If you’re anything like me, you may have asked yourself the question; “How do I make my Wordpress blog available for users with a mobile phone?”. Well, I did after I visited my blog with my mobile phone. Okay, it still looked good but was no where near mobile phone friendly. The sheer size of the blog, all the extraneous content, heavy images etc made the blog rather hard to load. And lets face it, size matters when it comes to mobile phones. Not only because of the screen size on most phones devices, but also the fact that surfing using a mobile tends to be quite expensive.

Here many of you may think that making your blog accessible for mobile phones is a hard, rather long winded task. But fear not, it’s actually very very easy thanks to the work of Alex King. Alex King is an excellent Wordpress plugin developer, who has developed quite a few plugins, many of whom I use on this blog. The plugin in question is the excellent Wordpress Mobile Edition. With this nifty plugin, you will have your blog available for mobile phones in a matter of minutes, saving both you and the readers of your blog precious bandwidth.

To get this plugin installed, just follow these simple steps. SSH into your account, and go to your plugins folder, which should be in ~/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/.

wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip
unzip wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip
rm wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip

Then go to your blog’s admin plugins page, and enable the plugin there. If everything goes according to plan, your plugin should now be activated. What next you might ask yourself? Haha, I hate to disappoint you but that’s it. Nothing more to be done, as no configuration is needed. Now all you have to do is fire up your mobile phone browser, and point it to your blog. You should now get a nice bandwidth friendly version of your blog. Enjoy!

As some of you noticed, my blog just vanished from the face of the earth. And it did, for quite some time too. It was gone well over two weeks. Because of matters out of my control, the server this blog (and other domains) was hosted on was taken offline. But not only was it taken offline, after some time, the whole server was deleted. And yes, I didn’t keep any backups! When will I ever learn?

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Woohoo!

Last month I set a new visitor record to my blog, which makes me very happy. It makes it all worthwhile to continue writing all these articles. And it also proves that you, yes you, the readers of this site actually like what is being written. I would like to extend a thanks to all of you that have endured beta testing with me, private comments on different aspects of the layout and feel of this site, as well as a huge thanks for being who you are! I will not start a list of names, cause that list would be far too long, but again I say;

Thank you very much. Very much appreciated.

Today, another one of my domains went live. It has just started up, and the key people behind the page has yet to do the final talks. But the site is Cservice Sucks Dot Net, and that site too is a blog where people who all hate the group of people that run services on the IRC network Undernet. Here we can do as I do here, just keep on ranting and throw dirt. In other words, just as we would on any other given day.

Yes, you’ve heard me. And it’s a phrase being used on the net more and more often, and with a good reason. Not only are we being spammed via e-mail, but spammers have found other ways to spam us as well. You’ve had spam on IRC for ages too, but it’s not that often you read about IRC in the press. But recently, you’ve been getting spam over the instant messaging service from Microsoft, MSN. The new trend for spam sent over instant messaging services is called SPIM. But the spam that is really getting on my nerves these days, is blog spam. Over the last years, blogging has become a wide spread phenomena all over the glob. The usage of blogs has become so widely used, that it has become an influence on politics and the media. You only need to look back to what happened last year, with Dan Rather from CBS who was fired after having been slightly trigger happy with announcing a piece of information that turned out to be false. The case was blown wide open by a blogger, that could prove with simple methods that the case documents Dan Rather had based the case on was falsified. But to get back on track, spam!

As I said, lately I’ve been getting an insane amount of so called comment spam to my blog. This means, it’s spam disguised as comments to articles posted on my blog. Of course, all these comments are bogus and contains nothing else than advertisements to online gambling sites. Ok, I gotta hand it to them. They’ve found an area where it is easy to spam, and exploited that weakness for all it’s worth. But for goodness sake, who really likes spam, other than those that gain revenue from them!? NO ONE! I’m getting fed up with deleting comment spam daily, so today I’ve implemented a solution in the form of a WordPress plug-in to rid my blog of this problem. The plug-in is called Spam-Karma, and is written by Dr. Dave. So far it seems to be working quite well, and I will have my eyes fixed on what it does and how well it works. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

And to all you spammers:

May you all die a slow and painful death, and roast on an open fire for all eternity. (reference)

Ah well, it was about due time I started writing on this site again. Haven’t uttered a word in nearly three months, which is quite odd because I’ve had heaps to say, I just haven’t been able to figure out how to say it. Which is a odd, given the fact that I can be quite outspoken from time to time. As a gesture to me starting up again, I’ve gone over to using a new site layout, courtesy of Yusop.net. I think the layout is really nice, and is a design I really fell comfortable with. So please, if you have comments please share them with me.

My situation in life has improved somewhat, for those of you that remember my lung collapse last August, it has stabilized to the extent that it is back to normal operation which I’m thankful for. I’m still per definition unemployed, working the odd shift here and there at my old employer. Currently, I’m awaiting answers from two applications I’ve sent in. And the jobs could not be more different. One is for the Epcot center at the Walt Disney World Resort and the other is for a large Norwegian consumer electrics store. So it’s either back to waiting tables, working in a restaurant or doing maintenance work on computers. Either works for me, but one involves moving to another continent. Which means I’ll be trying to work abroad for the second time, and if it goes through, hopefully with better experience than with me little “joy ride” to Spain last year for those of you that remember that.

I hope that you will stay tuned and return here once in a while to read my rantings, and that you like my new theme. The rantings of a confused computer nerd is back! :) (PS: For those of you wondering if that picture is of my behind, I have to dissapoint you! :P)

Woohoo!

Site is now live, finally, I’ve been saying for months and months now that I was gonna get this site live, but you all know me. I can at times be extremely lazy. But I thought it was about time, finally got some details with my host sorted out and since it’s my birthday in two days time I kinda consider it to be my own birthday present.