If you are guilty of having one password for all of your on-line accounts you might want to reconsider your actions..

I’ve just written a full review of an excellent on-line resource for managing your passwords, which makes it easy to:

1. Ensure you never misplace a password
2. Help you use proper, difficult to guess, and different passwords on each of your on-line accounts

You can read the post over on the Pixelapes web design blog

In an effort to slightly improve the look of my RSS reader of choice, Google Reader, I had a look at the “Stylish” extension for Firefox.

Stylish allows you to add a “user style” to a website so that it changes the colour, layout, and other items that affect the look of the site. In addition Stylish goes beyond that to allow modifications to the look of Firefox itself. Think of it as a Firefox extension that is instantly applied or removed. It’s a really nice little plugin and I can see it being something I’ll dabble with on a regular basis, especially due to the instant results (instead of having to restart Firefox).

There are two ways of changing the look of things.

1. You can go into the add-on settings (or click the Stylish icon in your status bar) and start writing your own styles for things, or
2. You can visit UserStyles.org and browse through a wide selection of styles for various popular sites.

So, after some digging around for Google Reader styles I found one or two possibilities that might make it look nicer, although I only ended up using one of them which increases the font size and justifies the text – you can load it up by going here: http://userstyles.org/styles/1459

Writing your own?

So what, pray tell, does writing your own user style entail.. well, at the very least you’d want to have knowledge of HTML and CSS and it would be good to have a couple of handy tools about for analysing the site you want to affect.

If the site in question is well coded, there’s pretty much no end to the changes you can make – however, be warned (before you go spending weeks on a new style), there is always the potential that the site you’re restyling could decide to rework their outputted HTML, and the smallest change of an ID or a class could completely ruin your special style.

Still, a lot of sites retain their HTML output for a long time, adding small changes which could be easy to tweak, and certainly it can be fun to change the look of elements on a website – especially things that have been bugging you for a long time.

With this in mind I instantly had a look at changing the look of Jaiku, which has an awful lot of a particularly suspect green in use. Once I worked out the correct format of my first user style it was just a matter of settling into a familiar land of CSS and making some changes. After about 45 minutes of messing around I had the basis of a new user style for Jaiku, and whilst it’s a little rough around the edges (I focused on altering the main page style) it’s pretty usable (I hope..).

Here’s a before and after shot.

It’s imaginatively titled “No Jaiku Green” and you can get it over here: http://userstyles.org/styles/7584

Well I’ve just quickly added in (with little configuration) a photo gallery. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to work it in the future, but one way or another it’s always going to link to my picasa web albums account.

You can check them out in this site over on the photos page, and it’s all thanks to the workings of an excellent little WordPress plugin called “kPicasa Gallery“.

Guillaume Hébert has created a very smart little plugin which makes putting a gallery on your site really really simple. At some point I’ll probably rejig the configuration a little bit, but with nice lightbox implementation, it’s a definite keeper. Here’s hoping he develops the plugin more and more.

I’d love to see album selection (or exclusion options), support for multiple Picasa Accounts, private album selection (might not be so simple without some for of authentication), as well as templating options and turning on/off in-built style.

There’s some hint of coming updates and changes over on Guillaume’s blog, and it sounds like it’s going to mature very nicely indeed. I’ve volunteered my services for helping get kPicasa out of tables!

So, it turns out I’m a bad uncle. This weekend was my only nephew’s 4th birthday and there was a party for him down in Wexford where my brother and sister-in-law live.

The aim was to make the drive down from Longford on the day and get down there for about 3 O’Clock. To do that I would have needed to leave at about 10am though, as I would have needed to stop into Dublin to collect Gaia from Clontarf. Foolishly I didn’t get to sleep till about 4am on Saturday morning, and by the time I got up and sorted my shit out it was already about 1.30pm.

So I wussed out and missed calling over to see them. If you ever come across this post Robert. I’m sorry. Bad Uncle No.1

(Of course, his other uncle, Andrew wasn’t their either, but his excuse of being in Thailand, or India, or China, wherever he is, was much better than mine..)

What’s the glorious plan then? I have a few options for how I’m going to approach this.

1. This becomes just a general place for posting ramblings, interesting links, etc
2. This becomes a blog and a photoblog.
3. This becomes just a photoblog.

One way or another I’m definitely feeling quite good about working off my own domain name over using one of the other blogging platforms out there. I was using Vox for quite a long time, posting over 200 posts since November 10th 2006 after I got bored posting to blogspot. Blogspot was an aborted attempt at writing about interesting music related topics. I quickly realised that it’s a lot of work, and you really need to have a schedule for posting and writing reviews of albums is not something to be laughed at.

I think working off a personal blog will be much more suited to me. I think judging from my attempt to run a music blog (an utter failure), I should take that as a good sign that option 3 above is a bad idea. It’s something I’d like to do, but it’s all too likely to fall into disuse as I find myself lacking time to update it regularly.

Overall I think option 2 above is the most likely result. However the nice thing is that I can do so much more, thanks to my preferred platform of choice – WordPress. If I feel like writing music reviews, well, I can just create a “Reviews” category and give it its own space on the blog. I think it’s much more likely that I’ll post the occassional music review here, instead of feeling pressured into writing a new review every week as was the case with blogspot. Also I must say that both the templating system and the backend of blogspot are a bit of a nightmare. I don’t recommend it as a blogging platform.

Right, well that’s enough of that. It’s already 9.40 and I have some work to do. Keep an eye on here

PS. I have temporarily just grabbed a WordPress theme from Barley Hut, which is quite nice, but I’ll probably end up working on my own theme as a bit of a personal project.

So I'm thinking about moving my personal blog to my own domain, alex.leonard.ie, for no major reason but it feels like it's the right thing to do.

I've had a few people mention the fact that they have to join vox to comment here, and I don't want to think that I'm excluding anyone

Also, I have that domain name sitting their idle and it feels like a waste.

So I went looking for a method of exporting my blog posts from Vox and lo and behold one doesn't exist. It's a bit of a shame – I didn't realise my posts would be locked in here, so I'm faced with two options.

1. Wait until the Vox team create an export function.
2. Go through every post on this blog manually, copying and pasting it over to my own domain.

Neither option is ideal really, as I don't know when option 1 might happen, and option 2, well, copying and pasting over 200 blog posts might take a while..

Any suggestions anyone? I'd be planning on keeping this vox account so that I can comment on my neighbours vox's, but other than that I think I'd be doing everything else over on my own domain, and would love to see some people from vox drop a comment in on occassion!

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Well, at the moment I’m not really sure. My initial thought was to start a photoblog on here. However I haven’t found anything particularly appealing from a backend point of view (at least one that ties in nicely with wordpress). So for the time being I’m playing around with a few ideas.

My ideal situation would be to retain wordpress, import all my Vox blog posts, and include a photoblog at the same time. I would then have to work out a nice friendly templating system. Either having the main page displaying a large photo, with some form of top level nav to the text blog, or the other way around, or some marvelous middle ground which would probably require an awful lot of customisation…

Something which I could probably do without for the time being (work’s pretty hectic at the moment).

Came across this today here: http://trashpile.net/upload/white%20whale.png

I’ve tried to find out where it came from originally but can’t seem to find any reference to its creator. Entertaining though

What do you love about where you live?
Submitted by Emu with a Clue.

I love the fact that I'm in the middle of nowhere. Very peaceful and quiet. Lots of space, and cheap!

Here's a photo taken from the back of our house nearing dusk. All we have to see is a lot of fields, which is nice.

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This had me laughing uncontrollably. Brilliant stuff..

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