My Tag cloud implementation started from the Matt’s weighted-categories implementation on hitormiss. It was working fine but I needed two things (yeah, just 2)

the hover text to be more informative
WordPress 2.1 support

I only needed to change one line to make the hover text include the category name (for cases where my font size was tiny). [...]

I fell out of the software developer track for a number of years. I was a strong (although not the best) C language developer and had some C++ talent but I shifted gears when Java took off at my company. Since that time, I have done mostly scripting based hacks and small tools as “brain [...]

I’ve been under the impression that my blog is flat and slow. I took a look at a few other blogs and found One blog to be 390KB, another was 184KB, and mine was 450KB. (To get these figures I added the web page, the images, and the JavaScript includes. I did not add the [...]

I have a couple of pages on my blog to highlight some of my interests. For example, cooking and more recently, the restoration of a tower clock.
What I wanted to do was to have those pages include a list of posts. I could have solved it by creating “templates” by adding custom PHP files [...]

I’m amazed how different the various browsers interpret stylesheet settings. My development is against FireFox and during test, I get around to checking Internet Explorer 6. (Eventually, I’ll add IE 7 to my tests.) I always find things that don’t work or look as expected. For those who have a long history with web user [...]

I missed the “CSS Naked Day” on April 5th. The idea got me thinking - “what would theSalmonFarm.org blog look like without its CSS ?” Here is the before and after …

I’m glad to see the overall usability of this blog is not lost without the stylesheet. The only unexpected part of the layout [...]

A friendly reader complained about my “spam preventer”. For the historians out there, I started this blog with no “user challenge”. It was good for readers wanting to post comments and great for spammers. In the first month I got 30 or 40 spam comments. By the end of March, I was getting thousands each [...]

I’ve gotten some comments (or complaints, depending on how you hear them) regarding the time it takes to load my blog. I’ve tracked it to the external JavaScript includes I have for making the maps of visitors. While I like seeing where in the world visitors reside, I don’t feel that is the purpose of [...]

The purpose of this post is to try out the latest beta of Microsoft’s “Windows Live Writer”. I’ve been very happy blogging with beta1 of WLW. At the same time, I will admit to a couple small annoyances and one big one

 I stand fast with my technological point of view that no solution will succeed without having an established interface. I tend to leave some of Bill Gate’s creations out of the mix because monopolies don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world. I’ll also eliminate very small niche software. These tend [...]

I was talking to some people over the weekend that are still stricken with the dreaded “dial up”. It got me thinking about the performance of my blog again. I found a very helpful website for determining the bandwidth needed for a given web page - for instance my blog’s home page.
It turns out my [...]

I finally got around to upgrading this blog to the latest WordPress. the straw the broke the camel’s back - so to speak - was that Windows Live Writer now supports more XMLRPC interfaces included creating categories (in addition to just selecting from existing ones). There are also more complete interactions thru the XMLRPC interface.
I [...]

My apologies to readers who have attempted to comment since my blog moved to its new host ten days ago. A reader reached by email today to say comments were broken. I guess I was not a brilliant as I should have been during the migration. I forgot to disable the cryptograph-p before moving the [...]

I’ve written a few times about my transition to Ubuntu Linux for both my work and personal computers. In that time, I have also commented (as have others) on the lack of a good blogging client. For those that agree with me, it it interesting that many of us have gravitated to Microsoft’s “Windows Live [...]

I can finally say I have a useful and productive blogging tool for Linux - more specifically, Ubuntu. Thanks to the “Postie” plugin for Wordpress, I get to use Thunderbird - my email client - as my blogging client too. It’s great to have something that is quick and ubiquitous for blogging. I get all [...]

Looks like WordPress is flexing its open source code base to good use …
BuddyPress - A Wordpress MU Based Social Network Platform - will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform, something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network.
BuddyPress removes the main focus of WordPress [...]

For those few who lost my cookbook entries and the chronological story of my clock restoration from last year, it is because WordPress made some major changes to the way categories are managed for blog posts. Rather than bore you with the details, I’ll bore you with the code …
Old query …
SELECT DISTINCT posts.ID, posts.post_title
FROM [...]

I took a look at my blog’s statistics for June. I’m not sure what has been so interesting to the Italians … ?

 
Countries
 
Pages
Hits
Bandwidth

Italy
it
49710
49894
83.76 MB

United States
us
16080
40003
583.54 MB

Unknown
ip
509
1714
31.27 MB

European country
eu
361
1104
18.95 MB

Great Britain
gb
280
863
13.60 MB

Canada
ca
173
756
11.82 MB

Brazil
br
167
277
6.53 MB

Australia
au
160
718
10.12 MB

Germany
de
100
365
4.80 MB

Netherlands
nl
99
481
10.20 MB

Spain
es
77
327
7.29 MB

Denmark
dk
62
129
1.93 MB

Sweden
se
58
160
2.68 MB

France
fr
32
116
1.77 MB

Taiwan
tw
26
96
806.70 KB

Singapore
sg
24
104
1.13 MB

South Africa
za
24
82
1.50 MB

Poland
pl
24
91
1.35 MB

Austria
at
23
73
1.38 MB

Hong Kong
hk
22
101
1016.82 KB

Switzerland
ch
21
85
1.42 MB

Croatia
hr
19
89
2.11 MB

Hungary
hu
17
51
1.07 MB

Mexico
mx
16
95
1.23 MB

Portugal
pt
14
43
843.97 KB

Czech Republic
cz
14
40
667.48 KB

Finland
fi
14
41
703.90 [...]

I’ve received a strange error from my ISP a couple of times over the past month. You might have seen it as well. “This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota”. I don’t really think it is true but I’ve learned, with ISPs that your are guilty until proven innocent. So I am digging around for [...]

I read a lot of blogs. It is part of my morning ritual. It is part of my personal education, my creative outlet, and even benefits my career. I take the first 30 to 90 minutes of each day “blog surfing”. This process lets me see what is going on across technology, politics, design, [...]