Schonhose

The last day of 2007 brings us another Wordpress update (Version 2.3.2) and the opportunity to look back what has happened on my blogs the last 12 months.

Both January and February were dominated with posts concerning the bad weather we’re having at that time. March was a really exiting month. After a good look at the code of my previous self-written content management system it made me realize that a complete overhaul was in order. However, with my schedule this seemed undo-able so I settled with Wordpress instead. As a theme I choose the excellent Redoable theme.

April rolled around and Pixelpost 1.6 was released to the general public. May, June and July were kind of slow, featuring some tips for .htaccess and PHP issues. During that time I received some complaints about my site being slow. In August I switched to a new template (still in use this day) which was a tremendous change in responsiveness. The first information about the excellent anti-spam solution Defensio was published on this blog in September and I started to write some code to use it with Pixelpost also.

October proved to be a troublesome month. On October 16th I discovered my blog literally was set back into time two months. All the posts, updates and stuff were gone and no backup existed. The site of my girlfriend was totally vanished and had to be rebuild from the ground up. Needless to say this took quite some time. The end of October also marked an important change: I decided to accept donations through Paypal.

Defensio went live in November, providing a better spam solution (then Akismet) for the general public. Small code changes were made to the website during October and November, most notable the new download section. A couple of addons for Pixelpost were updated.

December 2007 started with troubles with the Pixelpost.org domain name. We basically forgot to renew the domain, so it took some days to get that fixed. New addons for Pixelpost were released into the wild.

Looking back at 2007 it was quite a productive year. Let’s hope 2008 well be as productive as 2007 was. I got a couple of things I really want to finish in 2008 (things like a rewrite of the Googlemap addon, among others), so look for exiting things to come next year.

Thanks for the visits, the comments and the support. I hope to see you again next year.

Happy new year everyone!!!!

Christmas 2007 has past and it is time to at least try to get back in the normal rhythm. So today is the day I try to figure out how my new phone works. I upgraded my SPV C600 (Orange-branded) to a brand new HTC Touch. First impression of the Touch were absolutely fabulous. Slick design, light-weight and with a stylish black color.

However, there was this matter of importing my contacts from the old phone to the new one. The last time I had to manually re-enter all the contacts into my smartphone. I still have vivid memories of that gruesome day. I figured this time, moving from one smartphone to another, things should be easier. A quick Google search confirmed this and led me to the XDA-Developers forum were the user dotfred made a post about the PIM Backup v2.7 program.

Now transferring the contacts was just a matter of a few clicks: backup on storage card, transfer storage card to new phone, import and be happy. It even managed to import appointments, old text-messages and caller history.

The XDA-Developers forum has tons of nice software for the HTC Touch so hopefully I can find more useful gems there. If you own a windows mobile based smartphone it is worth a visit.

For those of you who want to know what the fuss is about, check out this youtube video.

The past month a global advertisement campaign about the safety of online banking was launched. The campaign, named “Drie keer kloppen“, was designed to make people aware of the things they need to check prior to do online banking. With the number of phising mails trying to scam people this is necessary because a lot of people still fall for those scams.

The campaign focuses on three points:

• Check the computer security (e.g. anti-virus, firewall)
• Check the website (url and secure connection)
• Check the payment (follow the instructions)

However, I find it ironic to say the least that I’m presented with the following security certificate warning when accessing my online banking account:

Today I’ve released the 1.2.0 version for the Pixelpost Defensio addon. You can download the new version at the Pixelpost Extend and at Defensio.

Changelog:
Version 1.2 (14 December 2007)

• Added information about the learning status to the stats overview
• Fixed a small bug with an if statement (use == to test and not =… >_< )
• Unprocessed comments are placed in the Defensio queue and displayed with a blue color. These comments can be reprocessed by clicking the appropriate link.
• Cleanup of the code (Removed some testing code as well)
• Replaced the signup url with the correct one

Please update your addon to use the new features.

Today is the birthday of Sinterklaas and that means presents.

So without further ado, here are four new addons for Pixelpost. Please remember they require at least the release candidate of Pixelpost 1.7. Enjoy!

• Http:BL Addon
• Edit Exif Addon
• Photonotes Addon
• FlashCropImage Addon

And don’t forget to donate if you like them (otherwise you will be put in the gunny sack in which Zwarte Piet carries the presents, and be taken back to Spain, where Sinterklaas is said to spend the rest of the year).