Other Stuff Blog

Scott Hanselman included BlogJet in his 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List:

BlogJet - I freaking love this little guy. Works great with DasBlog, supports spellcheck, file upload, makes clean HTML, and includes Music Detection support as well as posting of Audio to your blog.

Thanks, Scott!

Side note: It’s very cold here in Moscow region today… -33 Celsius (it’s about -27 F). Oh…

No, it’s not usual, as you may think (we usually have 0 – minus 20 Celsius on winter).

My car failed to start today… I wish I had this little pony that I saw once from my window:

(And no, seeing pony on the streets of my town is not usual too ).

Nick Bradbury released FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 1 – the new version of the best news aggregator (in my opinion).

I really like the new version! It’s a huge impovement over 1.5. Now we have tree (at first I didn’t like the idea of trees – I liked the original implementation of feed management better, but since now I’m subscribed to lots of feeds, I find it very useful). I also like the updated Surfer style.

Nick, thank you again for great software!

We have new CDs now:

(To add CD to your purchase when ordering, just tick add/remove check box near “Backup CD” item.)

You know what? PayPal doesn’t accept payments from many countries. When you use PayPal’s system to accept credit cards, people from these countries just can’t pay.

For example, I’m in Russia. I can’t pay for, say, Flickr Pro account, since they accept payments via PayPal (even credit cards are processed by them), and PayPal doesn’t accept money from Russia. Or Mint (developer said that it’s not in his plans to accept payments without PayPal).

Now, everyone  (BSA, RIAA) talks that there are tons of pirated software, music and videos in our country. Since I’m a software developer, I know – this is bad, bad. bad. But how the hell we are supposed to pay if you don’t want accept money from us?

I want, I REALLY WANT to buy music from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Can I? No, they don’t accept my money. Same thing with music stores included in Windows Media Player – we have only one such store, which has only Russian pop music that suck.

Think! – Internet, Visa, Mastercard is all about going global. How are you supposed to go global if you restrict people from buying your stuff?

Think again! – there are tons of credit card processors that don’t exclude countries. Use them. Don’t use PayPal. Or use it as an option.

P.S. I accept PayPal. This is for your conveniece. I don’t want to exclude PayPal customers from purchasing my product. But since I can’t accept it directly (remember, I come from “bad” country), I use SWREG to process my PayPal payments.

Check out:

• Mémoires, the easiest Mac diary software.
• Cathodique, standalone YouTube player for Mac.
• BlogJet, blog client for Windows.

Update: PayPal now accepts payments from more countries, so this article is old and not relevant.

I know, Aussies can’t imagine Christmas in winter , but here’s what we have here in Russian village:

I heard that in this year we have the highest snowdrifts in history – 39 centimeters (15.35 inches).

It seems like our children will laugh at us, like we were laughing at people who thought that the Earth was a plain object that laid on elephants. The solar system isn’t what it used to be…

It’s funny that the new planet was called Xena and it’s moon – Gabrielle. Can we then call a few more planets Stan, Kyle, Cartman and (for the dead object) Kenny?

I wish you all the best. Have a happy holiday season!

Darren Rowse wrote today the points he extracted from interview of Performancing with Matt Cutts, Google engineer, where he talks about optimizing blogs for search engines.

The first point was “I wouldn’t bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I’d just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url”.

Great. Now, what if your blog already uses year/month/day in URLs? If you change it, you’ll lose all your permalinks.

I have the solution. Here’s how to switch to example.com/postname.html permalinks AND keep the ability to use old names like example.com/2005/12/13/postname/.

1. Download and open your .htaccess file and remove lines “# WordPress BEGIN” and “# WordPress END” (so that WordPress can’t change your .htaccess file).
2. Add this line: RewriteRule ^(.*).html /index.php?name=$1 [QSA,L] at the end before </IfModule>.
3. Upload .htaccess back to your server.
4. Login to WordPress, click Options > Permalinks.
5. Replace your current Structure with  /%postname%.html
6. Download and open your .htaccess again and remove all the lines starting from “# WordPress BEGIN” to “# WordPress END”.
7. Upload .htaccess back to your server.

Done! Now you can access you posts by entering old permalinks, and new permalinks will be in example.com/postname.html format.