with a desire to look for it. Just think about how many sites out there you have an account for. Just how many little instances of ourselves are there out in the wild? Email accounts, social networking sites, online banking, multimedia sites, shops, forums, services, blogs. Even just counting the ones we use with any amount of regularity, that could easily amount to a few dozen user accounts, and that’s to say nothing of the various gizmos we use that aren’t accessed via the Web, such as instant messaging platforms, backup or VoIP services, online games etc. More importantly, how many other extra accounts are there out there from services we’ve only merely sampled and don’t use with any frequency? How many accounts out there belong to users who have signed up to give a website a trial and perhaps never came back? Or worse, have been forced to sign up in order to access essentially free material, or to leave a one-off comment, and left their account ever after disused?

Personally, I would not be surprised if my own number of instances scattered around the Internet included over a hundred accounts. People more active on the web no doubt have many more. Those accounts may not all contain the same information—different usernames, passwords, email addresses, heck, sometimes even different names—but they are all linked to me, and the differences are not usually so bold. Most of us probably have a particular username and password combination that we like to use; it makes our lives easier if we only have to remember a single combination for all of our online activity. Occasionally those plans go awry when we find our username has already been taken, forcing us to adopt an arbitrary modification, like adding a number to the end, or an underscore in the middle. Other times our passwords have to change to accommodate some rules for a particular service, meaning our regular password has to suddenly grow or lose a number or special character, or grow or shrink accordingly. But in general, our online presences are cloned copies of our logins sprinkled across the Internet like a particular allele in the gene pool.

Well, so what? It’s not like these details are generally put on public display. Except that they can be. Try typing your own unique username into a site like User Name Check. And all it would take is for one of those sites to have a flaw in their security for someone to potentially have access to any number of services you’ve become a member of over the years. Only recently, a popular social website with over 30 million members proved to be a ripe source for the usernames and passwords of all its members. As detailed here, this represented a pretty basic flaw in security, yet despite its popularity, the site nevertheless failed to protect the information of its members. Would you really trust every little site and service you’ve signed up to to do the same?

The circle of trust

The web has to a large extent now grown to become an extension of the societies in which we live. Web presences have been something of a standard for most reasonable-sized businesses for a long time, and many small outfits have long since followed suit. Yet the last few years have seen that requirement spread to the general populace. It seems like every man and his dog has a Facebook account.¹ Information about us that would once require some serious detective work can now be gleaned from the comforts of your own home, with a bit of patience and a supply of coffee. The potential is still there to control how some of that information is shared, but only to a certain extent. And how many people are actually aware or savvy enough to look after that information is an entirely different matter.

Nevertheless, we are usually willing to place a lot of faith in the many online services we subscribe to, often without so much as reading the privacy policy or terms and conditions. In order to save ourselves the heartache of memorising different usernames or passwords for those services, we tend to limit ourselves to a small handful, all too often to some of those found on lists such as this one. With the potential for any one of those services to become victim of an attack and reveal to unknown third parties information including, but not limited to, usernames, email addresses, passwords, personal and payment details, it seems borderline lunacy that we leave so many unnecessary little copies of our details scattered around the Internet. This latter point is particularly true if you use the same username and password combination for the majority of sites. On the Internet we are willing to accept many into our circle of trust, but it still only takes one site to be broken for us to have a potentially large headache on our hands.

So what can we do to minimise our risks? Simply follow the same rules of common sense you would adhere to in the real world: keep your passwords secure and make yourself a smaller target; actually read the privacy policies and terms and conditions before agreeing to anything; acquaint yourself with the privacy settings on social networking sites, and keep control of the information about yourself; if you run a site of your own, don’t force users to sign up for an account unless absolutely necessary; and as a general Internet user, try to limit the number of instances you create, and delete the ones you no longer use.

1. Or else Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn etc.

define('TEMPLATEPATH', '/path/to/theme/directory');
define('STYLESHEETPATH', '/path/to/theme/style.css');

Fairly innocuous, until you actually change your WordPress theme, in which case those long forgotten about resource savers will leave you with little more than a blank page to diagnose your problem. If this is the case though, just updating the lines or commenting them out will leave you with a workable system once again.

The Fold

Many of us are probably familiar with the idea advanced in the early days of the Internet, that most users don’t know how to scroll through a website. Today that seems pretty unbelievable. The vast majority of websites, and indeed many of the most regularly visited, not only favour scrolling but to a large extent rely on it for navigation. So have the rules of the so-called ‘fold’ changed since the Internet’s inception? And what role should it play in decisions made regarding a website’s design today?

Viewing the web can be a very personal experience. Depending on your very own choice of browser, monitor or resolution, the web can look a very different place. If you’ve ever for some reason been forced to view one of your regularly visited websites on a much lower resolution monitor, for example, you’ll know what I mean. What once appeared spacious and easy to read suddenly seems squashed and cluttered. The cute little thumbnail images now take up good chunks of room and force you to scroll around them to get at the text. And should that site employ a fixed-width design that is wider than the current resolution, even more space goes to waste with the appearance of a side scrollbar.

Of course, well designed websites take their average readership into account, using accrued data to work out profiles that fit the viewing set up of their users. But finding out where that ‘fold’ lies can nevertheless be a tricky business, even armed with knowledge regarding the average resolutions used, given the various toolbars and other gimmicks most browsers can come equipped with, to say nothing of the size of the browser window, the workspace of the operating system, or whether the site will be viewed ‘zoomed’.

