Color Picker

General,

AdesClrPicker is an easy to use standalone program that let's you designers out there easily get the code for colors anywhere on your desktop.

Of course it you're using firefox there's an extension out there that does the same thing but that will only let you pick colors from your browser and Ades Color Picker has some useful extra features built in.

AdesClrPicker has a color library that let's you manager the captured color codes, you can delete andadesclrpicker menu edit colors ( set up the RGB values ), you can save the codes in a text file different formats ready to be used in HTML, Delphi, C++ and VB.

When started, this program goes to system tray and waits for activation.A right click on it's icon in system tray will show a popup menu with several options (Activate, color Library, Settings, etc ) and a list or recently captured colors.

You can activate it from that menu or with a key combination that you can customize from settings.

ades color picker magnifierWhen active the color picker will attach a magnifier to your mouse cursor so that you can easily pick the color you really want.

Flexible and easy to use, no need for photoshop loaded just for picking colors, not that I use photoshop, gimp rocks 🙂 at least for my image processing needs.
And btw this color picker almost works in Linux if you have wine. I say almost because you can start it but it will only pick colors that are inside it's own window, but this is because of a problem with wine applications not being well integrated into the X window manager. Maybe a future version will have Linux/Unix support too.

Here are some screen shots of the color picker in action:

ades color picker screen shotades color picker screen shot 2

What color picker and design tools do you use for web/software development? I would love to hear about them in the comments.

stop spam in phpbb with akismet

General, , ,

Spam is a big problem these days. Spammers use advanced bots that can post thousand of spam messages on your forum, your blog, or any other type of site that allows the user to post messages or comments. The bots are becoming more and more advanced.

A few years ago it was easy to stop this type of spam using methods like CAPTCHA but now the bots have sophisticated ocr algorithms that can easily detect the obfuscated characters in an image so that's not a protection anymore.

If you run a forum with phpbb you will have to install a few mods to protect it against spammers. If you don't do anything you will get hundreds or thousands of spam messages a day, you'll want to bang your head on to the wall trying to keep up and delete the messages and your forum users will most probably leave your forum before you'll manage to get rid of all that spam.

Continue reading stop spam in phpbb with akismet →

Full Feeds

General, ,

I just enabled full text feeds on this blog so now you can subscribe to my feeds and read full articles from  the comfort of your feed reader 🙂 .

I'm using the <!--more--> tag on some articles and because wordpress 2.1 also splits the feeds when it finds the more tag I had to install the Full Text Feeds plugin created by Ronald Heft.

There are some other methods to do this presented by Kevin Muldon on his How to use the more tag and display the full content in your RSS Feed  post.

Free dual monitor video card

hardware,

John Chow if giving away an ATi Radeon-based X1550 graphics card.

This card has a dual DVI output so you can connect two LCD monitors to your computer, or two CRT monitors using a converter. The card has 512 DDR2 on board and it value is around $100.

To enter the contest just comment on his post Who Wants A Dual Monitor Video Card? . He will make a draw from all the commentators and on Friday someone will win this card and with an extra monitor will be able to work like John Chow

This is of course one of his genius techniques to attract more visitors to his site and get more feedback in the comments of his blog.

WordPress optimal title

wordpress, ,

I'm using Aaron Schaefer's Optimal title wordpress plugin to modify the way wordpress displays the title by default. This plugin provides a function similar to wp_title() but your title will not contain "blog archive" in front of your post's title and this is good for seo.

You will have to modify your header template and replace the call to wp_title with a call to optimal_header().
In a previous post I presented a plugin for integrating Jerome's keywords plugin with google sitemaps, this post will show you how to integrate it with the optimal title plugin.

Continue reading WordPress optimal title →

Showing some link love

General, ,

As of today the links in the comments section do not have the nofollow attribute anymore. So those that will comment on any post will get a link back to their site and that will add to their page rank. I'm using Oliver Bockelmann’s Nofollow Case by Case plugin that will remove the rel="external nofollow" attribute from links in comments. Thanks to Martin Reed of communityspark.com for his idea about making a blog link love compatible

The side bar also shows a top of those that commented the most with links to their sites ( also with no nofollow ) . I'm using the Show Top commentators plugin for this, thanks to John Chow for his ideas about how to increase blog comments

Some think that this will just increase spam ? what do you think ? do you show link love on your blog ?

Upload Mime types plugin for wordpress

wordpress,

A few days ago I had to upload two diff files with the extension .patch on my previous post about qmail and dkim and wordpress asked me to try other extension because the file extension did not met it's "security policy". That was really annoying so I started to look through the code to "fix" this :).

Few minutes after, I find this function wp_check_filetype in wp-includes/functions.php. It seems this function is the one responsible for filtering unwanted extensions. The only problem with it is that the allowed extensions are hard coded in it. you can easily add your extension to it but then you'll have to do that every time you upgrade wordpress.

Continue reading Upload Mime types plugin for wordpress →

qmail and DKIM

Email, security, , , , ,

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a method for validating the identity associated with a message using using public-key cryptography and key server technology. DKIM is an enhanced version of Yahoo's Domain Keys and Cisco's Identified Internet Mail methods. As of February 2007 an IETF draft was accepted as "Proposed standard", it may take some more time till this will be a standard but the current version is stable ( according to dkim.org ).

Implementations of DKIM in email servers is not available as much as DomainKeys.
For qmail there is a patch that uses libdomainkeys to implement a replacement for qmail-queue that will verify and sign messages but this only works for DomainKeys not DKIM. I have developed a solution for qmail to be able to verify and sign messages with DKIM. Continue reading qmail and DKIM →

reviewme paid reviews

General,

Today I received an email from reviewme (Aff) announcing me that my blog was accepted and they are ready to accept review orders, so I may write some paid reviews if I find something interesting to review.

It seems they now have a marketplace where advertisers set up campaigns and publishers can accept those offers so you don't have to wait for the advertiser to find your blog, you can find their offer and just accept it if they have such campaign. But it seems the prices for such campaigns are lower then what you would get if an advertiser would order a review.

Here is a link if you want to get Reviewed by this blog for $40 at ReviewMe!

squid outgoing ip patch

Patches,

Some time ago a client of mine was running squid on a system with multiple interfaces and ips. He wanted a setup where squid would use the same ip on which it received the connection to create the connection to the destination server for fetching the content.

Let's say we have 3 ips 1.1.1.1, 1.1.1.2 and squid listens on both interfaces. Now if a client would connect to the proxy server on ip 1.1.1.1 and request google.com, squid will use 1.1.1.1 to make the connection to google. If the client will connect to 1.1.1.2 squid will use 1.1.1.2 to connect to the destination server.

Continue reading squid outgoing ip patch →