Brand New Design

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If you are a feed subscriber you might not know. But we’ve just launched the redesigned SuccessCREEations, Inc. website. There are still some bugs to work out yet and now I’m in the same boat that my clients often find themselves, a new website just begging to be filled with content.

Upgrading WordPress

The first thing I did was to bring the back end up to date with the latest version of WordPress. SuccessCREEations, Inc. had long been in that classic situation where, “the cobbler’s kids got no shoes.” There was so much work to do for clients and their sites that our own site was, ahem, a few versions back.

I gotta say that the completely redesigned WordPress 2.5 dashboard is very nice to work with. It is different, for sure, and takes a bit of getting used to.

But it took far less time to adjust than I expected, especially considering that I’ve been using WordPress for going on three years now. In fact, after spending less than a day with the new version I went back to the old version and was already forgetting where things were in the old menus.

The new dashboard design is that much better.

Screen Shots

The most obvious change is of course the new look. For you feed readers, here’s a screen shot of the new design.
I had developed the new SuccessCREEations, Inc. logo a while back with the idea of using it as a starting point for a new look to the site. I pulled the gold in the compass rose points and the blue/purple from the logo and used those colors as the starting point. Read more

Add Functionality to WordPress with Plugins

WordPress is a powerful web publishing platform. That statement almost goes without saying.

Because it is open source there is a tremendous amount of support for the platform freely available out there. And you can really add functionality to your WordPress site by adding plugins.

What Plugins Are

Plugins are simply smaller programs that interact with a bigger program to do something that the original program couldn’t do alone.

The beauty of plugins is that they are modular. They are normally easily activated and deactivated which means that the desired functionality can be turned on and off as desired.

So in theory you can add them, take them away, mix and match without causing problems with the original program.

I say in theory because, as with anything computer related, your mileage may vary if you know what I mean. Sometimes they might produce unexpected and very undesirable results. Those are the fun times.

But I digress. Read more

Defensio Promises Competition for Spam Killing Akismet

Spam is the scourge of the internet. Spawn of Satan. Evil incarnate.

It’s bad stuff.

They say something on the order of 90% of all email sent is in fact spam. Blech!

Spam Defined

For those of you who live under an un-technological rock, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia Spam entry.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

In other words there is little cost and effectively no adverse consequences to spammers so they continue to flood the planet with their electronic waste, and tie up huge swaths of bandwidth and countless man hours dealing with their mess.

And if you were wondering where the term spam originated, apparently some of the early computer geeks were fans of Monty Python and they saw all that junk as overwhelming things the same way the Spam song did in this skit.

Read more