So does the fold even really matter? Jeff Atwood over on his blog at Coding Horror posits that scrolling fast became something of a litmus test for web users. Scrolling soon proved to be a prerequisite skill for web surfing, and thanks to the principle of survival of the fittest, every web user today should be a scroller. Yet old ideas die hard. Trying to cram as much content as possible into the top section of a web page is pretty common practice even today, and more graphically inventive or intensive preamble to content hidden beyond the fold are more of a rarity than they perhaps otherwise would be. The fear that content not immediately displayed on a page will go unread then, is perhaps given users’ willingness to scroll unfounded.  But just because everyone is in the position to do something, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to do it.

As the research over at cxpartners points out, scrolling is par for the course, and in fact having content that is obviously cut-off or clearly points to content further down a page increases the amount of time users will spend scrolling through it. That isn’t to say there aren’t any pitfalls to avoid, and one thing that can seriously distract users and disguise potential content hidden offscreen is the use of strong, horizontal lines. Particularly if these should ever happen to coincide with the bottom of a browser window, such lines can act as a mental barrier, as users expect the content to end. A second pitfall can be the use of scrollable content embedded in the page, which remains hidden from the main scrollbar, an tool often used to gauge further content according to the results.

But the most important conclusion drawn from the test is that sites should avoid trying to cram too much content above the fold. Assuming that users will be drawn in by their first impressions of a site is one thing; concluding that they will only care for what they first see is entirely another. There are things that certainly belong in that noble place above the fold, depending on the type of site. A site logo/link to the home page, the main site navigation, the search form, a link to the checkout, the login form/registration link. We’ve come to expect that such staples of the web find themselves in an easy to find location above the fold. Sites which break these conventions, however, are not unheard of.

The original reason I started this little post was seeing Chris Coyier’s personal blog redesign detailed over at CSS-Tricks. I was particularly impressed by the use of custom designs for various pages, such as this one and this one. What does this have to do with the fold? Because with this miniature resolution I’m using, there’s little content to see on first impressions, and only the content of the entries themselves to draw the reader further in. What made the pages particularly inviting, however, was certainly this attempt at customisation, a move towards giving each of his entries a more personal look suited to the content it is delivering. This step towards a magazine-style approach to displaying content is, in my eyes, a very welcome one. Of course, Coyier’s site is a personal blog and can perhaps be forgiven for breaking the other ‘rules’,¹ but I hope his reckless approach to the fold, along with throwing more colourful and individual content out into his posts will prove to be a success and an inspiration to others.

1. In my opinion the site suffers from a poor navigation and a lack of search functions.

Bridge solutions

Many of us have found ourselves in this position. Your business or group make use of an online system, such as a forum, wiki, blog etc., which you then wish to augment or combine with some other system. How you go about doing that, of course, depends entirely on your goals and the systems you’re trying to use together. Design and styling are usually the least of those worries.

The problem which consistently presents itself when attempting such a combination is what to do with the userbase. Whilst this issue can sometimes be simply ignored, in the hope that only a small number of the users of one system will need access to the second, this isn’t always the case. When it comes to one userbase requiring access to two or more systems, the first question that needs to be answered is whether the user information should be shared, enabling a unified login procedure amongst other benefits. Requiring users to sign up to various different pieces of the puzzle is a time-consuming process, and one that many will find confusing and unnecessary. And since different online systems often have conflicting requirements when it comes to usernames and passwords, for example, this can also lead to more lost password checks and work for the system administrator. However, programming such functionality oneself certainly isn’t within the realms of the abilities of all of us, and keeping such modifications functioning across various systems and versions can be a painful procedure.

Fortunately, in certain instances such functionality may well be freely available, usually in the form of third-party hacks or bridges, as they are often known.¹ Installing such addons is, in comparison to a home grown solution, much easier, safer and reliable. But reliance on a third piece of software does not guarantee that all of the features required will be available, and it also presents its own set of security issues. Aside from the software hiding its own potential security pitfalls, it can also lead to services being inoperable after an upgrade, if it isn’t kept regularly up-to-date with the latest versions of the systems it is meant to bridge, and in so doing advocates running outdated software.

This post provides no answers or alternatives. In fact, I’m not even sure if what I’m proposing is already available, or otherwise feasible or not. The news on the OpenTTD project website was the first to jog my mind about this, wondering exactly how they had solved their problems, and whether or there might be a simpler, more user-friendly option. Essentially, my idea would be for a new open source project, to offer a simple solution to the issue of shared user details across a variety of different online systems, be they forums, wikis, blogs, bugtrackers, etc. Beyond handling simple login information, the system could be used by administrators for handling various user-related issues, such as assigning general rights and permissions, handling groups, cookies, password requirements, user info and so on, but the basic benefit would be a central one-key-fits-all solution for unifying user accounts across a variety of different systems.

Does such a system already exist somewhere, one that is user-friendly, free-to-use, and supporting a wide variety of platforms? If not, would such a system even be feasible, given the different requirements and standards of the different systems, and the various issues of security and privacy involved?

1. Take this list of WordPress/forum bridges as an example.

Fortunately, an excellent guide was available on Alex King’s blog. For more information and follow-up comments, you should definitely read the full post, but here’s a summary of the method that worked for me.

Note that you should always backup your database before attempting any such conversions. WP-DBManager comes highly recommended.

