As mentioned on the WordPress Development Blog, the kickass sidebar widgets system that’s in use at WordPress.com is now available for everyone as a plugin. For those who don’t have a WordPress.com blog, here’s a screenshot of the great drag-and-drop system:

While currently only a few plugins support this cool new plugin, more are supporting it every day. None of mine do yet, but they will soon! :)

EDIT: For those missing that you could find a download link via the above mentioned WordPress Development Blog, here is a direct link to go to the plugin’s site.

Got back into town this evening. Please give me a bit to catch up on e-mails, forum posts, etc. ;)

Just a head’s up — if you’re trying to get ahold of me, I’ll be outta town from Saturday until Thursday. I’ll be in Eastern Oregon vacationing with my family and won’t have access to the Internet until I get back. ;)

About a month and a half ago, this video was leaked onto the Internet:

It was claimed to be the next Battlefield title from DICE, but most people, including me, figured it to be a non-BF title. Oh how we were wrong, as shown by this video released yesterday:

EA also posted a community update today confirming the project.

While I really enjoy modern combat (i.e. Battlefield 2), Battlefield 2142 definetly looks interesting and like a lot of fun. :)

As mentioned on their blog, Google has released Google Mars in celebration of Percival Lowell’s birthday. It’s a lot like Google Moon which I mentioned 7 months ago and Google Maps, i.e. very cool.

Shame they didn’t release it as a plugin for Google Earth though. It woulda so very cool to fly around Mars in 3D. :(

Incase you didn’t hear, WordPress v2.0.2 was released. It’s a bunch of bugfixes and security fixes. If you’re running the v2.x series of WordPress, it’s strongly suggested that you upgrade.

You can check out the official post announcing version 2.0.2 on the WordPress Development Blog.

Oh, and don’t forget to backup!! You don’t wanna be like me, do you? ;)

This post was originally posted on March 7th, 2006 at 4:33 PM. However, I busted my blog by upgrading to the wrong version of WordPress and had to revert to a database backup. That resulted in the loss of this post.

I’m working on a new theme for my blog as I’ve grown tired of this one. You can check it out at my development blog. It’s still a work in progress and is based on andreas09, a template (I converted it to a WordPress theme) by Andreas Viklund.

If you have any suggestions about it, please let me know by leaving a comment on this post! I’m looking for it to be the best theme as possible. :)

This post was originally posted on March 7th, 2006 at 4:17 PM. However, I busted my blog by upgrading to the wrong version of WordPress and had to revert to a database backup. That resulted in the loss of this post.

I was watching a Discovery Channel show that I downloaded today called “Ultimate 10 Military Machines” and it featured this crazy plane called the Airborne Laser (ABL) for short (see right).

It flies around above the clouds in friendly skies looking for enemy missles. It then locks onto them with a bunch of low power lasers and then uses a bigass chemical powered laser that’s 1000 times as powerful as the sun to basically burn a hole in the missle.

How futuristic and crazy is that?!

You can find out more about it at Boeing’s website.

First, a bit of history. I have been using the anti-spam plugin Spam Karma 2 on my blog for months. It’s quite an excellent piece of work. It uses a ton of different methods to determine if a comment is spam including the age of the post, a Javascript payload (most spam bots don’t support Javascript), URL blacklists, comparison to other spam comments by the same person, etc. All of those result in a very low error rate and next to no spam actually making it onto my blog.

Anyway, I decided to try out recently the only other player worth mentioning in the WordPress anti-spam field, Akismet. Rather than trying to figure out if a comment is spam by doing a bunch of tests on your blog’s end, it sends the comment’s contents off to Akismet’s servers and it compares it to the huge database that it has.

Now of course this has it’s pros and cons. The pros are that it’s always up to the second on spam as it uses other blogs to compare with. However, it doesn’t do the Javascript tests or compare it to other spam on your blog. And in the end, I found it to be reliable, but not quite as much so as SK2. Which is why I switched back.

However, the other day I ran across an excellent little plugin for SK2 that uses the Akismet servers as an additional resource for evaluating the comment’s karma. So, now I have the best of both worlds!

Oh, and before I forget: spammers, please go die in a ditch. Thanks.

As some of you may have noticed, I broke my blog earlier today.

Long story short, I tried to upgrade to the release canidate of version 2.0.2 of WordPress, but accidentally downloaded and upgraded to a very alpha version of version 2.1 instead. It was really not what I wanted and it’s so alpha that it didn’t even work quite right. And of course the worse part was that it upgraded my database and so I couldn’t just downgrade.

Luckily I just happened to make a database backup on Sunday, so I only lost a couple posts and comments. Pretty funny actually seeing how I usually only backup once a month. Close call, huh? :)

Anyway, I saved the lost posts and I’ll re-add them tomorrow as I’m off to bed for now. ;)