DigitalHobbit

Yesterday I set up Markdown support for my blog, as I was getting tired of typing <li>, <a href=”…”>, etc. I’ve had my blog for almost four years now, and I can’t believe that I have not done this before. It finally allows me to focus on the actual content while I’m writing a blog [...]

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been blogging much lately. I am hoping to change this and start posting more regularly again. In the mean time, I have adopted Twitter, so please feel free to follow my Twitter stream.

I’ve been meaning to post some sample code for a while, and I always wanted to have a nice WordPress plugin to perform syntax highlighting of code. A cursory search of the WordPress website brought up this page, which lists a bunch of syntax highlighting pluging. However, it appears to be a bit outdated, and [...]

I decided to take my recent comment / trackback spam issues as an opportunity to upgrade Wordpress from 1.5 to the latest version (2.02) and try the new Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin that is included in the release.

Comments are re-enabled for now. Let’s see how this goes… Either way, the upgrade was worth it. The WordPress [...]

The Typo Theme Contest ended on 11/28, and the final results were posted two days ago. I didn’t win anything, but my humble contribution “opyT” admittedly pales in light of the many awesome themes that were submitted by others.

Most importantly, over 120 Typo themes resulted from this competition! The themes are very diverse, and everybody [...]

The Rails based Typo blog engine has been gaining a lot of traction lately, and I’m seriously considering switching from WordPress. Don’t get me wrong - I love WordPress. It is a very solid and full featured blog engine that has never let me down. But I can’t deny that there’s a certain attraction to [...]

Google has just launched another beta service: Google Blog Search. It looks pretty good already, and for example searching for relevant phrases brought up the expected postings from my blog. There is no way to explicitly submit a blog to Google, and the key to getting your blog listed is to submit it to relevant [...]

Google Adsense seems to be very sensitive to certain content. I have only posted two entries about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (this one and this one), and currently the main page displays these two posts among various others about topics such as iPod, podcasting, Ruby, Java, Cafepress, Spreadshirt, Xbox, etc. Still, as of the time of [...]

Weblog Tools Collection is organizing a WordPress Plugin and Mod Competition. The competion will start on April 15 and run for two months.

If the participation is anything like the recent WordPress Themes Competition, we can be sure to see some excellent plugins coming our way.

I moved the blog from the “/blog” context to the webroot (http://www.digitalhobbit.com). Old links should still work. Please leave me a comment in case you run into any issues.

I just upgraded my blog from WordPress 1.2 to 1.5. As expected, the actual upgrade was very smooth, and it really didn’t take longer than a few minutes.

In the next few days, I’ll need to play with WordPress’s new theme mechanism to customize the design of my blog. I tried a bunch of themes (there [...]

While I’ve been pretty successful in suppressing comment spam, I still seem to have some trouble with trackback spam. I believe there are some decent WordPress solutions out there now, but I haven’t really had a chance to play with them.

In the mean time, I decided to start filtering out all comments that contain the [...]

Lately I’ve been bombarded with comment spam (free online poker anyone?).

I have expanded the list of keywords that flag a comment as potential spam, thus requiring manual admin approval before it is posted. This is still annoying, though, as I have to disapprove the spam every time it is posted. Therefore, I have implemented a [...]

JustBlogIt is a nice little Firefox extension (also works with Mozilla) that adds a right-click menu entry to easily add a blog entry for the current page. The unique thing about it is that it also supports many web based news aggregators, such as Bloglines. You simply have to right-click on the entry you wish [...]

Here is a very nice collection of weblog and RSS submission sites.

Out of curiosity I just did a Google search for “digitalhobbit” to find any references to my site (not that I really expected any…). One of the links that was returned among the top search results was this one. It points to a site called All Consuming, which apparently monitors blogs for Amazon book links [...]

Mark just published a Wiki plugin for WordPress on his Weblog Tools Collection.

This is great news, and I can’t wait to install it on my blog. I am a big fan of Wiki servers as collaboration tools and for simple knowledge management tasks, and even though the collaboration aspect would not really apply in case [...]

I came across a very nice page on RSS Readers. This looks like a very complete listing of RSS Readers, including client-side applications for various operating systems as well as web-based aggregators.

Before I got into blogging (writing but even more importantly reading blogs), I never quite understood the big deal about RSS. Sure, there were [...]

Several blogs have reported that Amazon apparently added a new beta feature called Plog, which they define as a personal blog on their website. It sounds like a plog is mostly a different and slightly more up-to-date way of presenting recommendations to the user. On their website they list a few of the more popular [...]

Argh… After getting back from a late night shopping trip to IKEA, I tried to hit Bloglines as usual in order to catch up on the blogs that I’m reading, only to find that the site is down for a few hours (undergoing plumbing, as they put it). This made me realize how much I [...]