If you have access to phpMyAdmin:

1. Use phpMyAdmin to dump the database (this should be in UTF-8 by default).
2. Open the dumped file in Notepad or similar, and save it to ANSI format. In Notepad++ you can find this under “Format” and “Convert to ANSI”.
3. Open the saved file in your web browser, and then change the character encoding to UTF-8.
4. Copy the contents of the current display, and paste this into a new document in Notepad. Check that any and all references to CREATE TABLE within this file use the character set ‘utf8′. If this is not the case, find and replace all references of the previous character set (e.g. from ‘latin1′ to ‘utf8′).
5. Save this new file to yourfilename.sql using UTF-8.
6. If you are moving the database, import the newly changed file into the new database, modify your wp-config.php file and then check your site.
7. If you are changing your database in situ, drop the affected tables (you already backed up, right?), then import the new file and check your site.

If you have shell access, you could also try using the script detailed here or here.

Reproduced entirely without permission.

Moses and the Eleventh Commandment

The war against file-sharing that currently rages primarily over the Internet will ultimately be lost. That’s my prediction. I can’t support this argument with any authority, being no expert in the fields of law, politics or technology, but instead make my statement on the basis of many years’ observation from the wilderness. But the trends all point to this being the case. File-sharing has become a mainstay of this new generation, a fact which has forced most corporations and organisations to rethink their strategies and come up with ways to stem the tide. We have already seen many changes in this direction, such as the explosion of digital content that is now available online from legitimate sources. But in addition to this carrot, the war is also being waged with a stick, as organisations set out to have legislation passed to clamp down on file-sharing activities, and new technologies are created to lock down digital content and prevent its spread. So what will the future bring?

File-sharing is usually portrayed as a new nefarious activity, something alien brought about by changes in technology and society that benefits no one and is an obvious criminal activity. Whilst there are some elements of truth to that charge, it’s not entirely accurate. Man is a social animal and has been sharing since the stone age. The only thing that’s new is that it now involves digitally stored media rather than pieces of sharpened flint, and problematically, it is now easier, faster, more accessible, more reliable and perhaps more inconspicuous than ever before. But this is merely the extrapolation of a phenomenon that is essentially part of man’s nature. Irrespective of the legality of the issue, people generally consider it fair use to lend books, albums, movies or software that they have purchased to their friends and relatives. It is generally considered reasonable use for people to record items broadcast on television or radio for later viewing, an act normally referred to as ‘time-shifting’, though these recordings may well be played back repeatedly, and of course lent and exchanged as with purchased items. And if anyone were to take a peek in many university libraries throughout the country, they would see the level to which the letter of the copyright law is upheld in the ‘fair use’ rules of photocopying published articles. In each case, the law has either been adapted, or it has fallen into disuse. The latest developments must no doubt ultimately result in a similar reaction.

The similarity between online file-sharing and the typical state-funded public library system is perhaps more than a little unfair, but in theory shares similar features. That one is treated as a villanous scourge and the other as an equitable and fundamental public service is born not out of principle, but out of execution. Libraries are often restricted, under-staffed, under-funded, and under-provisioned, but most vitally, they are controlled. Online systems of file-sharing are none of these things, and the sheer scale of the problem provokes the reactions we see around the world. Quite what effect the rise of file-sharing has had on the many industries is difficult to tell, with arguments and statistics flying back and forth almost unceasingly. There is sadly no control experiment to substantiate the many arguments, whether they claim file-sharing has a negligible or positive effect, or that milliards have been written off the world’s economies. People who assert blindly that file-sharing boosts album sales are ignorant of the facts, whilst studio execs who believe that every downloaded track is a lost sale are plain wrong. Nevertheless, whatever the effects, this is a changing world, and every generation’s attempts to lay claim to that impalpable, fleeting sense of the status quo have failed. Whilst the majority of society morphs and adapts, there are always those who attempt to put the brakes on.

Virtually every attempt, particularly in the mainstream, to prevent copyright infringement has met with resistance from the end-users, or has been circumvented to leave it essentially useless. The recent case of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection placed on a number of recent games released by publishing giant Electronic Arts has met with particular resistance from customers. Recent games like Spore, Red Alert 3 or Crysis Warhead all come equipped with SecuROM, a form of DRM which installs itself surreptitiously onto a user’s computer, and includes limits on how often the game me be installed amongst other features. After a certain number of activations the user has to call EA to have the limit lifted, otherwise the disc is unusable. Aside from the obvious problems for the customer, particularly in the longer term given that the servers which deal with the activations could easily be switched off at some point in the future, is the manner in which the relationship between the corporation and the customer becomes strained. This kind of copyright protection instantly treats customers with suspicion, even to the extent of criminality. Worse still for the company is that this kind of intrusive mechanism is stripped away in the illegal versions of the software which are produced almost as quickly as the mechanisms can be implemented. And this is well known to many customers, evidential in that Spore became probably¹ the most downloaded game of the year, no doubt to a large extent based on the DRM issue.²

As has happened so many times in the past, the current furore over file-sharers is an example of a conservative heritage being challenged by the next generation with new technologies and ideas. Copyright laws are no longer able to cope with the situation, and whilst file-sharing undoubtedly infringes upon copyright law, the ability and the will to enforce the letter of the law is lacking, and to a large extent, essentially inappropriate. As I understand it, New Zealand has become the first country in the world to pass legislation to allow for a “three strikes” attitude to individual file-sharers, meaning that they should be cut off from the Internet if they are found to be responsible for file-sharing. All very well in theory, but in principle dealing with such scenarios is extremely tricky business: it is difficult to achieve from a technical point of view, it is difficult to enforce and prove from a legal standpoint, and in most instances it certainly infringes on personal freedoms and liberties. In this respect copyright laws are put on a pedestal above individual liberties.³ The attempts to equate file-sharing with theft in media propaganda⁴ have met with very little sympathy from the general public, in part because the comparison illustrates how the law is no longer able to reflect reality. Stealing a car is not commensurate with making a copy of it, a blindingly obvious fact that is recognised by the general public, but not by the organisations and legal bodies, though there are signs that wheels are in motion in certain parts of the world.

