If you havn’t guessed it yet, this was introduced to raise revenue and increase popularity and downloads for Wordpress. Eventually wordpress will have ads on it’s free hosted blogs and at a small fee you can have a full hosted Wordpress blog. This is done in association I believe with Textdrive which is managed by the guys who brought you Textpattern

The dashboard

The dashboard looks different to the normal dashboard for the latest version of Wordpress… its a blueish colour and has the following on it, Quick links to help you change your blog title, description, password and profile… Top 5 Wordpress blogs today and the Fastest growing blogs on Wordpress today… – I guess that’s the insentive to make you keep on blogging.

Writing a blog

It looks very similar to the normal wordpress but there is removed features and layout has been reorganised there is now two columns and on the right you have discussion tab, password protect, categories, post status, post timestamp and post author. You have to go to advanced post settings to upload images, there doesn’t seem to be a total image upload limit though.

Writing a page

Same system as above also to mention and improved UI on the Post editor with highlighted bold and italic which kind of looks like the VB Forum advanced post form.
Custom fields can be added to post blogs and pages.

Managment

The managment page tabs are a bit different they include

1. Posts
2. Pages
3. Categories
4. Comments
5. Awaiting Moderation
6. Invite – an invite system similar to Gmail.
7. Referers

Note also that there is the removed file manager and files cannot be modified I guess this is so that advertisements can just be cleanly added into themes and removed like a piece of cake.

Links

Links allow you do the same with the standard Wordpress system I am running normally Wordpress 1.5.2 and I do not believe there is this feature – Import links. So I believe this is a new feature – if I’m wrong add a quick remark

It allows you to go to upload or link an OPML file and select where to import the links to – by categories which can be edited and deleted like the usual Wordpress.

Presentation

Because Wordpress wants to be able to change and add to your blog, fix up ads and make sure you don’t abuse the service this means that they don’t allow you to modify themes to the extent you would only certain themes have the ability to be modified limitly like Font size colour etc. The themes available for Wordpress.com Blogs are:

1. Kubrick 1
2. Almost Spring 1.1
3. beloved Blix 0.9.2
4. Connections 1.0
5. Green Marinée 1.0
6. Ocadia 1.1
7. Pool 1.0.7
8. Wordpress Classic 1.5

Profile

Editing your profile is simeple, the fields available are:

• Username, First Last Nick, publically visble name
• About your self, shown on the front page.
• Contact info; Some IM details – AIM, Yahoo, Jabber/Google but no MSN - I wonder why…
• and Password updates

Options

Sadly they don’t allow you to specify how many articles to include in RSS and ATOMs only include except, users prioritys, ban users, Permalink options. The only options available to is to use Wordpress’ new RichText editor or the standard.

The service is not fast but is reasonable. If you wish to join the hype of Wordpress you can join Wordpress mailing list at wordpress.com or get one off some one, eventually it be like Gmail everybody who wanted one Got one.

Here is your chance to win a wordpress Invite

Ok all you have to do is either, pay me :p, or you could request it by the end of this month October To request it I have set up a new form at *http://fabio.ugtech.net/wordpress*

The results will be drawn on November the 1st along with the new site Reboot. Good luck.

In order for me to keep this site running, please every now and then click on an ad to help me keep the site under costs. Also if you have a talkr account you can subscribe to my site under your feeds at Talkr’s website look under FabioDRN, I have also been listed in a couple new search engines emerging around the net and have joined the Atom List.

Comments Form has been fixed up, I finally got the time to do it, I now keep a log of your IP address email and name, if you do not provide a Full name – filters with at least two words, a valid email address a message greater then 2 Characters, and have a IP address which is not dodgy or listed at spamhaust.org – off the top of my head. then your email will go through other wise nothing will happen and I wont recieve your email. If you have any problems email me at my normal email: derango {} gmail {} com

Also If you really wish to help the site allot purchase a domain name or some hosting for your self via me at HostingBay all proceeds go to the running of the site and nothing to me.

