So, after a bit of googling I found an awesome little plugin called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress (download it here). This little wonder, like WordPress, can be set up to “Block comments with 15 or more links to external sites “ – but by block it mean delete/kill/exterminate – i.e. it the crappy comment never even appears in your spam queue and it’s automatically squashed.

I personally think this is a feature that should be added to WordPress by deafult, but until that day, TanTan’s plugin will do just fine.

So if anyone’s genuinely trying to post a comment on my blog with more than 15 url’s in it – sorry, but I can’t hear you, you’ll have to try shouting a little louder. But, I’m pretty confident any comment with that many links if guaranteed to be one of the bad guys, and TanTan’s plugin dealing with it so I don’t have to can only be a good thing.

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.

There were already plenty of other options in there – big names like authorize.net and PayPal etc – but they take a much much larger commission per transaction than Google do, were therefore much less attractive and I never bothered looking into them. Google Checkout still takes a cut, but it’s tiny in comparison and I’m more than happy to sacrifice a few quid in exchange for the convenience of not having to cash as many cheques.

I could use Adobe Bridge to view those files, and I sometimes do, but in 99% of situations Bridge is overkill if all I’m wanting to do is scroll through a few images and try find the right file I’m working on. I’ve used a few other apps in the past, but they’ve always been way over-complicated for just looking through a few PSD files.

So far Picasa Photo Viewer seems like the perfect alternative for viewing image files in Explorer. It’s fast, doesn’t struggle with big layered PSD files or large images and shows everything in a tidy LightBox style overlay above everything else on your desktop…

Plus, if you’ve got a Google Account and have Picasa Web Albums set up, you can easily upload an image to your account with the click of a button. By default they get put in a “Drop Box” album, but you can sort them out and organise them online however you like.

All in all it’s a great little free tool that comes as part of the equally fantastic Picasa. If you’re fed up with Windows Explorer’s very limited image viewing options it can’t hurt to give it a try, can it?

Installation

• Download the plugin, unzip it and upload it to your plugins directory –
  /wp-content/plugins/
• Activate it from the ‘Plugins’ are of the WordPress admin
• That’s it, you’re done

Not working?

This plugin should work with most themes out there. If it doesn’t it’s probably because the theme you’re using doesn’t have the correct template tags in it. WP Admin Quicklinks requires that both the <?php wp_head(); ?> and <?php wp_footer(); ?> template tags are in the theme, usually in the header.php and footer.php respectively. If they’re not there you can try add them yourself, or try contact the theme’s author and ask if they’d be nice enough to update the theme and add them for you.

Changelog

• v1.01 (08/01/2009) – Fix WP2.7 ‘Logout’ link redirect for on the homepage, category and archive pages etc
• v1.00 (07/01/2009) – Initial release

Notes

• I’m no PHP developer, so if there’s a better way of going about this please let me know
• Tested and working in WordPress 2.7. It should work in 2.6, maybe even 2.5, but I’ve not tried it. Let me know if there’s any issues.
• In WordPress 2.7 and above it makes use of the new  wp_logout_url template tag and redirects you directly back to the page you logged-out from.
• In WordPress versions < 2.7 it (in theory) adds a a standard wp_loginout().

Background

This is my first plugin for WordPress (so be gentle), and came about because I’ve ended up using WordPress to build a few CMS sites for people recently. I needed a nice easy way to jump to various sections and pages of the admin from front-end pages I was testing etc.

It started off as a bit of code I put in the footer of all the templates I make, and all it does is add a discreet floating admin panel to the top right of each page of your WordPress based site. To make it easier to add it to future sites I looked at a few of the plugins I had installed, saw how to make them write code into the footer automatically, and put this little thing together.

You like it? You like it a lot?

Now, this is entirely up to you, but I’m not going to be unhappy if you click the nice little PayPal button below

The Original

• http://www.lipsum.com/

As far as I know this is the original Lorem Ipsum generator – at least it’s the only one I’ve ever used in the past. Genuine Lorem’s good in that it simulates ‘real’ text content with a readable combination of long and short words that are inoffensive and can be used in just about any old place.

I’m not promising the list of alternatives below are all suitable for use in your work – that ultimately depends on the sense of humor of your client. So if you’re doing something for a big corporate gig, probably best sticking to good old Lipsum.

It looks like this site needs all the PR it can get at the moment too. I don’t know what I did or exactly when it happened, but despite my little PageRank boost Google doesn’t seem to like me any more.

