Update: In the end, as you may have guessed, I went with neither and installed WordPress.
Joomla and Drupal are widely regarded as the two most popular open source content management systems on the web. In fact, my website, Andrewj.org, runs Drupal. But recently, I’ve been having trouble deciding which one I prefer.
Freeview is the UK’s wonderful, all-singing, all-dancing digital terrestrial television platform. “Digital terrestrial”, for those of you who haven’t a clue, means you receive the TV through a standard telly aerial, and not a satellite dish or via cable. In the USA this is known as “over-the-air” TV.
Freeview is the successor to gigantic heap of fail ITV Digital, which, despite having a monkey in its adverts, didn’t work because nobody wants to pay a subscription fee to anyone for TV unless their name is BSkyB or Virgin Media. It was dreamed up by the so-called “Freeview consortium” which orginally consisted of the omnipresent BBC, the company that wants to own British TV itself, BSkyB, and Crown Castle, which is now part of Arqiva. It was essentially founded so we’d actually have a digital service that wasn’t Sky Digital ’cause that costs too much money.
So, in theory, we’d have a lovely little service for people who don’t want to buy into subscription telly. And, to some extent, we do, even if you don’t like ITV as I regularly do for some reason. All the major TV networks are there, right?
Microsoft and Yahoo! have just announced a major deal which will see the search box itself, which has been powered by “that other search engine”, Google before, will now be powered by Bing. That is to say, Yahoo! Search is dead.
Well, it’s not as exciting as an actual takeover, but it’s more exciting than that anticlimax they not that long ago.
This could actually make for a serious competitor to Google, couldn’t it? Well, not really – the combined market share will be about thirty percent, around half that of Google’s enormous market. Still, being the number two search engine on the block can’t be that bad – particularly for Yahoo!, who’ve been used to it for years.
In my opinion, it’s not going to be terribly exciting, as it is just Microsoft spreading Bing around as much as possible until you can’t stand the sight of it. Nobody was really excited about their Yahoo!/Windows Live Messenger deal, were they?
(How long before Microsoft decides to make their next move, take a deep breath, and ask if they can go further with their relationship?)
In other news, I, and a lot of other people, will still use Google.
Source: BBC News
It’s now possible to post to Twitter whie you’re asleep thanks to the magic of Twuffer.
Described as a “Twitter buffer” it keeps back Twitter posts until a convenient time when it will post them for you.
Now, is it just me, or does that defeat the point of Twitter, which is to tell the world what you’re doing? Sure, you could use it to automatically tweet things you know you’re going to do, but where’s the fun in that? The only real use for it I can see is actually to use it for when you’re sleeping. But that still wouldn’t make for a very interesting read.
Sure, I can see some people using it, but when am I going to need to post something to Twitter at a set time?
If you have a use for it you can check it out at twuffer.com.
If you’re a Radiohead fan you’ll probably know what I’m talking about when I mention the choose what you pay for music system.
If you’re not “in the know” about that, Radiohead originally released their In Rainbows album through the internet, before they dished out the CD to major retailers. They chose to allow users to state what they wanted to pay to download the album from the internet. You can imagine what happened – loads and loads of people chose to pay nothing. After all, the best things in life are free, aren’t they?
Update: This doesn’t currently work with newer versions of iTunes as it appears to redirect all audio through its Program Files folder. You will have to either accept that it’ll scrobble podcasts, or disable scrobbling while you listen to podcasts. For iPods, select iPod from the Last.fm preferences window and tick the Always confirm iPod scrobbles box. You will then have to untick all the podcasts you listened to on your iPod each time Last.fm asks to scrobble it.
Do you use Last.fm to scrobble music you listen to and love, and also listen to podcasts, but don’t want the podcasts to appear on your Last.fm account as they’re not music? You could disable scrobbling when you’re listening to podcasts, but this is a method that will stop them scrobbling once and for all whether you remember to or not.
It seems like Facebook are having a rough time of it. People are being sent messages with bogus links to trojans. The same has happened to Bebo users – people are being sent messages there purportedly from their Friends List containing links to an attack site.
I was sent one of these links on Bebo the other day. What I did automatically was click Help > Report Web Forgery… in Firefox, and today that link no longer works in Firefox. I also reported it to Microsoft using the built in reporter in Internet Explorer, but unfortunately that browser is still vulnerable.
The problem? People on Bebo trust their friends. I mean, YouTube links are fairly ordinary to chuck around and they don’t look twice and see that it isn’t actually youtube.com. And when the poor users who don’t know better are confronted with a dialog box saying that they have a missing ActiveX control, they believe it.
Something’s going to have to be done about this, and unfortunately we’re not going to be able to get end users to do it. We need a solution that doesn’t involve installing any extra software, a solution that involves absolutely no effort.
Is that possible?
Tumblr