Shady Goings On

I use the small revenues generated from various ads placed on the site to help pay for the website hosting and other fees, also users might be interested in the services on offer.
There are a lot of banner ad services of there that are suitable for the site and do serve interesting ads, but I don’t want to show them all because it detracts from the content. A better approach is to serve a different ad each time and get the variety in this way, without bombarding my visitors.

So, I’m looking for a plugin to do this for me.
The first candidate is AdRotator which looks like it will do the job without being too heavy-weight.
I’m looking down the WordPress list of Ad plugins for alternatives though.

I’m on a quest to be able to import RSS feeds from other peoples blogs onto mine, this is called syndication and is encouraged in the blogging industry so long as you provide a link back (or have permission).
The idea is that I can syndicate certain posts from other similar blogs, or my own other blogs.

So far I’ve come up with a good candidate: FeedWordPress . It has a good range of features and seem to be fairly active too!
I found it on a list of WordPress syndication plugins but they are mainly for producing feeds from your own blog for others to syndicate or read using a RSS aggregator.

The internet connection has been dropping a lot lately, and I got really fed up with it: it kept loosing the adsl connection, usually when I was in the middle of doing work for my ou course.
So tonight I rushed out and bought a new one. Just like the last one it is an ADSL modem and router combined. This one has some extra features such as wireless (802.11b and 802.11g if you know what that means) and a built-in hub (so now I’ve got an extra socket to plug something else into ), it also has ADSL2+ (whatever that is: I don’t need it) and VPN support.

Setting up the WAG54GS was really easy, anyone could do it if they had a couple of bits of info from their broadband provider. It’s working quite happily now and I’ve got a 14-day money back guarantee from Staples so if it’s not what I want I’ll take it back.

After hunting round for a decent FTP client I finally found this plugin for my favourite browser.

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SSL encryption, file hashing, and much more!

Highly recommended!

On Windows I used uTorrent (really light, never crashed, nice and quick), but it’s not yet available for Linux so I’m on the hunt for a new one.

The Pc did seem to be overheating a bit during DVD encoding, but I’ve not done any of that and it’s been fine since. Maybe the heatsink needs re-seating?

I’m now running on StartCom Linux, this a vaiation of RedHats’ Fedora Core 6 that I was using. I didn’t have any problems with FC6 but I didn’y have the disk handy when I needed it so I thought I’d try SC instead. There’s not much to tell between them.

It’s a bit slow to boot but that’s due to my unusual SATA/IDE setup, I’ll resolve that eventually but I’m in no rush at the moment.