Inbox Zero: fail
Yeah… I think it’s safe to say I’m not cut out for Inbox Zero…
2011-11-11
2011-11-10
Smart 404
Now here’s a great plugin I wish I’d discovered several years ago.
Smart 404 intercepts standard 404 messages and looks through your posts, tags and categories to see if it can come up with a match of what the visitor to your site was looking for. If it finds it, it will display it as a standard archive view displaying the posts.
Example: http://x111.com/azumanga doesn’t exist, Smart 404 however finds a tag for Azumanga Daioh and thus displays http://x111.com/tag/azumanga-daioh/ which is a HELL of a lot better than giving your visitor a blank ‘oops, it’s gone’ page.
If Smart 404 doesn’t find anything, at all, it goes to your standard 404 WordPress page, in which you can add some code to have Smart 404 generate a list of posts with the keyword a visitor was looking for (example). Again a big improvement.
I’m very impressed with this plugin, I only wish I’d have come across this years ago when I was moving all the old reviews into WP, that would have saved me from the big nosedive in daily traffic.
2011-11-08
2011-11-03
Website screenshots for lazy people
If you use a lot of screenshots of websites for your blog you can easily make them through the wonders of wordpress.com.
Here is the URL:
http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/http%3A%2F%2Fx111.com%2F?w=612
All you have to do is insert your required URL in the place of the ‘x111.com’ part of the link and resize (‘w=300′) to your required width.
2011-11-02
Aquarium 101: The cycle
If you’re thinking about starting an aquarium there’s quite a lot of info to take into account.
There’s a lot of info to be found about cycling, which is the act of getting the nitrogen cycle to complete.
Your aquarium is to be a slice of nature, in which there’s a working balance of stuff eating stuff which sets up a whole balance that lets all life flourish.
It all starts with proteins, which are excreted by fish as organic waste and is also a part of decomposition of organic materials like plants, food remnants and dead fish.
Proteins are broken down into ammonia (NH3), which is toxic to fish.
Ammonia gets converted by nitrosomonas bacteria to nitrite (NO2), which is also toxic, and then by nitrobacter bacteria into the less harmful nitrate (NO3).
Nitrate is used as fertilizer by plants who are used to produce oxygen and act as food themselves, thus completing the full circle. Nitrate also gets broken down by anaerobic bacteria that live in the filter and your substrate, which is why it’s important to clean your filter the right way so as not to destroy all the positive bacteria in the process of cleaning.
An excess of nitrate can be fixed by frequent water changes (an average of 10-20% of the total water capacity of your tank every week) and by adding more plants.
When you start a new tank it takes 36 days for the whole cycle to set, which is why a lot of people advise against adding fish for this duration, because you can get spikes in for example the nitrite which could kill your fish off.
On the other hand, adding a few hardy fish actually helps to kickstart the cycle due to the fact that they eat and excrete stuff necessary for the whole circus.
There’s a lot of products out there that supposedly add all the right bacteria to your new tank straight away, and if you look around the web you’ll find a lot of people claiming it’s bogus and a lot of people claiming they do work wonderfully. Your guess is as good as mine, but considering how much you’re spending on the whole setup with aquarium, decor, plants, fish & equipment… another $5 for a bottle of miracle bacteria won’t kill you so why not try.
2011-11-01
Let the reading commence
Front Row is awesome
When Apple released Lion they decided to axe Front Row, a sort of media theater player controlled by the lovely remote that comes with every Mac. Few people seemed to mourn its passing, claiming it wasn’t useful because it only plays iTunes content anyway, saying Plex is so much better, bla bla etc. You, my dear people who believe so, are idiots. Understandable idiots because every monkey seems to have a computer these days, but monkeys nonetheless. (Sorry, I get slightly annoyed reading so many comments from people saying Front Row sucks when they don’t know how to use it in the first place)
You see, Front Row plays pretty much EVERYTHING you could want. And without a lot of work or configuration. Say you download movies, tv series and what not on a nice big external usb drive, which has a big downloads folder. Now the only thing you have to do to make all of this watchable in the comforts of Front Row is:
1. Right click on the folder that has the content you want to watch in Front Row.
2. Select ‘Make Alias’. This will create a shortcut link to the downloads folder.
3. Move the alias link that just got created into the Movies folder in Finder.
4. Start Front Row, go to Movies, and it’ll show the folder with everything it contains. Pick something to watch, and enjoy.
It’s that easy.
Now in case you changed your mind and want to give Front Row another shot, here you can get Front Row enabler if you have already upgraded to Lion.
Thoughts of Imbalanced Mind
