Category: Site Stuff

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Book Reviews

I have added a nice little feature which is seen in one of the side bars on the right hand side of the web page. I can now add the books I am , going to and have read recently. The plugin picks up the book cover and other detail by linking to  amazon.com . I haven’t set up a referral system which I can and get discounts based on people who buy after coming here. Given the low traffic of this site its probably not going to matter. The plugin was written by Rob over at Roblog.

I did look at another similar plugin in based in an open source library net work, but try as I might I couldn’t get it to work. By contrast this worked relatively easily.

Any way if you dare you can look at what I read.  I kicked off with Silesian Station which is  a crime novel set in Pre WWII Germany.

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Another plugin

I have added another plugin that translates the original English of this blog into other languages. The plugin links to the google translating system and indeed can link to others. I have added a few languages , a couple for fun Japanese and Israeli only because I wanted to see what the blog looked like in a non roman alphabet.

I will see if there is any feedback , that is of course if there is nay one out there in the great beyond.

Just to get a feel for it this is snapshot of the post in Hebrew

Screen capture of translated blog
Screen capture of translated blog

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Testing a new plugin for this blog

I have just installed a new plugin that allows my posts here to appear in my Facebook page. This post is a way of testing that idea to see how it works. It was very fiddly to set up as I have no experience with Facebook applcations. However it seems to be working now.

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A tale from a parallel universe

I subscribe to a wonderful blog called stusshed. Stu laments the passing of the Triton Woodworking groups in Victoria. Triton of course are the makers of a range of tools which are resplendent in their orange livery. User groups, or groups of users,  can be great things and I suppose the woodworking user groups are a sort of men’s group that does not involve the “inner child” or hugging trees. There is of course nothing better than the sight of saw dust on the floor and the sound of electrons being murdered. 

This sad tale of the Triton users groups reminds me of another similar experience that I had. Remember the old computer user groups in the days when there were several computer operating systems in the market place. Windows was only a dream. I belonged to an Atari user group , they had a GUI long before Microsoft. It was a bid nerdy but 512 kilobytes of ram was something to behold. However  with the arrival of the 2400 baud modem and bulletin boards things began to change. The once flourishing Atari User group drifted away as we all became seduced by Microsoft.

So once upon a time in a small hall far far away………………………………..

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A New Browser and an Update of an old one

Well google have just released their new web browser called Chrome. I cant help myself I have downloaded the beta and am using it as I make this post. so far so good. I have just installed it on my XP Pro SP3 machine without incident. It seems a little slow but that is an unreliable variable it may well be the site where this blog is posted.  I like the fact that you can drag tabs off the browsers, in to another window or another monitor if you are lucky to have one  of those.

Just prior to this IE8 now has a public beta and that seems on first looks to be better than its predecessor, well it hasn’t crashed on me yet! However this chrome thing is apparently built using a different paradigm to the existing browsers and is supposedly rather crash proof time will tell I suppose.

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It’s a cold night in Adelaide

Another test this time posting from inside Word 2007. I suppose this has the advantage of all the text tools within the program such as grammar check and spell check. Just another way to rant on the net I guess.

Apparently it is snowing in Hobart tonight!!! At least it is a moist winter this year in South Australia bring on the climate sceptics.

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Stu’s Shed A great Aussie Shed

A great shed site

Stu’s Shed I should say that I linked to this photo when testing the new Press It feature of WordPress 2.6. Stu has commented on his site that people have pinched content from his site and repackaged at their own. My post is just a proof of concept, and a tribute to what he is doing. A really great site.