It is difficult to predict what the precise outcome of the current war on file-sharing will be. Whilst repeated attempts will no doubt be made to plug the analogue hole, and increased powers are sought to enable authorities to control the public’s actions on the Internet, a few braver men are trying to find answers in fundamental alterations to copyright law and society’s view on file-sharing, and the new technologies and freedoms that have developed in leaps and bounds in the last few decades. Perhaps it is no surprise to see that Sweden is leading the charge. The potential pressure of the Piratpartiet caused a number of parties to rethink their stance on the file-sharing issue, particularly with regard to the statistics which highlight around 10% of the Scandinavian country’s population as potential targets for litigation. The Swedish Left Party, for example, has come around to the idea that copyright laws need amendment, and that file-sharing on a domestic basis is as legitimate an activity as lending libraries. Similar changes in policy may also affect the Moderate Party and the Green Party.

It may yet be many years before this issue sees a satisfactory resolution, and the market will adapt accordingly. With all likelihood a change in copyright legislation will be required that prevents leaving vast numbers of so many nations liable to prosecution, or it will it lay dormant like so many other vestigial and antiquated legal modes. The attempts to incriminate almost an entire generation cannot be in the best interests of either society as a whole, nor even its constituent parts, whilst the efforts to hunt down the technological cat and put it back into the bag are as futile as trying to turn back the clock. Whether a miraculous, ingenious solution will be found that satisfies everyone, or the weight of numbers fighting for change will affect a political reaction, or simply a piecemeal combination of political change, technological development and market mutation, the days of file-sharing as a nefarious phenomenon are numbered. The future is not set. But neither is the present.

For a future post in relation to this topic, I intend to conduct an interview with one of the founders of a leading Bittorrent tracking site. If anyone has any questions they would like to have posed, please feel free to leave a comment below.

1. Statistics in this area are notoriously difficult to confirm.
2. See many of the reviews at Amazon as an example of customer reaction.
3. Typical in the democratic societies in which finance is so deeply entrenched in the political process.
4. As ridiculed here in the recent Futurama film.

Whilst I wouldn’t normally comment on a post of this ilk (given my feelings about bloggers who blog about blogging) it seems pretty clear that unless Boutin is giving us a tongue-in-cheek excuse for a debate on web trends, he’s essentially wrong in his assessment. After all, it comes as no surprise that Boutin proclaims the fall of the blogosphere from the comfort of a blog entry, nor indeed that he rails against his own ilk in decrying the “tsunami of paid bilge” that ranks highest on the Technorati charts. The idea that blogs should be abandoned on account of the fact that personal blogs rarely garner any extended readership or popularity calls into question why authors set up their blogs in the first place, and why indeed they should switch to other means if popularity is their main objective. Boutin upbraids blogs for being text-only affairs, a charge which I daresay isn’t especially accurate, particularly since it is easily possible these days to integrate precisely those services that are supposed to supercede blogs, such as Flickr or Youtube.

Of course, no one can deny that the nature of the Internet is constantly changing, so much the better, and whilst the blogosphere may start to shrink once the new wave of Web2.0 forms of communication become fully fledged, they will merely overlap and supplement the current crop of technologies available. The continued prominence of email, IRC, Usenet and web forums all point to this fact. So whilst I daresay the number of new blogs appearing on the web will start to slow as new users find outlet to their thoughts on other media, there may always be a place for the humble (and not so humble) blogs that litter the webscape today.

[Via huffenglish.com]

If there’s one jargon term that every user new to the Internet soon becomes acquainted with, spam must near the top of the list. Its prevalence and virtual ubiquity through many forms of online communication have generated miniature industries devoted to dealing with it, and the science of spam detection, prevention and treatment almost resembles the tactical skirmishes of biological immune systems.

Spam exists in many forms, from bogus guestbook entries to elaborate instant messaging robots, but the variety which prompted this post was that classic form – unsolicited email. The level of penetration of spam illustrates itself in the number of systems put in place to combat it as standard on the vast majority of websites, including of course authentication emails and the ever evolving captcha. I use a small combination of plugins on this blog to block out most of the spam, and given the extreme sparcity of genuine comments, the potential for inconvenient ‘false positives’ is rather slim. Nevertheless, even the cursory inspection I tend to make over Akismet’s latest haul becomes tiresome for all the size of this blog – spam comments to date outnumber genuine ones by a factor of almost 500 (and that only counts those caught and tallied by Akismet). Quite how larger, more popular blogs deal with searching for false positives, I don’t know, but the task must be fairly time-consuming.

Yet even that abysmal ratio sometimes seems quite congenial next to the level of email spam I receive in its current state. Whilst the common techniques for filtering out spam emails have fairly high success ratios, the constantly evolving battle with the Bayesian filter can never ultimately separate emails, black and white, and sifting through the gray matter can be a painful experience, particularly when searching for unexpected false positives. Indeed with some of my emails going through multiple filters (before finally ending up in a Thunderbird client and getting filtered once more), I begin to wonder how many emails have simply drifted away in that black sea of jetsam.

The problems of course don’t stop there. In recent days I have been reminded of another serious gripe, when my inbox was flooded with bounced messages, evidence that my address was being used by spammers (and many of those were filtered as spam on account of their message contents, despite technically being genuine messages). Since very few strings at the associated domain are actually received by anybody, it stands that the deluge represents merely the tip of the melting iceberg. There are many tips out there to stop spammers from harvesting your email address, but very few to prevent them using it to spoof messages elsewhere (and even to yourself). The most common piece of advice is simply to wait it out – eventually the spammers move on and utilise a new address, and indeed the bounced messages seem to come in waves.

