Don't Back Down

It's finally over. The Carolina Panthers have mercifully ended the season that at one point looked like it would never end. It went from 2-2 after four games to 4-4 after eight games and slid to 5-7 after twelve games.

What did the final quarter of the season hold? Amazingly, the team still had a chance at the playoffs. Though Tampa Bay sewed up the division fairly early on, and Atlanta floundered without Michael Vick - and got worse when Bobby Petrino bolted to return to college. Somehow after thirteen games, the Panthers just had to win out and get a little help to find themselves a wild card.

Read "Carolina Panthers: 2007 Wrap-Up" »

To build a community, you need your visitors to comment on your site. Unfortunately when you do that, you open up your site to others who you might not want to come calling - namely spammers, who will leave all sorts of garbage on your (virtual) doorstep. While we probably won't ever be able to get rid of them, managing spam feedback is a completely bearable process.

Depending on who you ask, you're likely to get a wide variety of answers on the best avenue to take when it comes to plugins to use or configuration directives to take in the fight against spam. You'll see names like Akismet or Defensio mentioned, and plugins such as MT-Approval and Tiny Turing thrown into the mix. Some will tell you that you need a CAPTCHA and some will tell you that there's just no way to win. In the end, you don't really need much more than a little creativity and some patience.

Read "How to Best Handle Spam on Your Movable Type Site" »

I'm not a big user of images - though I have a digital camera, I typically end up using it less than I probably should. I think one of my goals for next year will be to actually get some of the images off the memory card in the camera and let people see the pictures I've taken. One step in that process is to get them in a format that makes them nice looking. A single page without much around it, as you often see on a web page, can be downright ugly. Enter Lightbox.

This JavaScript framework is a fairly simple way to display pictures with a sort of frame around them - the image is actually assigned a special HTML segment, and the surrounding section of the page is blacked out, giving the viewer a much more pleasing experience than a simple image without much around it. There are three problems with Lightbox. The first is that it's big, the second is that it's slow to load and the third (and most important) is that it doesn't work! Luckily, there are some options.

Read "Enhancing the Display of Images on Your Site with Slimbox" »

Over the weekend, the Charlotte Observer reported that since opening to paying customers on November 26 - nearly a month ago - the Lynx Blue line had taken some 12000 passenger trips. I'm thinking that's a misprint, but I haven't been able to find a retraction or a correction. Perhaps they meant to print that they are doing 12000 trips per day. But 12000 total would be, well, pretty bad, to say the least. They were supposed to do over 9000 per weekday, and 12000 total would just suck.

They did announce that there will be a couple more ticket vending machines added at the I-485 station, and even a pre-fabricated ticket booth for someone to dispense tickets. I can't imagine that they would need to do that if the ridership was so poor, unless they are following some strange publicity track of trying to convince people that ridership is so good that they need more when there really isn't anyone riding.

Read "Just How is the Lynx Blue Line Doing?" »

Since it's Christmas, that means many of you may be looking at new gadgets at this time of year, so I'm going to look at one of the most common - and perhaps the most disregarded - of all. The keyboard. Even though we use the lowly keyboard every day, we don't pay it nearly as much attention as we should. This is very likely the most important piece of our computer, yet it usually gets pushed behind just about everything else.

Over the years, I've worked with a huge number of keyboards. In the beginning there were those old beasts that came with the original IBM computers. Some people like them, but I have to say that I don't. They just don't work for me. I've used laptop keyboards. I've even used keyboards for mainframe and midrange computers. Today, I'm still searching for the ultimate keyboard. It might go on for a while. But here, I'll take a look at the last four that I've tried.

Read "A Christmas Keyboard Comparison and Giveaway" »

A while back, I converted an original XBox to something new - an XBOXMEDIACENTER. It actually was a whole lot easier than I expected. I didn't even have to open it up, because through the judicious use of eBay, I managed to find a copy of the original Mech Assault (not the Platinum Hits version, that's just what comes up at xbox.com), which allowed the loading of a softmod.

Once I did, it's like a whole new world opened up. The people who have developed XBMC have done a bang-up job, by packaging a nice interface along with a great platform for playing all sorts of videos and even being able to load games - both those developed for the XBox and ROMs of all sorts. But I was frustrated because I couldn't get some AVI files to play. They would act like they were going to start, but after a second or so, they would just stop. I was pulling out what little hair I had left. Luckily, I finally appear to have found the solution.

Read "XBMC Won't Play AVI Files" »

One way to keep visitors involved in what's happening with goings-on at your site is by involving them in what's happening, and one of the more interesting developments in this area is by providing them with the ability to rate your content. Until now, one of the more common ways of doing so for Movable Type was with the Ajax Rating plugin.

Mark Carey has done a great job of putting the plugin together, don't get me wrong. But installing the plugin and getting it to work right can sometimes be a bit more than most folks want to take on. The advantage is that you get complete control over what's happening. Sometimes, however, you just need a quick-and-dirty rating solution, and that's where Outbrain comes in.

Read "Easily Add Ratings to Your Site With Outbrain" »

On Tuesday night, we decided to head out for the annual Everitz Consulting Christmas Party. What's that? You think just because I'm a Movable Type Consultant, I can't have a Christmas Party? Think again.

Anyway, we decided that we'd take in a Charlotte Checkers game, which thanks to the North Carolina Zoo was just $49 for a family four-pack of tickets to get into the game, four hot dogs and four sodas. Pretty sweet deal all around, especially when you consider that the dogs and sodas by themselves would cost thirty bucks!

Read "Family Night at the Charlotte Checkers" »

In various places around the world, they hold meetings with some regularity for people who have similar interests. Meetup has thousands of groups where you can get your group together and organized, but unfortunately they started charging people to organize things a while back, which means if you are just casually interested in getting things together, it may not be worth it.

Which leads me to my question in the title: Is anyone interested in a Charlotte Blog Meetup? It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Chow has dinners fairly frequently, and even if the food in our area may not be as interesting as his Dim Sum, it is certainly something we could check out. We could even just do coffee or something, though I don't really dig coffee, so I'd hope there were alternatives.

Read "Is Anyone Game for a Charlotte Blog Meetup?" »

One of the complaints about pair Networks is that their back-end interface is a little different than a lot of hosts, and I'll have to capitulate on this point. It's not your standard cPanel host - not even a branded one.

Instead, pair has developed their own interface, dubbed the Account Control Center, where you log in to do all the necessary tasks related to your account - setting up email accounts (including related tasks), managing databases, files, billing tasks, just about anything you could want. The only difference is that it's not what you're likely to see on any of dozens of other hosts. The one thing that they didn't typically offer that most hosts did was an easy way to administer your databases. Until now.

Read "Pair Networks Adds Shared phpMyAdmin Install" »

If you use Movable Type, there's a good chance that you use plugins. And if you took the plugin survey, there's a good chance that you use a plugin to add extra fields to your installation: Roughly one-third of people polled used either CustomFields or RightFields to provide some additional breathing room in your installation.

To make matters more interesting, the combined plugins accounted for roughly a third of the votes for being rolled into the core package, and easily bested all other plugins when it came time to choose just one plugin to install. The problem all along has been that there are two ways to add extra fields to your site. The announcement that CustomFields is now going to be part of Movable Type just makes it more complex - especially if you're a user of RightFields. Until now.

Read "Convert RightFields Data to CustomFields" »