ss >/dev/null » Web

Let me google that for you

Benny Chew — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:30:16 +0000

If you participate in online forums or groups, you would realise that a majority of queries could be answered simply by googling. Colleague sent this site around today which potentially could help those whom are in need of guidance: Let me google that for you

Type in the phrase in the search box.
Hit Google Search.
Copy and paste the link to the person who requires guidance.

For e.g., click here.

Cross street in Google Maps

Benny Chew — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:29:06 +0000

I decided to find out if cross streets (intersections) can be easily searched via Google Maps rather than searching for one street and just scrolling around to find the intersection with the other recently, and realised there was a keyword to do that.

For e.g., typing a very frequently used rendezvous point into Google Maps:

Swanston St at Bourke St VIC 3000

Would give you the intersection of Swanston St and Bourke St (ex-Nike Melbourne). Link to the page here.

Pretty nifty since it’s common place for shop lot locations to be listed as ‘corner X road and Y road’.

via MalekTips

Gmail 2.0

Benny Chew — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:10:56 +0000

An updated version of Gmail was recently rolled out to most users just after IMAP access was released, and I got it pretty early on. However, I somehow got reverted back to the old version a few hours later and never actually figured out why, till now..

Apparently, after I got moved over to the new version, I actually switched my language preference in the settings from English (US) to English (UK). :| I sort of left it as it is since then and finally decided to find out the root cause today (after much cursing at how evil it was for me to be given access to the updated version for just a few hours..).

So if you still seem to be stuck in the old version, try the following (was suggested here):

Click ‘Settings’ in your Gmail window (top right, close to ‘Sign Out’).
In the drop down for ‘Gmail display language’, change it to ‘English (US)’.

Oh well, Gmail is still in beta..

More screenshots of the new version here.

Firefox add-on: Split browser

Benny Chew — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:10:43 +0000

A Firefox extension (add-on) which enables a Firefox window to have multiple tabs tiled to however you like which is useful if you have a widescreen LCD monitor. To read more, click here.

Will It Blend? – iPhone

Benny Chew — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:42:51 +0000

And the iPhone craze continues..

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more blending action, head over here.

myIPneighbors

Benny Chew — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 14:16:26 +0000

myIPneighbors provides a very quick and easy way to find out which other domains are hosted on the same server (IP would be more accurate I guess). If you have nothing better to do or just curious who else is on the same server as you, check it out.

Sharebee.com

Benny Chew — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 13:30:00 +0000

Just a site I came across earlier today which (re)uploads the file you uploaded to multiple file upload sites (Megaupload, zSHARE, Sendspace, RapidShare were the ones used when I tried). Sendspace links weren’t working for me then (apparently being fixed) and Megaupload link only worked after some delay. Link to the site: Sharebee.com

I don’t have much use for it, but if you’re into uploading files for multiple users to download from, this site would definitely cut the amount of time spent uploading to each different service. ;)

A very neat WordPress plugin

Benny Chew — Thu, 17 May 2007 09:40:27 +0000

As stated in the WordPress’s Codex, one of the steps in doing a proper upgrade of WordPress is deactivating all plugins beforehand (and reactivating upon successful upgrade). Since I’m managing a number of WordPress sites, and each WordPress install has a fair bit amount of active plugins, doing this is a considerably arduous task and annoying (especially so since updates/upgrades get released often).

I was googling around for a quick fix for this and found this plugin which works a treat. :)

Now if only that can be added to my shell script which currently automatically grabs the latest.tar.gz and rsyncs all the separate installs to promote further efficiency and laziness..

Remove truncation of feed feature after more tag in WordPress 2.1

Benny Chew — Sat, 12 May 2007 14:27:27 +0000

If you have already upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and have the syndication feeds options set to ‘full text’, you might’ve noticed that the RSS feed for your blog post gets truncated after the use of the tag. This is a change in behaviour as compared to previous version of WordPress (2.0 and below) which would show the whole post in an RSS feed if the feed option was set to full text.

Without going into the debate of full vs. partial feeds (I’m on the full feeds side though ;)), there’s a WordPress plugin which does not require any additional configuration apart from just dropping it into your WordPress’s plugins directory and activating it. Get it from here.

Combating comment spam

Benny Chew — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 11:05:39 +0000

After the major upgrade by my webhost, there was a sudden surge in spam on the blogs on spherebox, with a lot bypassing Akismet’s filtering. Apparently he did not configure the ModSecurity Apache module (which did an excellent job previously) and was too lazy to do so as the new version he had installed had supposedly different configuration settings. :(

Since I got sick of getting the incessant email notifications of spam held in moderation queue, I decided to go looking around for fixes and came across this at WordPress’s Codex which helped cut down the crazy amount of spam that kept going through by heaps. Basically it adds rules to the .htaccess file which will check that any comments being submitted to wp-comments-post.php come from the comments page of the WordPress installation and not directly injected by spam bots.

Note that this did not stop the spam completely, but managed to reduce the volume enough so that Akismet could block it off appropriately.

If you’re encountering the same issue as I did, try it out. The instructions are fairly simple and requires few modifications. :)