Going on hiatus, not a permanent one though. Need to catch up with RL stuff (I have an extremely busy week next week) and to re-establish my online presence. Hopefully I’ll be back in a month by which time I should’ve made the time to recode this template!

One of my pet peeves at the moment is that whenever I whack Stumble on my StumbleUpon toolbar, I have a ¼ chance of stumbling upon a Ten Ways to Become a Better Blogger guide on some blog about blogging (call me a hypocrite, Azhar), each one possessing pretty much the design.

This annoys me.

Sure, your FeedBurner FeedCount might say you have 7,000 readers but I’m 7,000 times the blogger you’ll ever be.

I don’t mind being given specific pieces of advice, what a good design is, which WordPress plug-ins I should use, providing they’re all valid.

I don’t want to know, though, about the widget which you think is in this week nor which Photoshop filters I should apply on my RSS icon, which you think I should make at least 200px-by-200px and 3D.

You tell me that I should blog about some pyramid scheme which continuously fails to materialise into anything.

I don’t want to hear about how to make a quick buck, sure, tell me how to increase my eCPM but don’t tell me to sign up to affiliate programs which want me to convince folk into buying serviette dispensers! Also, I don’t want to get paid to review them without disclosure.

You’re not the blogging god, neither am I. So stop being a David Shayler!

Tags: blogs, blogging

I wish you a happy 2008! Not a lengthy post but tomorrow (or maybe Wednesday…) I’ll be posting a fairly lengthy review of the 3 Skypephone. Be prepared for posting to resume once again!

Thanks for reading Webby’s World

It’s time for a quick post with some links which I have discovered this week which interested me and will probably also interest you! Many of these links will be for OS X considering my conversion.

1. Scribbles is a seriously cool drawing application for OS X. It’s extremely simple and is by no means a replacement for software like The GIMP or Photoshop but is rather just a nice doodling application to waste your time with. It has an extremely simple, yet feature packed and attractive, 3D interface. Scribbles has nice textured, natural-looking brushes, support for layers (with transparency) and is shareware costing only $20. If you don’t pay $20, it just becomes nagware asking you to buy it for 10 seconds each time you launch it and adds a non-obtrusive watermark to any images you export.
2. MacHeist have a Mac Giving Tree open until sometime tomorrow. Per person you refer to the Giving Tree, you get one free piece of software on Christmas morning!
3. Some Mac developers are providing Christmas reductions.
4. JDarkRoom is a free, multi-platform piece of software which is a good alternative to WriteRoom.
5. CrypTool is a piece of Windows FOSS with many simple and advanced features. The aim of the software is to educate people regarding cryptography and it is very good (it can do things such as automatically solve many Vigenere ciphers!).
6. On a non-tech note, Tony Blair’s converted to Roman Catholicism. I wonder if it will impact in anyway on the Middle Eastern peace process.
7. A youth failed his driving test. (I didn’t say chav!).
8. Azhar pointed me to these funny quotes on insurance claims.
9. Have a Merry Christmas!