One of the methods used to reduce spam that was highlighted through these bounced messages is Sender Address Verification. As covered by this post, the method requires people sending email to an address for the first time to verify their authenticity by fulfilling a certain task explained in an automated email reply, before the message (and future messages) may be delivered to the recipient. This bears some resemblance to the automated email verification sent out by many online accounts. However, it is not without its weaknesses. After all, spam sent via spoofed, verified emails will still be delivered as genuine messages, and the potential for spammers to find methods to fulfil the authentication tasks is all too clear from the variety of methods already deployed to crack online captchas.

Ultimately I’m reduced to dealing with spam in the usual manner, relying on filters to do the heavy work and leaving me to occasionally label those messages not picked up, whilst occasionally doing my own filtering for false positives (and burying my head in the sand every time my addresses come up for spoofing duties).

How do others combat the spam plague? Are there other methods commonly available that I’m overlooking? And do people consider the possibility of false positives a necessary evil in the war against spam?

Yet some downtime during a WordPress update is not the only worry when it comes to plugins. Whilst major updates often accentuate the problems, there is no guarantee that plugin authors will continue their work to cope with bugs and software changes. The small WPPA plugin currently used on this blog was recently broken by the WordPress update, but the author considered that the features introduced in the recent version might make his plugin obsolete, and only touched up the plugin to work with 2.5 (so far). Since I hardly post any photographs, such a change makes little difference to this site, but for many others migrating to another plugin could prove a major job if automated tools aren’t available. Others may have experienced such changes when moving between multilingual plugins as the features and support changed, from Language Picker, through Polyglot, to Language Switcher or WP_Multilingual. Such a migration might involve moving media around, altering themes, or having to change tags or syntax within WordPress posts.

How do you approach using plugins on WordPress? Do you consider WordPress should avoid leave extra features to the plugin authors rather than implementing features already well covered (e.g. tags, photos)? Should plugin authors attempt to implement migration tools or leave it to end-users to do the necessary conversions?

And, indeed, the coda of the first movement, with its slippery, chromatic bass and the awesome moans above it, remains a paralyzing experience. That is the way the world ends. It is absolute music, but it clearly represents struggle, and it is hard to hear so monumentally anguished a cry without reading something into it. The trouble is that face with such music, all of us tend to become sentimentalists, reading into it the wrong message.

So he sums up the Ninth Symphony of that “Revolutionary from Bonn” as the chapter title has it. A pretty decent book on the whole. And yes I realise that was four sentences.

Now the bigger question of who to pass this on to. Let’s see if and how Steffi, Heliologue and Rob respond.

WordPress Plugins

With the news that WordPress Photo Album plugin potentially contains a security vulnerability, I decided it was probably time that I took stock of my increasingly long plugins list and removed some of the outdated and superfluous items. One of the greatest improvements to WordPress of late has been the automatic update checks provided for plugins listed on the official site, which whilst by no means universal does at least mean that updates for many popular plugins will automatically be reported without the need to check up on each one manually. This little list of what remains represents some of the better plugins I’ve encountered.

addons
Articles – This plugin allows a list of ‘articles’ to be maintained, to keep a list of the most commonly read or best written posts in one place. The author also has a number of other handy plugins on his site. Currently disabled on this site since well written or popular posts are few and far between.

Democracy – Adds that little widget on the sidebar to run a poll. Great functionality, employing AJAX to make it speedy and fun to use.

Footnotes – Tiny plugin that allows <ref></ref> style syntax to insert footnotes in posts.¹ From the author of the brilliant Now Reading plugin.

Language Switcher – Not actually used on this blog since it is written almost exclusively in English, but the author illustrates how to create a multilingual blog, and with a little help from this plugin enables authors to create multiple entries in different languages.

Now Reading – Well designed plugin that integrates well into WordPress, displaying those current books on the sidebar, with those planned and previously read available on the library page.

Quotes Collection – One of the more recent additions, this plugin allows you to store a database of favourite quotes and have them displayed randomly in the sidebar or wherever else the user wants within the WordPress loop.

ShareThis – One of the more ubiquitous plugins out there, this plugin allows readers to easily shares posts with others via the many social networking bookmark sites. Probably extraneous on this site, but a decent plugin nevertheless.

Viper’s Plugins Used – Not actually employed on this site, the plugin offers a list similar to the one I’m writing here.

Viper’s Video Quicktags – An excellent plugin, allows for easy integration of videos from a variety of different sources, including YouTube/Google Video as well as local files in the usual formats.

WP/GeoTrack – Neat little plugin which provides the output shown on the Visitors page.

WP Dash Note – Ever find yourself needing to leave yourself notes on your blog? This plugin adds a tiny post-it note to the Dashboard of WordPress. Useful for those little remembers to finish writing your post on plugins.

WP Photo Album – Very well written and simple little plugin for integrating a photo album into your site. Whilst the WPG2 plugin which works with the Gallery2 software obviously provides more functionality, for adding a few photos to WordPress with the minimum of fuss, this plugin certainly cuts the mustard, though note the recent security concerns.

extra functionality
Advanced TinyMCE Editor – A fully featured addition to the standard WordPress editor, making it easy to format posts exactly how you need them. Unfortunately there still appear to be some compatibility issues with the aforementioned WPG2 plugin.

