General »

So I just got back from a nice Christmas break visiting family, and I noticed something quite interesting. When I left, Akismet had blocked about 350 spam comments and trackbacks from being posted on my blog. Simply-Basic.com has only been around for a few months so this number seemed adequate. However, in the last week it jumped to 800+ spam comments! Quite the leap.

After thinking about this, I was lead to two conclusions. My first conclusion is that spammers are humans too, and deserve our respect. They take time away from their precious Christmas break to spam our blogs. That’s time that they could be spending with their families. But instead, they would rather let their…

Announcements »

Well it’s a very special time of the year. A time where a lot of people celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, or a host of other holidays. Whatever you’ll be celebrating, I hope you have a wonderful time! I will be taking a week off beginning this afternoon. I will be on vacation with my family to our cabin for Christmas, which is in a remote area with no internet. That’s right, you read correctly. Such a place does exist!

I wish you all the best, and I’ll be back in a week with more great updates. Now is a great time to subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss any articles!

Happy Holidays from Simply-Basic.com!

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Tutorial/How-To »

Edit: While switching hosts the subdomain I created for the test of the following script didn’t transfer. I’ll try and get them back in the next few days so that you can see a live example of this script.

Something that my regular readers have come to learn is that I am not a professional coder. Everything that I do is because I’ve set out and learned it on my own. I don’t do it for a job, just for my own education. My latest “educational” dabble was using Iframes. Iframes have lost a lot of appeal and are deprecated in XHTML Strict. Nevertheless, there are still many people who use them.

For those who aren’t familiar,…

Reviews »

I recently came across a great new service. It’s called CrossLoop. It’s a program that lets you remotely share your computer. Why would you want to do that? I’ve found this most useful for those times when you need quick, remote tech support. If you are anything like me, you’ve got parents hours away who keep calling with computer problems. Now all they have to do is install CrossLoop and you can fix their computer from your own home. Genius.

Of course, programs like CrossLoop aren’t new by any means. But CrossLoop makes it easy. No router configurations, port forwarding or anything like that. CrossLoop actually starts a 128-bit secure Peer to Peer connection between the…

Tutorial/How-To »

A few days ago John Burton contacted me asking if I knew why he couldn’t get Wordpress MU to show embedded YouTube videos and podcasts that he was working with. To tell the truth, I had no idea, but I agreed to check it out with him. He was quicker then I and found an easy way to fix it .

Turns out Wordpress MU filters the code and disables the embed features. How do you fix it?

Edit wp-include/kses.php. In that file search for “Post filtering” and then comment out the following lines:

// Post filtering
//add_filter(’content_save_pre’, ‘wp_filter_post_kses’);

Read the full story »

Useful Tools »

The other day I decided I was done editing my HTML and other code documents in Notepad. While searching for a better alternative I came accross PSPad, a free, multi-purpose code editor. PSPad’s code syntax highlighter works with many different languages and markups, including HTML, PHP, CSS, javascript, and others.

PSPad has many features, but I’ll describe some of my favorite. The syntax highlighting is excellent and makes editing those long codes much easier. PSPad also has the option of condensing your code to save a few kb on your server or to expand code to make it more readable. This feature made me realize how sloppy my code writing was! Web developers will also appreciate…