Month: August 2003

DeskNow

I downloaded a copy of DeskNow a free email and collaboration server that has mail, file sharing, message boards and calendar functionality. If you register for a commercial licence it also acts as an instant messaging server with jabber compatibility. From what I’ve seen so far it looks pretty good and could make a nice cutdown version of exchange server! One of the good things in the email clients is timelimited emails. By appending the date that you want an email to expire to the username part of the address, email sent after this date will be dropped as spam. ie fred.040302@domain will drop emails after the second of March 2004. Filtering is also available on the server, but again its functionality that you need to register the server for. Still worth checking out if you run a small mail server on an office lan or for home users.

Zempt wishlist – Uploading offline entries

I’m using Zempt to compose these entries offline ready for posting when I’m connected again. It would be *really* nice if Zempt detected I was backonline again and offered me the ability to post all composed entries that are currently saved as draft options (or gave me a menu option to do this) – possibly with a listing of draft entries saved with a checkbox next to them to say “post this” – a bit like when you select a post to edit.

Awasu News Reader.

Downloaded and installed a new RSS reader today, Awasu and gave it a quick whirl whilst out of the office. It looks really nice but the stupid thing doesn’t save the feeds to a local hard disk so as soon as I had disconnected from the internet and then went to look at the feed, it kept coming up with pages not found. REALLY annoying. It doesn’t look like there is an option to download the feeds either. It’s also meant to autodetect pages with rss feeds but it didn’t do anything when I went to my site or Mike’s
Newzcrawler offers both of these functions – although I don’t think it supports autodetect in mozilla – I must admit I’ve not used RSS feeds since switching to Mozilla as my main browser, but those two events are completely independant, apart from the fact that Mozilla allows me to open multiple pages at once in one window so makes it alot easier to read multiple sites quickly. I must get back into the habit of using Newzcrawler though (and add an RSS category to my MT installation!)

45 facts…..

Courtesy of a plaque on my wall in room 45 at the Brook Hotel.

  • “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicouokanoconiosis” claims to be the longest word in the English language with 45 letters. It refers to a lung disease caused by ultramicroscopic particles of volcano dust.
  • The 45th King of England was James I who also was James IV of Scotland thus becoming the first British Monarch
  • Harold Wilson defeated Alec Douglas-Home in the 1963 General Election to become Britain’s 45th Prime Minister.
  • The element of atomic number 45 is rhodium (Rh) so named because some of it’s compounds are rose coloured.
  • The 45th Pope was Leo I, one of the only three Popes to have earned the sobriquet ‘the Great’

This hotel has a thing for Prime Ministers as apparently it was once owned by Robert Peel – the founder of the UK police force and a Prime Minister for Britain.

Webpages not opening….

Not sure whats going on, but for a few days I’ve found certain sites such as yahoo,google, blog.iloaf.com, ggsearch.blogspot.com and others not working. Pages just don’t load for some weird reason. Initially I put it down to the sites being hosted in america somewhere affected by the power cuts. However in ggsearch’s case I can lookup the ip address in dns, and then take the server ip address into a web page and get the main servers webpage ok. Yahoo seems to be behaving at the moment but there is no response from google, although i did eventually get the favicon.ico loaded but no page. The two sites that I need for banking over the net, Halifax Online and Royal Bank Of Scotland are also unavailable, although both these sites stop on a traceroute when the network gets to bt.net (quel suprise!)
Can anyone else get to blog.iloaf.com or ggsearch.blogspot.com

Archives are really messed up!

Grrr – just realised my archives are really messed up. It looks like the import/export format and not what they should look like at all… Now to work out what I need to change!
Update Fixed ! <sigh of relief> I had to create an entry in the Weblog Config for the blog in the archive section. Under the monthly section I created a new filename for the Monthly Backup Template so that it wouldn’t overwrite the standard date based archive. My config screen now looks like this(popup), but with the text actually reading something along the lines of andysmonthbackupfor-<$MTArchiveDateEnd$>.txt

First Friday Five

Thought I’d do my first ever Friday five….on a Saturday. My answers are funny (at least to me) so here goes….

1. How much time do you spend online each day?
The home computer is connected 24/7, I check my email when I get up and check news sites and blogs updated in blogrolling before going to work. I then use the internet for most of the day at work, I eat tea and then I’ll check email, blog check, program or just randomly surf….so probably at least 12 hours a day I’m actively using the internet.

2. What is your browser homepage set to?
Which browser? 🙂 Mostly about:blank That way it loads the quickest. As my browsers are constantly opening and shutting I don’t want to wait for the home page to load each time. Having said that most of the time I use the address bar to actually type the url or search query in to launch the browser so it never goes to the home page in the first place.

3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? Very occasionally I’ll use Miranda but I have accounts on yahoo,aol,icq and msn. In fact I have a 6 digit icq number which is pretty rare!

4. Where was your first webpage located?
On a floppy :-). The first accessible page was (and still is) Wabbit’s Warren . This was in 1995 when they were still geocities and everyone wondered how on earth they were going to be profitable giving away free web space. I had to decide on a theme for the site, as in those days pages were grouped by neighbourhoods ie Hollywood for entertainment. I was big into Petra at the time so that influenced my neighbourhood. Note the painstakingly created grey background, auto refresh to a different page, animated wabbit logo (hand created) and imagemap for the various pages. The scary thing is that people still sign my guestbook!

5. How long have you had your current website?
Which website? Absoblogginlutely.net is the latest and the main site that I update and has been running for about 4 months I think. This is the third location for my blog as I’ve moved hosting providers (and urls)