Greetings and salutations. I’ve been longing to redesign ye olde Trotz.com for a few months now, and found it so very simple to quickly install WordPress 2.0, pick a nice theme, and add a handful of enhancements during my lunch hour. I’m very pleased with the result – much cleaner, hopefully eaiser to use (note the font size control at the top of the right column). Shout-outs to Jerik One (developer of the Lush theme), PhotoMatt (creator of the Sidebar Widgets architecture), and the creators of all these fine widgets: Weather widget & Plugin, the FlickrRSS widget, Last.fm Covers, XboxLive Gamercard, Netflix widget and plugin, the Category Cloud widget. Please take advantage of the comments feature to tell me what you think!
Update: I’m aware of some problems with the navbar appearing in Internet Destroyer Explorer. I’ll work on this after our evening out tonight – if the margaritas don’t do too strong a number on me.
Microsoft has been awarded a patent they applied for in 2000 to extend the functionality of cookies and web beacons. Trouble is, I really can’t discern where the originality in this concept lies – thousands of web sites do this every day. Ars Technica (quote below) suggests the focus may be on the addition of an API to these ‘permanent cookies’ – of course how permanent can any file be on any computer device for a savvy user?
Provide developers with an Application Program Interface (API) which can be called from languages such as JavaScript, ASP, and VBScript. The permanent cookie can contain four data types consisting of bits, counters, dates, and strings. In the patent description, Microsoft also notes that the cookie is flexible enough to allow for new data types in the future.
M-Dollar: Microsoft patents the super cookie
The patent itself is lengthy and obtuse, but I wonder what’s really ‘new’ in here. The abstract suggests that it’s the application of the cookie info to what content a user is presented on subsequent visits; I believe that’s been done in many forms by many web sites using cookies and databases in the past.
technorati tags: microsoft, cookies, patent
Photos, musings and miscellany – New and Improved!