Archive for the 'General' Category

Find Back-Links for Multiple URLs

Friday, January 14th, 2005

I’ve been using this query format for checking back-links on yahoo and msn:
link:http://v1.magicbeandip.com/ -site:magicbeandip.com
Try it at: MSN Search and Yahoo!
It’s nice because it excludes all pages at Magic Bean Dip that link to http://v1.magicbeandip.com, so all I see are links from other websites. The thing I dislike about this method of finding back-links […]

Nibbles – Multiple Column Hack for WordPress 1.2.2

Wednesday, January 5th, 2005

Nibbles allows multiple columns to appear on the front page of WordPress 1.2.2. Each column contains the most recent posts in the category definition you specify. On Magic Bean Dip, my main column is selected by this line of code: $cat=-7. The minus sign indicates that every post that is not in […]

Unencoded Amazon Web Service data makes XSLT abort

Sunday, December 12th, 2004

I’ll only admit to being slightly masochistic.
When I set out to create my new bookstore, Magic Amazon Beans, I focused on using XSLT to process the XML replies from Amazon. They have an option to send the results of an XSL transform as a reply instead of their normal XML file. You simply […]

My New Bookstore

Friday, December 10th, 2004

Magic Amazon Beans v0.2

I added an Amazon book store to Magic Bean Dip today. It’s still rudimentary, but it works. I wrote my own software and used the new ECS 4.0 data interface supplied by Amazon, with PHP and the Pear libraries to process the data.
This is my abbreviated to do list:

Retry failed […]

We All Have Original Thoughts

Friday, October 8th, 2004

Are you a sheep or a nude llama?
Here is an interesting article at Whitespace on thinking for yourself or a lack there-of. Scrivs also introduces his new book concept “I design in the Nude with Llamas”.
Personally I like to look at Earth as a place where everybody creates their own reality but at the […]

Background Interference and Big Money Tips Logo

Wednesday, September 15th, 2004

Vertical lines in the background behind text will interfere with the natural flow of your eye as you read.
Lines that flow the same direction as the text don’t interrupt the path your eye follows as you read the text.
I was merrily surfing along one day and ran across yet another blog by Scrivs. […]