larryni.me.uk

I just finished upgrading my blog through the Automatic Upgrade plugin and only then noticed that I couldn’t ssh or telnet into my webserver. I always do this to set the correct permissions from the cli or there’s stuff that doesn’t work properly after the upgrade.I just went through everything using an FTP app. Please let me know if you come across anything that does not work as it should.

You might have seen my earlier post on how to disable the DiggBar. I just came across a post that explains how the DiggBar works. It really does not play nice. I didn’t realise that all the link credit actually goes to digg.com and not to the site that provides the content!

The fun stops there. Like lin.cr, it does a 200 code. That means the page is actually on Digg itself — they’re making a page with the DiggBar and pulling in your content without permission into a frame. That’s not illegal, but it’s a tactic that died off years ago. It also means that if you use the Digg short URLs, none of the link credit passes to your page. It’s all kept with Digg.

That sucks.

The above quote is from Search Engine Land’s post about link shortening services. They also provide a way to get out of all frames, not just Digg’s. All you need to do is put the following bit of Javascript between the head tags of your pages:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (top.location!= self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}
//-->
</script>

The bar still loads, but then just disappears shortly after.

The new DiggBar really annoys the tits off me – I cannot see which link I’m going to when I’m on Digg’s front page and before I bookmark something I have to remember to close the damn thing or I end up with the short Digg URL bookmarked. Even worse, some morons start submitting the short URLs to other sites like Stumbleupon and I even came across submissions on Reddit. WTF! It’s not like your browser can’t handle long URLs. And if i want to submit a page to another social site then I’ll use a bookmarklet or one of the many submit/share buttons found on most pages.

You can disable it in your Digg profile settings:

• click the My Profile link at the top of Digg’s front page
• click the Settings tab
• click viewing preferences under Options on the right and select Never show DiggBar for external links under Site-wide Preferences
• save the changes.

To automatically get rid of the bar on pages that you come across out in the wild you can use a Greasemonkey script like DiggBar Killer or Anti Diggbar.

Update: check out my follow-up post if you run your own website.

Wordpress 2.5 was released yesterday. I’m just after upgrading and everything went smoothly as far as I can tell. Let me know if you see anything strange.

Technorati Profile

Getting this blog started hasn’t been without its problems. I screwed up the files/folders permissions a few times and messed around with WordPress stuff that I maybe shouldn’t have. But the main headache is my FTP access. It sucks. It sucks big time! And the network support staff at my ISP don’t seem to be able to find anything wrong. I can establish about 1 connection out of 10. I can use ssh and telnet to get into my account without any problems though. And when I finally get a connection then the transfer rates are practically zero. I hope they get it sorted soon.

The good news is that my domain has finally been re-directed to my blog’s webspace. About time that I set it to some use.

I also replaced the header image courtesy of Plastic Jesus and Creative Commons license. Talking about CC, I decided to make the contents of this blog available under a by-nc-sa license. Not that there’s much to license yet

Well, my blog’s up and running. It was actually surprisingly easy to set up once I got the file permissions right. Now off to do some tweaking and customising.