Try it.
Google
Blogger

So Hows The Developing Going?
Well unlike the usual Fabio DRN, the sites main page is going to be seperated from what is it today. Things are going to get reorganised right from the Permalinks to the comment form.
So far the layout has just been redone 3-times and eventually I have everything done including style switches and event style sheets – Christmas and New Years etc.

I am thinking hard about disconnecting the blog completely from my site, after all this site is not a blog…

Articles will come back soon.

Click Here to Suggest or Choose a Domain For Me
http://fabiodrn.com
http://fabiodrn.net
http://fablog.com
http://fabd.com
http://derango.net

I’m choosing between
fablog.com and fabiodrn.com
Help Me!!

That means, backup Feeds (RSS and Atom, I don’t think any body but me uses them) and double of everything, the new one should look much better easier to see when updates are around etc. New features will be added including a calendars, style sheet changer, better comment form, layout handled by a better plugin – low plugin, negative and positive comments, gravatars (finally), blog links will display up to 5 on the page, Random to keep it fair, be use of Javascript more, Accesibility page and much more, better search engine (custom coded by mwah). Still looking into having polls. Oh yeah its XHTML 1.1 Strict, seperate CSS so it will load faster, possibly Low-Fi and Hi-Fi version of the page.

Much better archive system to be installed, and the option of using the crappy one I have Javascript, RSS Live Search etc.

Remember to close your variables with a semicolon. Declatartions like statements, end with a semicolon and ca be split over several lines with each vfariable in the declaration separated by a comma. To declare multiple Variables in javascript try this:
<script type = "text/javascript">
<!--
var super, slick, and, lots, of, diff, names;
// -->
<script />
</script>

You can learn more about this by clicking here or here

For this we are going to be using a XHTML Strict Doc Type

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="UTF-8" />
<title>Fabio DRN tutorial on Prompt and Alert Boxes</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var username //username is a variable set by the user
// this will make username variable equal to whatever the window prompt box input value
username = window.prompt("Please type in your name, "")
// try this
// username = window.prompt("Please type in your name, "and this will equal the default field so it will say something")
// javascript will then write it in, it works top to bottom sequentially
document.writein("<h1>" + username + " welcome to FabioDRN< /h1>"
// -->
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

The initial use of the internet is to communicate. Communication can mean anything from sharing your files to chatting to your buddy on an IM application. Websites are like a document online, with hyperlinks and have transformed to be visually appealing. Even though we have added fancy text, text with shadows, and frogs which talk, the initial purpose of the webpage has not changed.

When you start your website there is many questions to ask your self like the title of the site, but the most important question is; ‘What is your website about?’, and ‘What is its purpose?’

I am going to do this with this website so you can see how planning works. This website is about Website Development and technologies. Its purpose is to educate and deliver content to the user about this. The key words – again this is debatable but for this paragraph – are deliver and content. Other sites may want to deliver another type of format of information, such as music, PDFs, applications and what ever else exists on the internet. Since our main priority is to deliver this content, delaying it is just contradicting the sites purpose.

The problems…

Many people create Splash pages with out putting a skip introduction link, which makes it impossible to get the content with out waiting. Or if they do put a link to skip the introduction, they incorporate it in their presentation which is usually a third-party plug-in, or Active-X control which many users (including me) disable it because it wastes to much – bandwidth (mine and theirs), time, processing power, security and space – so if some one doesn’t have flash enabled what are they going to see, a blank page with a Download Plug-in message in the middle.

I intentionally come late to movies at cinemas to miss opening titles and all the crap. Imagine a user coming back to your website again and again, and having to click skip all the time.
Haven’t I ever heard of the cookie?
You’re probably wondering “but you can prevent users from seeing the same message over and over by using a cookie?” The con’s is to this;

• most some of the user’s browsers reject cookies ^a
• anti-spy ware software deletes cookies
• cookies expire –there’s ways out of this.

So no matter what you cannot cover the whole community of users, because not all users have cookies, have them enabled or keep them.

Imagine going to Google to search and you had to go through a presentation of what Google is, or its new features. There are better ways to illustrate content with out having a splash screen. Remember your initial purpose of your site.

Not convinced?

