Kirb’s Musings

Kirby Witmer’s ponderings, ruminations, and meditations of… anything.

I remember when I would get an email everytime I would get a comment on this Blog, and then I would have to approve it, disapprove it, or mark it as spam. I started to get a bunch of spam, and it was a real pain to moderate all the comments. But then I discovered this wonderful plugin called Spam Karma 2. Ahhh… it’s amazing!! 579 Spams eaten and counting… You poor spammers, why do you even try?

Update: The author of this plugin has said he will be no longer developing this plugin. Use Akismet or something else.

heh. Why bother giving a phonebook entry that doesn’t match?

I happened to notice this web clip in Gmail. “tis the season to send spam.” How true.

All kinds of new features and news coming from Google lately. I don’t have time to blog about all of them so I thought I would just briefly touch a few of them.

• Search engines Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are uniting on the sitemap protocol. A sitemap lets you tell a search engine about all the pages on your site, and optionally, other information about those pages. The problem is, I haven’t found the time to sit down and actually create one yet for my sites.
• Google has released Google News in Norway and Sweden.
• You can now search public events in Google Calendar.
• Google Desktop 4.5 has been released, and is now compatible with Microsoft Vista, Office 2007, and Firefox 2. I imagine the Google Desktop team is frantically programming new features, since Vista will include desktop search and a sidebar by default.
• And Google Apps for your Domain now includes a start page. I have created one, and its really cool. I think this will really take off for computer system builders. The only thing I would like to see added yet, is the ability to add adsense to the search results.

And yes.. I didn’t near get all the news.

IE 7.0 crashed on me, but G-mail had autosaved my e-mail. Thanks… Google.

I’m noticing that Skype is now included with Google Pack. Hmm… that’s strange. Isn’t Skype doing what Google Talk wants to do?

Microsoft has released Windows Vista to manufacturing. But you already knew that…

Ahhh…… now I can relax. I think I’ve finally got my websites, blogs, files, and everything else moved to my new hosting provider, Hostmonster. And so far, I’ve been real impressed with those guys. Unlimited domains, unlimited email accounts, 999 gigs of transfer, and 50 GB of hosting space. What more could I want? And in the few times I’ve had to email them, they have responded promptly. I’m impressed. Ohh.. and did I mention it’s only 4.95 $5.95 a month??

I’m noticing that Microsoft is pushing out Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update today on it’s Microsoft Update website. I’ve seen it on a couple of computers now.

Since Google redesigned Reader, I use it all the time. But lately its been soo frustrating slow, even in firefox. Sometimes it times out and gives me errors like the one below. Maybe it’s because I keep adding more feeds, or maybe it’s because more people are using it, I don’t know exactly, but I want more speed.