My parents have the cutest dog ever. Bold assertion, but its the truth. The dog, Leo, has black fur so soft that girls can’t stop petting him — and he loves it. When he wakes in the morning he groans like an old man, rolls over and literally tries to rub the sleep out of his eyes while he awaits his tummy being rubbed. If he wants attention, he will come right up to you and put his head on your lap and stare with soul melting eyes until you give in to his demands. He prefers ice cubes from a scotch glass and will knock the glass to ask for some.

Imagine going through life with the ability to make everyone you see happy instantly, Leo posses this gift. The only thing that is not perfect about him is that he gets a little worried when people leave. He likes companionship so when my parents leave their house the dog will sometimes have a lot of nervous energy.

Recently, while my parents were out, he started to chew on a book they had purchased. When they got home, this is how they found the book: » Read the rest of the entry..

Paul of 2pt3.com just released his custom icon set, twotone. It’s 100% free for any use, comes with every icon in both PSD and GIF format, and also includes one large PSD file so you can manipulate them all as you see fit. Its a great package!

Paul is also a designer at twothirty.com — “we design websites, applications & identities.”

what’s the catch?
there isn’t one. no licensing, no legal, just do whatever you want them. and if you want, post a link the comments if you do use them on a public site, so i can see where they’re being used and how.

Subscribe to MaxPower: keep up to date about free icons

Also view the compendium listing of all free icons currently catalogued for use.

» Read the rest of the entry..

Using Owen’s fantastic WordPress plugin antileech, I have successfully taken control over new posts appearing on a splog intent on copying them. Instead of getting actual post content, the splog gets a message written by me. Right now that message advocates gambling and buying firearms, two things expressly forbidden by the Adsense TOS (read Fight dirty by entrapping splogs using antiLeech).

If you could publish any message you wanted on a splog that was stealing your content, what would it be?

Rules:

• The splog removes all markup — no IMG’s and no links.
• There is a 140 word limit. The splog doesn’t like to post long entries and truncates after about 140 characters.
• The splog makes new categories based on the categories that the post came from. For example, if I put this post in a category on my blog called ‘eat shit and die’, the splog will make a new category called ‘eat shit and die’ and put whatever message you would like in the post content.
• Like categories, the splog accepts tags and creates new ones as they come in.
• The splog takes the real post title, regardless of fake content.
• The splog takes the real author name (at the time of posting) and links it to the original post.

The overall goal should be to get the splog’s adsense account yanked for violation of terms (see the bulleted list 1/3 down for some ideas on what constitutes a violation in Google’s eyes). Secondary goals are possible as well, one example would be to get the splog booted from their webhost (dreamhost). However, I feel it is important to first make sure that the revenue stream dies. If something else happens along the way, great.

Anyone care to share their splogging revenge fantasy?

If you’ve ever tried to use the popular image manager plugin or the digital fingerprint plugin at the same time as the immensely popular Adsense Deluxe plugin then you’ll have probably run across a perplexing problem: some buttons won’t show up in the post and page editor. Seemingly, Adsense Deluxe doesn’t play nice with the ButtonSnap Class Library created by Owen Winkler. ButtonSnap makes it relatively easy for plugin authors to insert customized buttons into the WordPress post and page editor regardless of the users editor preference (WYSIWYG vs rich editor). For an example of how this works see the Sawchuk Buttons plugin and the corresponding Tutorial on how to write your own button functions using ButtonSnap.

With hundreds of plugin writers and authors contributing to the WordPress community there is bound to be some conflicts between plugins. The method that the Adsense Deluxe plugin uses to create it’s button in the WordPress post and page editor stops any plugin which uses the ButtonSnap class library from producing it’s own button in the editor. The two just don’t work together.

In order to get around this, I suggest a simple workaround to the Adsense Deluxe plugin until a more suitable solution can be found: disable the part of Adsense deluxe plugin that produces the button in the post editor. Its easy: » Read the rest of the entry..

When I created the Sawchuk scheme for K2, I wanted a clean minimal theme that emphasized the content that I wrote. I wasn’t concerned with bells and whistles, I just wanted people to easily be able to read this website. WebDesignFromScratch has some great tips for emphasizing readability in webdesign. Those tips combined with a little common sense and style created the current look of Sawchuk.

However, the big problem with having different text styles available for use when writing posts is that you have to manually type out the class designations. For example, WordPress offers a blockquote button which theme authors can style using CSS. Sawchuk employs three different styles of blockquote each with their own background colour. In order to use these three different styles, the full class must be typed out like so: <blockquote class=”red”> Some text </blockquote>. The blockquote button alone isn’t enough to define the style (class=”red”) of the blockquote wanted.

This is where Owen’s ButtonSnap Class Library comes in. Using it, buttons can be added to the post editing screen for any class / span / element that a theme author / designer can imagine. Here is how its done: » Read the rest of the entry..

WordPress 2.0.5 is here. The latest version’s changes are discussed here, and I’ll put a link to the unofficial dif upgrade when I find it here. Congratulations to the WordPress team.

Thank Mark Jaquith for providing only the changed files for those of us going form 2.0.4 to 2.0.5.

I created a custom search engine using Google Co-op for helping me with my (various) WordPress problems and thought that maybe others would be interested as well. Right now it only index’s 3 websites: the official WordPress Codex and support forums, and the WP-Hackers email list archives. I find that the vast majority of my queries come from those sites, so this search makes a lot of sense.

Feel free to let me know if there are other sites to add.

I try to keep maxpower pretty cruft free — no banners, no flashing hit the monkey games, popups or popunders. As a websurfer, I hate those types of advertising and as website owner I would never employ them. In order to keep the site afloat and pay for itself I seek out web sponsors that would be interested in employing text ads here on MaxPower.

I feel that any website I advertise or endorse on MaxPower should have some utility (aka be useful). COLOURLovers meets this utility criteria and I am pleased to be able to help promote it and I am genuinely a fan.

//// COLOURlovers™ is a project focused on providing its audience with colour (color) inspiration & information. it’s purpose is to allow creative individuals to share colours & palettes they love as well as submit news and comments for others to read. the COLOURlovers community is regularly updated with current color trends & news articles along with interviews with top creative professionals.

If you are a theme designer or web developer, or want to paint a room in your house I can think of no better place to start dreaming than at the top Colour palette’s section of the website where various colour palette’s created by users are on display and ranked. A few schemes I wouldn’t be caught dead with, but the overwhelming majority are beautiful. Its a great place to start your next CSS reboot.

Thanks COLOURLovers for providing a valuable service and for helping to keep maxpower cruft free. Here is a screen grab: » Read the rest of the entry..