Category Order – Installed this one a while ago when I had some issues getting all of the categories to appear on the WordPress sidebar, this might now have been superseded by inbuilt WordPress options, but for now it’ll stay put. Allows you to arrange the Categories in the sidebar exactly how you want.

Get Recent Comments – Allows you to display the recent comments in the sidebar using your own preferred formatting.

Google XML Sitemaps – To quote from the blurb “This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO”.

ImageManager – Very handy little extension to the WordPress repertoire, allowing simple manipulation of imported images using ImageMagick amongst other things. Unfortunately seems to have some issues with one or other of my Firefox plugins and leaves some functions unusable, as the popup windows are badly sized, but works fine under Opera.

Photo Dropper – Another new plugin undergoing a trial, this one offering to import Creative Commons licensed images from flickr.com directly into the current post, and attribute the necessary details.

Simple Tags – Successor to the great Simple Tagging plugin of previous WordPress versions, this offers greater flexibility and functionality with WordPress 2.3′s inbuilt tagging feature. One of the must-haves.

Tiger Style Administration – This plugin simply alters the look and feel of the WordPress admin section. Unfortunately looks slightly broken with recent WordPress or Firefox updates, not really sure which is causing the problem.

TinyMCEComments – Provides a small TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor for the comments section.

WP-Lytebox – Neat little plugin to implement the typical Lytebox system in WordPress, and can easily be fit to work with the WP Photo Album, amongst other things.

security
Akismet – Simply a must-have, even on this small blog Akismet has managed to block over 10,000 spam comments of various kinds. Used in conjunction with the Bad Behaviour plugin below, I’m left only needing to review those comments left in the spam queue in case of false positives, which to date I don’t believe there has been.

Bad Behaviour – Works on a number of other systems, purports to block robot-based spamming on WordPress, and at least according to the statistic printed at the bottom of the current theme, seems to be doing a good job.

statistics
Feed Statistics – Neat little plugin to keep track of those feed subscribers without using an external service like FeedBurner. Also counts post views and outgoing links.

GeneralStats – This small plugin counts up numbers of users, posts, comments, words in posts amongst other things. Does its job and satisfies some idle curiosity.

StatTraq – A bit out-of-date now but still quite useful for checking page views and search criteria. Might replace this with the WordPress.com Stats plugin as I test that out over coming weeks.

1. Such as this one. Now powered using WP-Footnotes

Ostensibly the website is aimed at those allegedly few remaining people who cook, though it would appear equally useful to people planning dinner parties, students looking for something to go with their pasta, or just about anyone curious enough to experiment with a few different ingredients. In its essence, the website would be nothing more than a large recipe repository, with everything from snacks and sandwiches to stews and casseroles, with anything in between. Recipes would be submitted by users, moderated and standardised, but the slightly clever part is that these recipes would not be displayed as flat text files—it’s 2007 after all—but would be cross-referenced in such a way as to make the whole collection completely accessible.

The aim would be to create a database that would not only allow users to find a recipe for chocolate sponge cake (although this would of course be possible), but would be able to input a short list of ingredients and find suitable recipes based on what they have, and what they could easily acquire. Not got much time to prepare your meal? Limit the search by selecting a suitable preparation time. Found a recipe which works well for your dinner party but want to push the boat out? Check the recommendations for slight modifications to your meal, and other dishes that complement your main course. Each recipe entered would include relevant information pertaining to ingredients, preparation time, required utensils and serving suggestions. The database could also be expanded to include drinks and cocktails.

Of course, the website should be open to infrequent and regular visitors alike, offering daily dishes of the day or perhaps cooking tips for beginners. The site’s contents should be easily adapted to suit those on a tight budget financially, as well as those with little time to spend in the kitchen. Perhaps members could keep an updated pantry of what vegetables, meats and spices they have in stock, and get offered meal ideas based on this list. And of course there’s plenty of scope beyond this—with enough exposure the site might generate sufficient advertising revenue, there are enough people preparing their own meals still to warrant it. But then again, perhaps this site already exists somewhere?

The standard file should have a section which reads:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', dbname// The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'dbuser'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'dbpassword'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
define('WP_HOME', 'http://www.yourblog.com/');
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://www.yourblog.com/');
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', 'utf8');

Note the new options added at the bottom regarding the codepage used in the blog’s database. If these are set incorrectly they may make your blog unreadable, else prevent special characters from appearing correctly. I personally found that commenting these two lines out left the blog functioning as before, but for people wishing to change the codepage of their database, WordPress has a rough guide available, originally written for the beta testers.

Click here to download Language Switcher Widget v1.01.

There really isn’t anything special here, but for people even more hesitant with code than I am, pop this file into the wp-content/plugins/ folder of your WordPress installation, and then enable it via the Plugins admin page. You should then find the Widget available in the Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets admin page. At the moment, the Widget will display your available languages listed only by name. I’m still learning how to allow this to be changed from within the Sidebar Widgets page.

Click here to download Language Switcher Widget v1.0.

Adblock or Adblock Plus – There’s fair advertising, and then there’s frankly unreasonable advertising. I can see the merits of allowing sites to earn funding through the placement of adverts related to their products, whether they come from Google or elsewhere, but some web adverts go too far. The popup plague of yesteryear might have been largely beaten back, but that doesn’t prevent wiley coders from placing wholly obtrusive flash adverts in every nook they can find. Unfortunately their actions can only serve to give web advertising a bad reputation, and drive people to finding ways of blocking adverts wholesale, obtrusive or otherwise. Of course there will always be a small minority of web users who cannot stand to see web adverts in any form, but for their purposes, and the folks seeking refuge from the advertising bombardment, Adblock/Adblock Plus will fulfil their every need.

