What follows is a selected timeline of imagery firsts both photographic and digital. Please suggest any images you feel should be added. Sources are cited as much as possible.

First “Photograph” | 1826

View from the Window at Gras
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took this picture from his workroom in 1826. It represents the world’s earliest-known, permanent photograph from nature.
Source: The First Photograph » Read the rest of the entry..

Updates galore over the weekend. I’m sure there are lots of things broken, mind the code popping out of your page for a bit until the virtual dust settles. Time to start maxpower going again.

Target Adsense is a plugin for WordPress that provides more control over how google_ad_section targeting is employed on your WordPress blog.

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and content that you’d like to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. This plugin helps you to emphasize the content you want by employing Google Ad Section Targeting. You may want to use targeting if you feel the Adsense ads on your pages could be more suited to the content. Ads that are more suited are more likely to get clicked on. It follows that profits may increase from using Ad targeting. For more information about targeting please read how to use Adsense Section Targeting to Maximize Profit.

Features: » Read the rest of the entry..

This post was written to support the ‘Adsense Target‘ WordPress Plugin

Introduction:

This article provides a very brief overview of how contextual advertising works and then illustrates how a webmaster using section targeting can have more control over the advertisements served by Google Adsense. Specific recommendations for bloggers are made on how best to use ad section targeting code to maximize profit. » Read the rest of the entry..

Abstract

33Rockers.com is a website created, written, and developed by Karthik Kastury — or at least that’s what he’d have you believe. His website has risen in the ranks and gained some notoriety since it’s inception due to the quality and insightful articles published online. Turns out that Karthik Kastury has been stealing not only other people’s words, but their blog designs as well.

The following post is written in the spirit of education. By making an example and exposing Karthik Kastury for the plagarising blogger that he is, I hope that others can learn why his actions prove not only unprofitable today, but stupid in the long run due to pagespank as a result of public shaming. I hope other bloggers learn that stealing content and claiming it as your own original work is foolish and possibly detrimental to your future career.

Full Text

Karthik Kastury is a plagiarist. Consider his most recent post, “The Hottest Map Based Mashups” posted on November 2, 2006. Here is a small snippet:

Of late, map mashups, applications based on on-line map services, have gained considerable attention. A map mashup integrates user-data on top of a geographical map pulled from an on-line map service such as Google maps and Yahoo! Maps (http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/). Several such applications are being rolled out daily.

Wow. Pretty good stuff. Unfortunately, its been stolen from an article entitled, “Location-enabled webfeed holds promis,” found at www.m-indya.com. The original author is one J. Murali and he posted his article on October 30th, 2006. Here is a snippet from his article: » Read the rest of the entry..

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..

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?

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..