I have installed a version of phpBB for users to post on. The forums hosted on sourceforge were getting spammed like crazy so I decided to move to a more useful forum that is easier to manage.
It is designed for bug reports, feature requests, language support and general help and support.
Users should register to post topics. Guests can post, but their posts must be approved before they become visible.
Please feel free to visit the forums and let me know what you think.
This is a feature that has been requested many, many times. Users can now click the image thumbnail to access the main form rather than having to click the text link below it.
This is a logical thing to do and you can see it now at the WebCards Demo.
Obviously this isn’t appropriate for java applets and Flash files so it can be defined on a macro-by-macro basis so it can be turned on and off. Let me know if you have any problems with it. I hope this goes to show that feature requests do make it into WebCards and I hope you will all keep your suggestions coming.
I came across this story on the Daily Mail website. It is a UK-based newspaper and this story is about UK-based Royal Mail. It is not particularly related to WebCards but I thought it was an interesting story none-the-less.
Apparently Royal Mail finds “about 500,000 undeliverable parcels are sent to Royal Mail’s return letter centre every year.”They are kept for up to six months, after which a proportion - about 15 per cent - are sent to auction, with the proceeds making a contribution to the centre’s annual £10million running costs.”
The system was exposed by a retired school teacher who sold a set of bagpipes for £1500. He sent them to Belgium using Royal Mail’s premium Airsure service. He claimed the package was labelled correctly but it never reached its destination. He was only able to claim £500 compensation.
It turns out the pipes were sold by Surrey auctioneers Wellers for just £60 and ended up on eBay. The police are currently in posession of the pipes until they can determine who owns them.
It just goes to show that you never know what is happening with your mail. I don’t know why Royal Mail would ever start selling lost packages. Surely they never own them in the first place?
Since the explosion in the world of blogging over the last few years one of the biggest problems has become comment spam. This is when somebody automatically (or perhaps even by hand) adds some lame comment to your blog which is actually promoting their website. A good proportion (at least in my experience) is promoting online prescription drugs. The kind that we all used to get emails about before the days of Gmail.
Many things have been tried such as Google’s support of the <a rel=”nofollow”> tag and the use of a CAPTCHA to prove you are human.
A few months back I installed Akismet. It is a product from WordPress themselves and you require an API key from them to enable it on your blog but it is such an amazing tool. Because it interfaces with the Akismet website it is constantly updated and you don’t need to update spam “definitions” like you would do with a virus checker or other such application.
Any spam it blocks is sent back to the Aksimet database to enable it to learn and update itself to help others. You don’t need to maintain your own “blacklist” of spammers and in my experience it is very, very effective. You can pick out false positives or any missed spam and this gets reported back to Akismet so it can be updated and improved. According to the website “Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.”
According to Akismet 4,853 comments have been detected as spam on this blog alone. You can also see how Akismet is performing world wide. From their website:
So if you are suffering from the problem of blog spam and you use WordPress then give it a try.
I went to see Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End the other day and thought I would share my views. As usual there are spoilers here so don’t read it if you don’t want to know what happens.
The main story sees Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann travel to the end of the world to rescue Jack Sparrow from Davy Jones’ Locker (ie. bring him back to life). They must then unite with the Pirate Lords from all over the world to bring an end to Lord Backett, who is trying to bring down the pirate world.
The plot is sometimes a little confusing. Character’s change allegiances back and forth so often you often forget who is a good guy and who is a bad guy. But the aim of the film is to try and tie up all the loose ends created by the last two installments. Unfortunately it often does this by changing rules set in the other two films. A good example is that of Davy Jones. He is only allowed to set foot on land once every ten years. How does the script get around this? By placing him in a bucket of water of course!
Although there are some annoying parts to this film it is still a great movie. Depp is as superb as ever and very, very funny. Watching him debate situations with multiple Jacks is one of the best parts of the film.
As you would expect the effects are amazing. The final battle scene, pirates vs East India Trading Co. in a whirlpool is spectacular. This goes for the creature effects too.
Overall a very enjoyable, if long, movie that is pretty essential viewing to anybody who has watched the previous ones.