It used to be that you searched for Freelance Design Leeds or Freelance Web Design Leeds and I came up on the first page for each one – not at the top by any means but I did OK.

Now (Jan 2009) I’m currently back on page 10! Not good for generating new business, and the one thing a freelancer like me really needs to do is generate new business.

Ah well. I put this HUGE drop down the results table down to the fact I’ve been re-jigging the content and categorisation of this site/blog, and it’s confused google into thinking I’ve got a lot of duplicate content or something like that. I guess it’s just a case of waiting again and hoping I creep back up, page by page until I’m back up near the top again.

It’s not all bad though, have a search for freelance 3d design Leeds and I come second which is great. But to be honest, I don’t even know if that’s a term people search for a lot anyway.

Due to a mix-up at Evans Cycles I ended up with a 19″ bike which was way too big for me so I had to wait a week to take it back and get a 17″ which is, I’m happy to report, a perfect fit. I picked the 17″ up this weekend and and went for my first bicycle ride in probably 15 years, and probably the first bit of real exercise I’ve done in all that time too. My legs (and back, arms, head and hands) ache but I know that one day, soon hopefully, I will feel the benefit.

The plan is to ride every evening and weekend and generally spend time having fun doing something other than looking at a monitor and moving a mouse around my desk.

So far, so good – except the weather, which seems to start raining each time I even think about going outside.

Things I’m trying…

From been a web designer for the last 7 years I (hopefully) know enough to make a start on getting my site ranked much higher than it currently is. The main things to concentrate on are…

• Work out what search terms you actually want to appear for at the top of the list.
• Relevant good content is key to it all – write good content to the subject you’d like to rank highly for and the visitors will, in time, start coming.
• So, if I want want my site to start ranking highly for terms like freelance web design Leeds or freelance photography Leeds then I need to actually use those phrases or variations on them (it’s almost as if this whole article is just part of my plan) on my site – although not excessively else you’ll get ranked down for trying to spam your way to the top of the list.
• Write good content in this blog section of my site so that people link to it (don’t worry, I’m not under any illusions this is good content just yet – I can design and take photos but I tend to waffle on a bit instead of getting to the point when writing – maybe I’ll write a novel one day, can’t be that hard can it?) and just generally try to get people linking to me site.  The more people Google sees linking to me, the higher the ‘authority’ it’ll give my site, and will therefore hopefully show my site above someone elses, who has for example exactly the same content but a lower authority according to their ranking system. This, and it’s a dark art in it’s self, is called Page Rank.
• Make sure the Titles of my pages contain some useful keywords and phrases (but not a list of keywords like the Meta tag – see below), but still remain descriptive and readable for the user.
• Meta keywords, as far as I can tell, are pretty much ignored by Google and a lot of other search engines these days. While it’s still good to have them the engines these days take a much closer look at the actual content of the pages to index them and, not the Meta tags. Instead of making sure you’ve got a nice list of Meta Keywords, make sure you use all the key-words and key-phrases you want to get indexed for in the content of your site instead, like 3D design in Leeds. See, easy. (sorry, couldn’t resist)
• Be patient, wait for the major search engines to get a good index of your site, and don’t be afraid to change content if the old stuff’s not working

I’ll be keeping this post updated with whatever genuinely useful information I find on this subject but for now I’m just going keep on updating my site, tweaking the keyword content here and there for each of the work pages etc, and keep an eye on my ranking. I’ll let you know if anything starts shifting.

If you don’t need a 17″ laptop but still want a powerful graphics machine take a look at the Dell Vostro 1500 – smaller, cheaper and lighter but just as powerful, you just loose some screen resolution.

I could have got it off dell.co.uk for around £1000 I think if I’d configured it right, but if you look on Dell’s Outlet store you can probably find the same pc/laptop that you were just about to get but save a few £100 off the main site’s price.

I ended up getting mine new off eBay, for £740 including delivery, which for the spec of the machine is amazing.

I’ve been using it for nearly 2 months now and I can’t really fault it either as a dedicated graphic design machine or as an entertainment laptop.

As with all technology though it’ll be out of date within a year and I’ll be looking for something bigger and better – but with the £1120 pounds I saved by not getting a MacBook Pro of near enough the same spec, I can quite happily justify the upgrade. Or go on holiday for a month. Or buy a second car.

Some Dell Vostro 1700 reviews I found – if you still need convincing…

• http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3937
• http://www.notebookforums.com/thread209058.html
• http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=161077

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.