In between, and often alongside, most of my leisurely activities I watch a lot of television and movies. When the season finales of Lost, Heroes and The Sopranos finally came along a serious vacuum hit primetime TV. Generally this is the time of year that I up my Netflix subscription an catch up on old movies - this summer I decided to do something a bit extra as well.
About partway through May I downloaded the internet TV aggregator currently known as Democracy but soon to be renamed Miro. While I won't get into some of the conversations covering the name change I have to say that this program has become a major part of my nightly routine. Democracy / Miro makes downloading internet TV shows easy and rivals iTunes for anyone hunting for video content that's easy to download.
Right now I use Democracy / Miro to nightly to download several of the shows I stream to my XBox360. If you haven't used this great software yet give it a try and let me know what you think.
Picking an email service took me several years. I've used tons of free e-mail services but it wasn't until GMail that I really locked in - sort of. Even now I still maintain a Yahoo! account for tracking special types of messages.
I'm currently a Verizon subscriber, previously n at&t one, but who knows where I'll be in a few years. While my cell phone is currently my primary phone, there are occasions where it's unreliable and I'm not just talking about reception wise - see I forget my phone at work or in the car A LOT! For some time I've been thinking about getting a SkypeIn number to make myself more reachable but I worried about providing too many numbers to my friends.
Enter Grand Central.
Despite still being in beta Grand Central provides an incredible amount of tools for it's users. One of the most powerful utilities that Grand Central offers is it's call forwarding. Once you've setup your free phone number you can set it up to forward to any other numbers you choose. Mine, for example, currently forwards to my cell phone and home phone - I'll be adding my SkypeIn line soon I think.
In the beta version users have the option to set certain forwarding rules based on incoming numbers. Users can also setup special ring tones and messages for their incoming calls. Want your family to get one message? Your friends another? Grand Central makes it happen.
One of the major bonuses that I also consider a major selling factor was the ability to manage your Grand Central account right from your computer. This is great for tracking messages and customizing some of the cooler features that are available.
If you haven't yet be sure to check out Grand Central and let me know what you think.
Last week I started a series of posts concerning WordPress theme design and building a custom theme. After walking through my method of creating a basic blank theme I took a quick break and wanted to check in before starting up the next leg.
Has the first leg of the series been helpful at all?
Below are two screenshots. The first was my mockup for the theme that's part of the "WordPress Theme Design" series, the second is the result of a little work I did tonight.
Between doing the heat, an excessively busy work week I'm a bit overwhelmed tonight so I thought I'd share two screenshots. One of the two shots below is the original concept art for a new theme while the other is one hour worth of coding. Check them out and let me know what you think.
There's still some tweaking to be done but things are coming along nicely.
Last week I found the need to block incoming traffic from a particular site. While the author was kind enough to remove the links to my page when I first discovered the issue I was quick to block the traffic just to be safe.
The following code can be placed in your .htaccess file to block incoming traffic by URL.
RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} FirstSite\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} SecondSite\.co\.uk
RewriteRule .* - [F]
The code above blocks traffic from two separate URLs. [NC, OR] should follow every line after the first but excluding the last in order to block more than one site.