To tell the truth, the history of these two projects confuses me, save to say that at one time or another one or both of these plugins has been under development. As I understand the current situation, Adblock Plus is the more highly recommended, as it’s more heavily featured, comes with some default filters to subscribe to which can get rid of most adverts with the minimum of fuss for the end user, and has a much reduced resource footprint to boot (pardon the pun).

BugMeNot – It’s a bit of a misnomer to include this in the list, since as a plugin it merely allows Firefox to hook directly into a particular website. Nevertheless, the idea behind the project is sound – to get round all those niggling little registration requirements which many sites use to restrict access to content. You know the sort—’Register here – it’s free!’ Which begs the question, if it’s free, why do I need to register? Bugmenot.com offers end users a way to take a stand against this requirement, allowing them to log in to sites using generic, registered accounts. It does not include paid sites, since the purpose is to simply avoid the need to register for further content. imdb offers a perfect example of this kind of behaviour—if you want to read comments about entries on their system, you need to register. As bugmenot.com explains, you might consider this compulsory registration a breach of privacy, if you even fill it in truthfully! This little plugin integrates bugmenot.com’s functionality into Firefox’s right-click context menu.

Clipmarks – Another website-based plugin, though this time the functionality is all that more apparent. Click a button and the Clipmarks plugin will allow you to highlight sections of a webpage that are of interest, be they sections of text, links, pictures or video. These clippings are then saved to Clipmarks‘ website, which requires registration and attempts to act like another social hub along the lines of StumbleUpon (featured later), although clippings can be saved both publicly and privately, and doesn’t require much information from the user. With all of these clippings fully searchable, the website offers to act as an online scrapbook, doing away with wholesale bookmarking to really collect only the most necessary scraps of information. The service also offers a way of sending clippings directly to a blog post, something I haven’t experimented with yet, although it might be worth exploring.

CustomizeGoogle – If you use Google as your primary search engine, but sometimes find yourself wanting a second opinion, CustomizeGoogle might be the answer. The plugin will offer links to other major search engines directly within the Google search, allowing you to quickly check the other options. But that’s only the beginning! You can also remove adverts, filter out websites of your choice from search results, increase privacy by randomising your Google userid, have suggestions offered whilst typing out a search string, amongst others, and all options can be chosen from a simple menu. Extremely useful and well-featured plugin—I won’t use Google without it!

Dog Ears – A bit of a throwaway plugin, though could come in quite handy. Basically, Dog Ears allows you to leave little markers on web pages, particularly useful to mark your reading place on a long webpage, though it is open to other applications. Works best with Firefox 2.0 and above, as dog ears are saved by default even when you close or navigate away from that page.

DownloadThemAll! – Probably the weakest link in Firefox’s armour at the moment is its default handling of downloads, which makes DownloadThemAll! a superb plugin to install for starters. Pausing and resuming are simply handled, as are multipart downloads to increase speeds (though this has always caused problems with certain websites). Probably its greatest strength is the ability to use it to glean links from a page, and filter out the ones to be downloaded to a location on your machine. All of this is of course fully customisable.

Firebug – One for the developers, Firebug allows the end-user to view, edit and debug the CSS, JavaScript or HTML of the sites visited, allowing for on-the-fly updates and alterations, a handy way to test changes and isolate a variety of problems. An extremely handy yet unobtrusive tool for webmasters and designers alike.

FireFTP – I’ll be honest, I haven’t actually used Internet Explorer 7 in order to tell how good its FTP functionality really is, but my experiences with previous incarnations of the browser put me off altogether! Its abysmal handling of this simple protocol put me off ever using a web browser to handle FTP again, instead opting for a standalone client (the current favourite in this regard being FileZilla). Whilst I still rely on this program for most FTP stuff as the protocol seems to be quite susceptible to security risks, FireFTP offers a decent, secure (so far), and most importantly convenient client for those minor FTP needs, particularly for browsing repositories anonymously.

FlashGot – If you want something like DownloadThemAll! (DTA) mentioned above, but already have a favourite download manager, FlashGot is probably the thing for you. With similar functionality to DTA, FlashGot allows for one, multiple or all links on a page to be downloaded quickly, fully integrated with a range of popular download managers. It also features an interesting gallery builder, synthesising media from scattered pages for easy downloading, though this is not something I’ve actually used.

Foxmarks – For people who want to access their bookmarks, regardless of where they are or which computer they are using, Foxmarks has the answer. It works in the background to save all those favourite links on a central server, and by either logging in with the Foxmarks plugin or using the web interface, those links can be easily accessed, wherever the user. Of course, privacy might be of concern here, although it seems to be possible to use a 3rd party server for storing links. I normally just move the entire Firefox folder around between computers (including all plugins, cookies, links, the full shebang), but this plugin might just change my habits.

Greasemonkey – Perhaps the most confusing and yet most useful plugin on the list, Greasemonkey takes a little explaining for non-technical users. Essentially, it allows users to write small pieces of script which can alter the appearance or function of a website or selection of sites. Whilst this might be beyond the average user, there is a nice repository of user-made scripts to browse and select from. There is a massive variety, but to give some simple examples from what I’ve sampled, the plugin can be used to alter currencies displayed on major websites, updated according to the exchange rate, change the display of images on websites or Google image search results, or add buttons to the display of a user’s profile on eBay to show highlight certain characteristics. A tweaker’s dream!