Use cookies to redirect users after they have seen the presentation once, make sure the skip intro link always visible. If you are using flash, put the non-html page first and then use flash to redirect the user on the first frame. The purpose of this is so that you do not need to use a Client Side Script to check if the user has Flash, flash will redirect the user to your full flash object/page/movie/splash and if there is no flash then it cannot redirect, and you do need to put of search engines and other users because they be at the feet of the content.

I spent ages or allot of money to get this intro done… I don’t want to get rid of it

I Agree/Disagree

If you need users to agree to content for what ever reason it is, you can get around this with disclaimers which are still visible to the user. If your site needs to have an I agree or Disagree chances are its not going to help you at all in court, and if you’re providing that sort of content you are probably using the internet for all the wrong reasons. Another alternative to this is making the page per membership so the user agrees once they log-in, the agreement is agreed through a contract which they accepted when they joined your site.

More Incorrect uses of the Splash Page

Your opinions on this are appreciated comment below – even comment if you think their good I would like to know why.

Other
^a I said this because when you are using Internet Explorer, which allot of users use because of x reasons, it blocks cookies with its ‘Privacy Report’ this site you may of noticed picks up cookies for one of the external stats programs

<title><script type="text/javascript">
document.write("Printing JavaScript Titles Using
JavaScript"); </script></title>

document.write(' '); var MYHAWEMEA_LANG=""; var ...
document.write(''); else document.write(''); function
showpage(strpage) {
window.open(myhaeurl ...
else if(MYHAWEMEA_SHOWFAQLINK == "PM"){ document.write(' ...

Use server side scripting like PHP do to the same thing
You Could Do the same thing with this code.

echo('<head>' '<title>Printing JavaScript Titles Using
JavaScript</title>');
</head>

The code is much smaller and the source code isn’t made available for the user because it’s generated by the server.

The same problems go for meta elements. You can find many sites which come up by search engines with this problem. Though now some search engines such as Google have advanced they still do not generate everything for their own reasons.

Alternative using JavaScript

document.write("<title>Printing JavaScript Titles Using JavaScript
</title>");

Why use this Because the search engine can still get information out of the document.
The Previous Way
The SearchBot May See All the Scripting
...<title><script type="text/javascript">document.write('This Is What The Search Engine Sees')</script></title>...
Alternative Method
The SearchBot Will Just Pull Out Whats Between The Title Tags
...<script type="text/javascript">document.write('<title>'This Is What The Search Engine Sees</title>')</script>...
At least using the alternative method your site is better exposed to more primative search bots.

Some Help Before We Start

An Expansion On Comments

<!--
your script
// -->

Since we are on the subject of Good Programming practicies here are some more

Good Programming Practicies

• Use the semi-column to separate each code statement
• Use external JavaScript files when appropriate
• Strings in JavaScript can be enclosed with in either a single quotation mark or a double quotation mark. Usually double qoutation mark seems more popular.
• I usually leave JavaScript indented in the HTML file and leave a space between the rest of the document’s code to make the code more legible. A tag coloured editor also makes life allot easier. Suggest some editors

JScript or JavaScript

There is some minor differences between JScript and Javascript, Microsoft developed their own version of JavaScript which they called JScript. Back in the days JavaScript was developed by Netscape. Times have changed and there is Standards out for JavaScript both JScript and JavaScript comply with these standards which are set by the EMCA

What does the EMCA do?¹
They standardize:

• the syntax and semantics of the general purpose, cross platform, vendor-neutral scripting language ECMAScript
• ECMAScript² for XML
• the programming language C# ( C “sharp”)
• the programming language Eiffel
• a Common Language Infrastructure (CLI)
• a CLI binding for C++

¹ Taken from the EMCA Website
² EMCAScript is another name for JavaScript and JScript, or apparently by the EMCA it is called ECMA Script.
For More information on the EMCA visit their website

Some Links

All JavaScript Articles on this site
EMCA
Articles Prior To this
Basics on IF and ELSE statements in Javascript
Document Write & Basic Javascript
Why External JavaScript Files

Remember all those Zeros and Ones?

