In this case the spam squisher in question is called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress, and so far it’s been more effective at eliminating cerain types of spam to my blog than any other plugin.

Having any sort of comment functionality on your blog means you’re going to get spam at some point or another. Even a little site like mine with virtually no traffic compared to a lot of other blogs out there can get plenty.

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After much deliberation about whether or not to use one of the many fancy online invoicing apps available to make my life that little bit easier, I ended up giving FreshBooks a go…

…and so far I’ve been very impressed, as have the people on the other end of my invoices. But that’s a whole other post I need to write. This one’s just a little one to big-up the boys and girls who work at FreshBooks who listen to what their customers want and act on it – a rare thing indeed.

I was one of the many folks who asked for Google Checkout (the search giant’s answer to the seemingly ubiquitous PayPal) to be supported as an online payment option for the invoices I send via FreshBooks – and the powers that be made it happen.

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What is Picasa Photo Viewer? Well, like it says on the screen shot down below it’s a fast, powerful image viewer for viewing image and photos directly from Windows Explorer*

* I’m not sure about OSX, but Picasa 3 is now available for the Mac so chances are it’s part of the OSX version too – someone let me know will ya?)

It comes as part of the new and improved
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Picasa 3 which was recently released, and since I discovered it it’s become my default image viewer – which for a graphics designer a reasonably important thing to have in the tool kit.

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If you’ve been designing web or print work for any amount of time, chances are you’ve copied and pasted your fair share of Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet dummy text to fill in otherwise blank pages while you mock up designs or wait for the client to send you some real content.

Chances are you’re also probably getting a little bored of it too, and who doesn’t like a little choice these days anyway.
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I’ve had the google toolbar installed for a while now. It’s a very useful add-on to FireFox for me as I use google Notebook and Bookmarks and the toolbar provides nice easy access to both, so it’s a winner.

As a little bonus for me it has the ability to show the PageRank of whatever page you’re looking at. PageRank is the importance google assigns to a web page (0/10 been the lowest PR, 10/10 being the highest) based on how many other
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sites link to or reference that page. It gets a lot more complex than that and you can read about it and look at a horrible-and-not-very-helpful diagram here.

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Intro

There were 3 main reasons for re-designing and moving this site over to WordPress…

• To make it easier to keep up-to-date
• Get a more permanent presence on the old internet and replace the temporary portfolio style site, which was just a quick-fix after Christmas
  
• And finally and most importantly, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation for anyone who’s not sure what that means) – To get the site indexed well by Google and bumped up the results pages, getting more and more work directly from people finding my site independently on the internet.

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FLIR is short for Facelift Image Replacement, and it’s a really easy way (waaaay easier than the Flash based alternative sIFR, which replaces each header etc with a separate tiny .swf flie) to generate image replacements for any bit of html text on a web page.

That means you can easily use any font you want on a web page instead of having to settle for the classics like Arial or Tahoma etc.

FLIR, for example, is the thing that’s making all the headings for the articles on this site use Souvenir as their main font.

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Before you shout ‘MacBook Pro!’ – that was way out of the budget I’d set myself (less than £800 if I could manage it), so out of the question from the start. It was, unfortunately, the one that I really really wanted to get. It’s powerful and looks nice, and OSX is a joy to work on, but you have to pay a lot of cash to get it. Sorry Apple, maybe next time.

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Answer: Yes! It work’s really well.
I mentioned over a week ago that I’d decided to use WordPress (2.3.1) as the solution to provide a full CMS for a site I’m building (I’ll post a link to the final site when it goes live, along with some information on how I managed certain aspects of it).

It turns out it was quite easy to implement and the client seems happy with it. There’s a quite a few WordPress plug-ins used, but that’s a good thing for me as I’m in no way a developer. There wasn’t really anything I needed it to do that couldn’t be worked out some how.

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FFFFOUND! is one of those sites that you just, well, find – then wonder why no one else though of it before.

UPDATE: Sorry folks, I’m all out of invites. Try do what I did and send a nice email to the admin at FFFFOUND! asking for an invite – chances are they’ll send you one themselves!

The idea is really simple, it’s an image bookmarking site. You find an image on the Internet that you like – be it an illustration, an amazing photo, some inspiration for something you’re working on or just a piece of art – then you click on a link in your browsers favourites (that you add via the ffffound.com website) called ‘POST TO FFFFOUND! and said image is sent to your FFFFOUND! account, so you can keep them all in one handy place. Mine are here for example.

That’s not all though. They look and see what images you’ve added to your account, see what other users like the same images as you, then recommend other images to you based on the other users similar tastes.

At the moment it’s in a Beta testing stage, so you can’t sign up without an invite. After looking unsuccessfully on Google for one I just emailed them and asked for one. They sent one back the next day.

If you can get your hands on an invite it’s worth checking out and trying it for yourself. It’ll waste a good few hours of your time just browsing the growing collection of nice looking stuff.

Credit goes to EveryoneForever where I first spotted this.

You can’t really see much from that one image, but click here for pretty amazing video of it in action – http://www.pablovalbuena.com/augmsculpt_condeduque_web.mov

No, I couldn’t work it out at first either. More about it at http://www.pablovalbuena.com/