Chris Worfolk's Blog

When I started my blog back on Nerd Federation, I wanted it to be a place where people having technical problems could search through Google or whatever and the blog would come up as I’d had the same problems. In that spirit, I have this post about problems with my laptop.

I had recently been having the problem where my laptop could not connect to the internet but it could connect to both the routers on my network. Usually if I restarted it, it would start working again but not always.

Then I remembered, that my wireless router was currently cloning the mac address of my laptop (I set this up for when I was at uni). The way my network works is I have my two computers running to my wireless router which is then cabled to my second router which connects some more computers and that then runs to my modem.

Anyway so yeah, I just turned off the mac cloning and I’m able to connect to the internet again. I’m hoping that was the problem although I’m not entirely sure. Time will tell I guess.

I opened up Celeb Linkage in Internet Explorer to find it destroyed as the images were displaying at full size which I didn’t get. I didn’t actually understand how the thumbnails worked as they didn’t have anything in to set a size and the URL was to the full size image and there was no CSS.

End result is, it was the full size image but using some clever CSS, the container the posts were in kept the images small in Firefox. But it didn’t work in Internet Explorer. End result is that when you upload an image to WordPress and ask it to create a thumbnail it will but the code it will give you is for including the full size image. If you want to display the thumbnail you have to change the URL of the image.

I’ve just installed a new plugin to my blog (indeed the first plugin I’ve ever used with WordPress :P) called Akismet. It’s a spam thing that uses a big central server that checks the spam in basically the same way that Cloudmark’s SpamNet works. I use that for my emails and it is pretty good.

I get quite a bit of spam on this blog so hopefully it should work out pretty well.

I’ve just been running a search on various domain names including moviedonuts.com, moviepopcorn.com and moviepizza.com. They are all taken by domain quatters. Who would visit MoviePizza.com?!? It makes no sense they would register it. I mean, ok, I was looking for it but that’s because I am setting up a website, who would just type it in and even if a handful of people did would that cover the cost of registering it in adverting revenues? I very highly doubt it.

I mean, where do they come up with the idea to get names like that? I can understand if someone does it about one topic but these companies seem to cover pretty much every topic and still have all these random combinations of names.

Surround sound is scary! I was just cleaning my keyboard and I must have pressed one of the multimedia buttons or something as my paused MP3 player flicked to a new song (the song in question was Heather Nova – Island) which starts off with this haunting moaning type thing.

Not realising what I had done however it was like, where is that coming from? I was trying to listen to my computers as I had both on as usual but it was coming from all around me so I couldn’t work it out :P.

NTL introduced bandwidth limits in November (unknown to me until I arrived home) which I can see as a serious issue. The result was that I needed to upgrade to a faster connection to get increased bandwidth limits because at the moment by amazingly fast 1mb connection is useful for about 10 hours – that’s how long it would take me to max it out if I was downloading.

So we rang them up and asked to upgrade to the 2mb a second connection which has a more reasonable bandwidth limit. They said we sure could but the current set top box modem couldn’t handle it so we would need a new modem. No worries, they could have that to us by mid-January. Just after I go back to uni as it happens.

Lot of good that is. After moaning to sales they are coming next week or something now, I don’t really know what’s going on but it looks like the bandwidth limit is going to stay until January when they remove all the bandwidth limits which means I will be stuck with this limit until January when I only have like a week.

I’ve just finished working as I have a habit of watching a movie every night for some reason now but what I’ve just been working on is a new site named Horror Blog. It’s along the lines of my last post about how a blog can be an entire site but be more than a blog as it will have stuff like reviews, top 10 lists, pages, etc.

It’s going to be powered by WordPress but I’ve stripped down the default theme and re-build all of the CSS and most of the main templates as well. I’ve re-written the header and footer files from scratch and there is hardy a trace of the original sidebar code in there.

I’m having some problems getting it compatable with Internet Explorer but that’s because I haven’t tried yet, I’m getting it perfect in Firefox then going to move on to the problems with IE.

Recently I’ve started to think a lot more about blogs. Not that I’ve been ignoring them until now, stuff like Celeb State and Gamer Forge had them built in but they seem more at the forefront now rather than an addon or even part of a site.

What it really has me thinking about is the potential for blogs to be entire sites. Not just to have a blog on your site but for the blog to be the actual site. But for it to be a site rather than just a blog. I know that’s a little wordy but I can’t be bothered to explain it any clearer so I’ll just have to hope you understand what I’m getting at :D.

Been playing around with vBulletin 3.5 and I have to say the AJAX is pretty amazing in it. On the quick reply, once you hit post it brings up a message below the box telling you it is processing the post and then providing it is ok it will insert the post into the page without reloading!

Still working on my DVD library. Still have to remember to burn Book of Vegans and I have That’s Our Hardy and a compilation of the web TV shows I need to burn as well though I am still putting stuff together at the moment. Couldn’t find the original CNT Show files so I’m probably just going to use the compressed Windows Media Video version.

There will be a few shows I will have to do that for I think but so far I have managed to get hold of the full quality stuff so far. I love the way video looks so much better when you’ve been watching it low quality and you get it onto DVD.