Today is this weblog's birthday. Well strictly speaking it was yesterday but since October 30 2004 was just a test posting to see if everything was working correctly I consider today the real birthday of this site. On October 31 2004 I wrote that a lot was on my mind and it turned out to stay that way for a whole year. A weblog is a great thing to look back on a year that has passed. Many things have happened and I guess I've accomplished quite a lot. In this post I look back on what has happened since my first test post.

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This week has been different from many other weeks I've had. A lot of things that have happened are of a personal nature. Since I'm not a life-blogger and personal things tend to consume a lot of time, last week has been sort of slow on this blog. Luckily I can look back at last week as a good one. Things are finally starting to look brighter and I've made wonderful new friends. Thanks again, Hans...

Now back to the regular stuff you're used to on this site.

I'm happy to announce the first new version of Pivot. A while ago I announced the fact that I'm a Pivot developer now. Yesterday we've released Pivot 1.3 beta 2 which is the first of (hopefully) many containing concepts and code by yours truly. We're happily moving towards an 1.3 release and I'm sure we're going to make Pivot rock even more in future versions.

I don't know when KPN Mobile is going to release this baby in the Netherlands but I'm pretty sure the Nec N412i is going to be my next mobile phone. Some months ago I even had the privilege to play with it for a couple of minutes. Meet the world's thinnest clamshell mobile!

I spotted some 'buzz' on a new 'meta search engine' named Inquisitor. It surely looks nice I fully agree. However I don't quite understand what the fuss is all about. As a search it's just like MetaCrawler albeit less comprehensive ^*, as an 'application' it's just a nice Ajax live-search and when it comes to it's looks it uses mostly Apple (probably copyrighted) graphics and design which Apple might not even like very much. They've shown not to be very amused about others using their graphics in the past. Then there's the 'search elsewhere' section with the little Technorati and other icons that makes you leave the page instead of doing that Ajax style as well, similar to what I did with my Taggerati plugin. For example, click this link to see a tag page on Ajax with the little icons that perform ajax searches/lookups.

I guess I have mixed feelings about it. It works well, Inquisitor looks nice but still...

Comments? Did I miss something? This isn't a 'slagging' posting, I'm merely confused!

^*Metacrawler actually searches many engines and aggregates the results while Inquisitor is mainly Google based

Honesty
Is the hardest thing

The challenge is high
To be worthy
Of myself

To learn the languages
Of words
And acts

The man who was
Could not
The man who was
Could not write this

I have failed
Myself
Admitting it
I begin again

author unknown.

To my wonderful loving girlfriend Renie.

Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.Jakob Nielsen in Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

Quite recently, Jakob Nielsen published an interesting article on Weblog Usability. It's an interesting spin on the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes Jakob wrote about earlier. After reading Stoyan's analysis on his own blog decided to have a look at Jakob's the design mistakes and see how well my own weblog does. I turned out to agree with quite a lot of points Jakob states but not with all of them. Here's my full analysis on Jakob's issues, how they can be applied to this weblog and last but not least: where I disagree or believe it's not relevant to my own situation. (continue reading...)

A while ago I signed up to get news from Flock. It seems they had some pretty cool news last night. This morning I found a message in my inbox with a link to download a Developer Preview of Flock, the rocking new social-bookmarking and blog savvy web browser. I played around with it for a bit and it sure looks quite promising! Of course I checked out the mac version but a Windows version is available as well. In this posting I will take a quick look at what makes Flock different from other browsers. (continue reading...)

The world's most rocking tags plugin for bloggers is back on track on the Pivot platform! I've just uploaded Taggerati version 3.0. A while ago I released Taggerati for WordPress. It contains several very nice features which were lacking in the Pivot version. This difference is now gone. Taggerati 3.0 for Pivot has the following new features:

• caching! Gone are the performance isssues!
• Sexy AJAX RSS feed fetcher on the tag pages
• Revamped Flickr image display on tag pages
• Tag cloud is now ordered alphabetically
• Better configurability through a taggerati.conf file
• Several other enhancements and tweaks

Wanna see a demo? Just go to my local tags cosmos and click around! (continue reading...)

It took a while but I'm officially a Pivot developer now. I recently committed my first stuff to the SVN repository. After having worked on the largest extension for Pivot for quite a while I figured why not work on Pivot itself! I'm looking forward to helping Bob make Pivot rock even more than it already does!

It's one of these days again. Maybe the feeling is familiar to you. You want to keep the quality postings on your blog coming, preferrably every day. Sometimes you're on a 'high wave' and you can crank out great entries like it's nothing for a period of time. Today unfortunately isn't a day that's within one of those periods. I want to write a great post but I'm completely deprived of inspiration. Maybe it's because I already prepared a lenghty presentation on PHP and Ajax this weekend which I can't reveal on my blog until I actually delivered it? Is it because I'm working on tons of things I just can't blog about yet? I don't really know... (continue reading...)

