VanDragt.com

I was fedup with the poor experience of editing my host file, which is often needed when developing websites. So I quickly created an AutoHotkey script for the purpose.

15:03:50 – me: anyone knows a host editor app that works under windows 7
15:04:51 – me: fed up trying to first find the hosts file, then not being able to save because I again forgot to run notepad with admin privileges.

Download @ Host Editor 7 – Hassle free host editing for Win7-XP – DonationCoder.com.

Made few tweaks to improve the blog in preperation for several drafts I’m currently working on. Here’s a quick rundown for everyone that’s interested in the wordpress blog platform.

• Related Posts should show up to 5 related posts without too many false positives on single article pages. I like how this plugin scores posts on relativity and that I can set it to show nothing when no posts are related, which keeps the interface clutter to a minimum.
• A single easy recognisable block of Google Adsense adverts has been added to single articles. You won’t see it if you have Adblock Plus installed like myself, but it should give helpful suggestions on articles with a single subject and support hosting costs in the process.
• Template tweak: Moved post-meta-information from under the title to the footer (tag/cat info) so that the header is better connected with the body of the post. There’s enough clutter on other sites.
• I’ve visually combined  categories and tags underneath articles. Category are used for url purposes and tags  to facilitate cross linking of subjects. No need for two lists.
• I added a tagcloud to the site so you can browse the site and discover some other articles. I don’t think browsing by time and month is useful to many people so that’s been removed from the site. The only concern I have at the moment is that the cloud would grow to too big a list, so in the future I might just show the top 7 tags used. For now that’s not a problem.
• PHP Speedy. This is the most important reason why the site is so snippy.

There’s more but I’ll save them for another time.

I’m currently testing the WordPress iPhone app (WfI). It’s great for a free app! However I noticed a few things that need to be polished:

• It didn’t retrieve the blogs categories from my blog and the category I added to this post wasn’t saved.
• The interface is a bit slow on the frontpage when clicking an option it doesn’t turn blue immediately
• There’s currently (18th June 2009) no way to edit the blog’s details after setting up, or ability to remove it that I have found. I changed my user’s password but I cannot change it in WfI! An Edit button on the blog selection screen would definately help in this case. I’ll have to remove the application and redownload it – maybe that helps.

Still it’s a great way to do some writing while not at a desktop and I appreciate the offline mode for iPod Touch users.

I had a problem with my site and it has been restored to 4th January. Sorry for any inconvenience.