tomroyal.com

Category: geek

  • Some notes on Viaziz.com

    Meet Viaziz. Or rather, http://www.viaziz.com/adtracking/39. How did I get there? Here’s a nice advert that appeared on my Facebook page today. Save money on a Canon camera at www.saveonproducts.net. Click it and, rather than the website listed, you’ll land on the Viaziz page above. Looks interesting. You can’t buy the camera, of course, but you…

  • Stop WordPress Registration Spam

    Since I’m thinking about all things WordPress, I’ve updated my Custom Captcha for WordPress into a proper plugin called Stop Registration Spam. The idea is the same as before: to prevent automated registrations, and the spam that comes with them, by posing a question that will be simple for your visitors to answer, but impossible…

  • How to: Read Flickr API JSON via jQuery

    I always prefer to read API data in XML, but there are times when that becomes problematic – especially due to cross domain access policies. If you’re working on a single app it’s possible to solve that by proxying the XML with a local PHP script, but if you’re working with the browser only –…

  • Block WordPress Registration Spam with a Custom Captcha

    The WordPress platform is a great way to run a blog or website, but it is under constant attack from spammers. Even if you prevent anonymous commenting, require user registration and implement the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin, you might find yourself – as I did – receiving dozens of automated, spammy registrations per day. However they’re getting…

  • Zombie News: ‘Facebook Causes Divorce’ just will not die

    Pic: The Telegraph covers the original press release Back in March 2011 I wrote about a sudden flood of news articles claiming that Facebook was being cited in 20% of US divorce cases. After doing a little digging it transpired that the whole thing had sprung from the continual re-hashing, muddling and alteration of a…

  • Kitten Block – Now for Chrome

    Kitten Block for Firefox now has over 1,000 users and has been verified by Mozilla, but I’ve also had dozens of requests for a version that works with the Chrome browser. So, er, I made one. You can get it here. As with the Firefox version, it’s very simple: no options, just simple kitten-based blocking.…

  • Kittens vs the Daily Mail

    This is what the Daily Mail website now looks like on my computer. Let me explain. It’s hard to avoid the Daily Mail. Even if you’d never choose to buy a copy, links to its website are everywhere (except this post, obviously). Some are easy to spot and avoid, but when one is obfuscated by…