Anyway, getting back to the point..... I got this comment on my blog accusing me of spamming his blog. I told him that he should be happy for the comments (spam) in his blog. I told him that even though he thought of these comments as spam, that in truth they are valuable, keyword rich, relevant content!Bruce Riddell, comment spammer

Spamming other people's blogs is one thing but defending it as if he's doing other bloggers a favour? Check out the whole article to have a good laugh. Idiocy in one of it's rarest forms.

Update: Bruce has deleted his post. But I guess you'll believe he wrote the stuff I quoted anyway. As you can see here in his archive all his blog consists of is promoting spam tools.

Of course the above links are rel="nofollow"

Every once in a while one gets to feel the consequenses of maintaining software that a lot of people depend upon. I'm still recovering from a nasty flu but there were just too many emails to ignore the problems with Pivot Blacklist due to Jay Allen pulling the plug on the master blacklist. Anyway, I've ripped out the MT-Blacklist part. I hope it will work for you.

Get it...

In addition to this I have a valuable tip for Dutch bloggers who are getting shut down due to exceeding their bandwidth limits before the month ends:

Get a hosting account in the USA! That's right, the United States of America. Dutch providers are just ripping you off, plain and simple. The average Dutch provider charges more than what I pay for my account at Dreamhost for a lousy 10-30GB bandwidth. That's just ridiculous. So, cancel your expensive hosting account and get your ass to Dreamhost and you'll have 120GB traffic (!) / month and 4.8GB of disk space for your blog. I don't normally promote stuff here but in this case it might help.

Finally: IF you open an account at Dreamhost, do it by clicking on my links in this posting. I'll get some bonus if you do ;) You could look for other providers as well of course but this is the best deal I could find. When I have recovered and my DNS provider finally wakes up this site will move overseas as well.

Todays buzz in the blogosphere seems to be the launch of a new blog network: InstaBlogs. I must honestly admit I hadn't heard about them until postings started to appear everywhere in the blogosphere. Maybe it's because I still don't understand what 'pro blogging' is supposed to mean. InstaBlogs has been hit quite hard from within the blogosphere. I'm sure it must have hurt. They're pretty much made fun of, ridiculed, called over-ambitious, parodied, flamed, well... pretty much anything. Especially by a lot of people who like to call themselves 'professional bloggers'. My only personal gripe is they could have come up with a better design but other than that? It's a blog network getting started for christ's sake! (continue reading...)

It's almost weekend and I figured it would be nice to make some of you pull all of your hairs out while trying to solve this little PHP problem. Here's the assignment.

Create a php script which:

• Shows a textual list of all days in the current month
• Prints today's date in bold text in the list
• shows two links to browse to the same list for previous and next months into infinity

The catch is: You have to do it in one line of php code!

You can see the solution to this assignment running HERE so now you know what it should look like. It's one line of code.

I'll post the solution on monday if no one has been able to do it!

From a comment on the Pivot Blacklist website I just learned that Jay Allen has closed down the Master Blacklist for good.

Jay has chosen to end his anti-spam adventure with some carefully crafted insults towards other people who have joined the fight against weblog spam.

UPDATED, read on... (continue reading...)

Yesterday I spotted the admission of Mark Wade's Blog Marketing, Blog Promotion for Newbies to the 9rules Network. I was slightly shocked by the fact that Mark's site had some links to rather dark corners of the internet placed in his weblog's sidebar. Luckily, Mark responded to my comment by removing these links from his site. An excellent move because the advertised products are like the plague for the blogosphere. What kind of links were those then, you probably wonder?

I'm not going to repost the links here because I don't want to promote something that is quite likely to become a growing problem in the already over-hyped Web 2.0 world: content theft. RSS is one of the big buzzwords of this time. It's part of what many people call 'Web 2.0', including Wikipedia. The beforementioned links promoted applications that use RSS in a (imho) malicious way. But let's get to the good stuff first! (continue reading...)

This morning I received an email from Rogier Mostert announcing the release of his book on weblogging. This comprehensive work on all things weblogging contains an interview with yours truly on the design aspects of weblogging! This posting is probably only interested for my Dutch viewers since the book is in Dutch but still I wanted to mention it!

Go check out the site on the book!

I'm really not a life-logger so this is a true exception to the rule but I just had to share this. Meet Finn, my little baby nephew who was born this week. That makes me 'uncle Marco'! As you can see it's going to take a while before he'll be as large as the present me and my girlfriend got him. Welcome to the world, Finn!

Lately there have been some notable changes when it comes to comment-spam on weblogs. These changes don't look very good for us webloggers. First of all there's a new emerging trend in spam techniques, hitting innocent webloggers such as myself and a growing amount of others. I've already spotted the first incident on an innocent weblogger being added to a centralized blacklist. As I've noted earlier, this marks the beginning of the demise of such blacklists. But there's more to worry about. (continue reading...)