All computers directly use there own Machine Language. Machine Language is the computers native language and is defined by its hardware. Machine languages ultimately are just zeros and ones, which is just off and on’s (0 being off -false, and 1 being on -true) Think of a computer that started like this, which just a basic If Statement, 0 and 1. If the computer is on it is one, if it is off it is 0, then the computers go into other statements, until after years and decades if not more one day, they become so complex there is so many 0’s and 1’s. Each computers native language, is unique depending on the hardware of its self – I’ll elaborate on this, each computer will have different hardware (yes the physical stuff) thus there native code will be defined off this and will always be different.

There are basically three different types of programming languages. They are:

1. Machine languages (above)
2. Assembly languages (next)
3. High-level languages (lastly)

You could imagine all those zeros and ones would be come annoying for anybody to translate into something logical so as computers became more popular, programmers evolved (just like the cavemen) instead of programmers using the computers machine-language, they started using native language. Native or natural language is to represent elementary operations of a computer. Simply, another way of thinking of it, the word plus is just a short cut for the binary of +. It was created so we could see the code easier and speed up the process of computers.

What is assembly programming?
Assembly programming is a group of those “shortcuts” as I mentioned above in a bit more detail, each of these shortcuts hold the machine language code. So computer programmers see words, but now you are wondering how does the computer know what these words are? Well this would require some sore of translator wouldn’t it?

Assemblers
Assemblers are translating programs for assembly languages. As I also mentioned above, how could a computer understand what the program is talking about if it’s programmed with shortcuts, the shortcuts are translated into those zero’s and one’s we talked about (binary code or machine language)

With this great invention of Assembly, computer languages took a greatly less time to program in, and computer programmers where on a rise. Because computers where getting better, programmers wanted more – but because they where limited to so many statements because assembly was so primitive. They started to group statements together, and started to create high-level programs. All high-level programs seamlessly get translated either directly or indirectly through assemblers to binary.

As high-level language increased very fast the use of indirect translating took a considerable amount of computer processing time, in order to fix this, direct Interpreter programs were developed to execute high-level programs directly with out the need to compile them into machine language.
Depending on your OS, or interpreter, some interpreting programs take longer to process then the other; the newer developed programming languages for different OS some times use better and more modern methods from the start to convert code into binary.

This is why Mac’s are better^a
Since Mac where always the same, there OS is built around their software, it hardly changes so they can get the parts which help the computer run more efficiently, they save of case and if statements because all outcomes are more availably known then in generically produced computers – the generic PC aka IBM. The OS which is all created by the same person then can interpret the code better because they know the most efficient ways to code, and there you have it, where everything is run strictly, and coordinated by one it can go through twice as many processes then everybody else’s one. There are problems with a Mac, but I’m not going to start a fight on it.

End Notes: ^a Open to debate, not on my site don’t bother.

History

When programming was still shinny new, back in the early 70’s and 60’s, software companies found it hard to create software efficiently. They had trouble meeting deadlines and were always over budget. The problems that they encounter was that one or more programs still always run similarly, and instead of reusing components each program created their own component which was more time consuming.

The solution Objects.

What are objects?

Objects is reusable components of code, which mimic functions in real world or that other programs do. For example; date and time.

Why use this?
Imagine coding every scroll bar, button your self in code, and imagine coding it in assembly. Can you see how this could have problems, because not everybody would be at the same level as the other person and they wouldn’t see the bugs and bad out comes as the other languages had. The solution to this is to reuse components or objects; it helps the user have a friendlier user interface which is also known as the GUI - Graphical User Interface.

Programming languages like C++ and Visual Basic are heavily Object Orientated. Companies create classes which are reusable libraries of objects and components. Some companies who do this are Microsoft – with their developer network, and Microsoft Foundation Classes. Microsoft’s .net Framework class library, as well as Java and C++’s Class Libraries.

Previously programming energy, time, resources and allot of money was mostly in just the original object development. When objects are created they are usually tweaked and remade to be the most efficient and are mainly always better than anything coded by an individual. These libraries are all available, on the internet at no charge to you.