Sage – Probably one of the simplest and best plugins listed here, Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom aggregator, which integrates nicely with Firefox’s Live Bookmarks facility. There’s not a lot to say beyond that, since it does what it says on the tin, and not a lot more. If I had one criticism, it would be the slightly clumsy method proposed for changing the way feeds are presented, although a nice little collection of styles is available, with instructions for using them.

SearchStatus – This is only a small plugin and might be disappearing from my plugins list soon, but it offers a neat little summary of roughly how popular a website is based on its search scores in Google and Alexa, amongst others, although it is aimed more at the search engine market than the average end-user. Note that the current version (1.18) caused a problem for me, whereby popup windows were incorrectly sized, depending on where the SearchStatus toolbar was situated.

Session Manager – If you’re always closing links accidentally, or shutting down Firefox without saving your bookmarks, Session Manager can act as your safety net. It will remember recently closed tabs and windows, and create a backup of your last Firefox ‘session’ to be restored after a crash or otherwise, and of course both of these settings can be tweaked to allow for saving a greater or smaller number of tabs or sessions. A very handy tool for the clumsy browser.

Smart Bookmarks – If you find you have too many bookmarks for Firefox’s Bookmark Toolbar, this simple little plugin has the answer. Put simply, Smart Bookmarks reduces the labels for bookmarks right down to their favicon.ico files, that little image which appears next to a web address in most modern browsers, with an option to have the bookmark name displayed when the mouse rolls over them. Although it isn’t universal, the plugin is compatible with a fair selection of custom Firefox themes, and this selection will no doubt expand. Using just a fraction of the size of an average bookmark name, that Bookmark Toolbar can now be comfortably home to a great many more frequently used bookmarks.

StumbleUpon – Just one more plugin that’s about integrating website functionality into Firefox, and this time for entertainment. StumbleUpon offers a way for users to randomly discover new websites related to their fields of interest, rate them, and submit new ones for others to peruse. The plugin simply integrates this into Firefox’s casing, and although the default setup can make the browser look more than a little clumsy, that won’t be the only reason you’ll wish you never installed it—that Stumble! button is a productivity killer!

Web Developer – Similar to the Firebug plugin mentioned above, Web Developer offers a context menu to access all of the wires and workings behind your websites, find problems and test new code. Its documentation isn’t quite up to standard yet, but the functionality appears to be there.

Of course, this is just a short sample of the plugins available, and Greasemonkey alone opens the door to thousands of others, not to mention the ability to integrate a variety of different search engines right within Firefox’s default context menus. Nevertheless, these are the ones I’ve come to have installed at this moment in time, some of which get installed by default whenever I install Firefox (such as Adblock, CustomizeGoogle and Sage)—others are merely enjoying their ‘trial’ period, and with such an active development community, I’ve no doubt they won’t be the last!

1. Go to the admin section of your blog, select and find the Options > General panel.
2. Change the WordPress address and Blog address entries to reflect the new location of your blog.
3. Update your blog, and do not worry if there appear to be problems, simply log out.
4. Delete the wp-content/cache folder from your WordPress installation (if it exists).
5. Move the WordPress files to their new location, including all subdirectories.
6. If you use Permalinks, update them via the Options > Permalinks panel.
7. Update the settings for any plugins which require addresses which have changed.
8. Navigate to your new blog address and check everything is working.

Whilst this should update most of your settings to reflect the blog’s new location, some problems might arise with links and images, particularly relative links if you have changed the blog’s location within a single domain. If this is the case it would be easiest to edit the links en mass via the SQL database, however if this affects only a small number of posts it could prove simpler to edit these manually.

Note: WPG2 users might find the WPG2 Plugin page on their WordPress page reports everything successful, yet their embedded gallery page attempts to find images under the old structure. In this case, Show/Hide Manual Configuration Form will display the entries which need manually updating to reflect the blog’s new location.

Books

Amongst the plethora of new and interesting websites which crop up every month, there were a few which caught my eye recently that weren’t related to the usual photos, videos and blogs. Instead they were related to books, and whilst no doubt most of the websites won’t take off, there were some interesting ideas among them.

British Library – Alright, so the first link isn’t exactly a new idea, but the British Library have recently unveiled their new website, with a particular emphasis on its new search capabilities to retrieve results from its increasing online resources.

What Shall I Read Next – This website does exactly what it says on the tin. Type in a book title or author you read recently, and up comes a list of recommendations based on what titles others have read together. However, the system relies on a wide range of users for offering recommendations beyond the most popular titles, and as is mentioned here, the chances of catching up with the years of data a website like Amazon have accumulated in order to provide reading recommendations is quite slim.

BookMooch – BookMooch offers a different approach to ‘peer-to-peer sharing’, and takes what some might consider a logical step. The idea is that readers can swap titles they’ve read with other users, paying only the cost of postage, whilst simultaneously being able to search for titles they would like to receive. A points system is in place to assure the credibility of its users, and to help readers find worthy homes for their old books. Whilst there is still room for abuse, the system employs some safe guards regarding ratios and feedback comments to prevent fraud. Overall a pretty interesting idea, the basis for a small book-bartering economy.

Full Books – On the other hand, if you can’t wait for the postman to deliver your next read, you could always head here for something to tide you over. The listed titles are quite varied, some might say even random, and the website seems quite sparse otherwise, with titles published in standard HTML format. Probably not the best place to go first if you’re looking for a work that’s out of copyright.

Bookalizer – The final site on this list isn’t technically to do with reading, but instead a method for making a little money out of readers! Essentially it offers an easy way to generate Amazon book adverts for your website according to either page content or your own criteria, by specifying key words or product IDs. Using Amazon’s associates programme, the clicks generated can give your website a little bit of income, or else go to some predetermined ‘good cause’.