What makes you happy ?

This domain just stole my content.

Whois:
Domain Name:HOWSHITWORKS.ORG
Created On:23-Apr-2007 05:12:04 UTC
Last Updated On:18-Oct-2007 16:37:37 UTC
Expiration Date:23-Apr-2008 05:12:04 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com, Inc. (R91-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:GODA-030591892
Registrant Name:Developer Hut Inc Developer Hut Inc
Registrant Organization:Developer Hut Inc
Registrant Street1:P.O Box 3743
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Idaho Falls
Registrant State/Province:Idaho
Registrant Postal Code:83403-3743
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.2087579111

Hosted at http://hostingloser.com who have no sitemap, no contact, no aup / tos.
So the loser that steal anyone’s blog content hide away in the State of Idaho.
They have http://www.buyblogcomments.com, they sell ads and have ads on stolen blog content.

Google ‘developer hut inc’.

And the jerk behind this? The man who steals? The man who takes the work of others to make himself money? Jon Waraas. Behold – a thief.

http://www.jonwaraas.com/who-is-jon-waraas/

–

Update 12 Dec.
I find http://growablog.com/ as part of my work. Why do I find it? It’s spamming. Spamming trackbacks.
And guess who it is?

Registrant:
Developer Hut Inc
P.O Box 3743
Idaho Falls, Idaho 83403-3743
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: GROWABLOG.COM
Created on: 02-Jun-07
Expires on: 02-Jun-08
Last Updated on: 18-Oct-07

Administrative Contact:
Developer Hut Inc, Developer Hut Inc developerhut@gmail.com
Developer Hut Inc
P.O Box 3743
Idaho Falls, Idaho 83403-3743
United States
2087579111 Fax –

It’s that thief Jon Warass again. He is stealing from every blog he can scrape.
Oh yes, and I did email him to ask him to stop stealing. His response was that I got 2 free links from him. Well hell yes, that’s just great eh? He’s still Jon Waraas – thief

Update again – Tuesday 24 March 2009

Developer Hut, Inc.
P.O Box 3743
Idaho Falls, Idaho 83403-3743
United States
1-208-608-5133

Dear Mark R,
It has come to our attention that your Dec. 11, 2007 blog posting on tamba2.org.uk, “Developer Hut aka Jon Warass steals your blog content,” is making false and deceptive claims that are or may be misleading customers about Developer Hut, Inc. We request that you immediately cease and desist from continuing to make any such claims. We further request that you immediately remove such claims from your website, including Web site pages.

Developer Hut, Inc. is Internet Marketing company based out of Idaho Falls, Idaho. Since 2006 we have been offering web based advertisement to company’s looking to increase there SEO ranking. Developer Hut, Inc. is widely recognized for our quality seo services and has a well-deserved reputation of providing our customers quality seo link building. This reputation has been harmed, and will continue to be harmed, by any and all false and deceptive claims that tamba2.org.uk has made.

In light of the foregoing, we request that you immediately cease and desist from continuing to make any false, deceptive or misleading claims, statements, assertions or representations — whether explicit or implicit — regarding Developer Hut, Inc. We further request that you immediately remove all such claims from all your website, whether in written, electronic, verbal, visual or audio form, including, but not limited to, advertisements, emails, Web site materials, press releases, announcements and correspondence.

If you fail to take this requested action within 2 business days, Developer Hut, Inc. will have no choice but to pursue all available legal remedies against you, Mark R.

You will also be receiving a certified cease and desist letter sent to your whois address. If you have any questions or would like to talk to our lawyer then please set up a time for a conference call. Your full cooperation in this matter is appreciated.

Sincerely,
Developer Hut, Inc.

To create random gravatars for your comments so you have neither the default, empty spaces or the same one of your choice.

First get Matt’s script. I first used this when I wrote a couple of years ago how to get random headers on the blog and it’s come in handy again. Save that as it is.
Next go find your images and place them in a folder.
Put the script inside that folder.
Upload and link from your comments.php
Easy.

Here’s one I made earlier.
Download this folder, unzip.
It contains all the images I’m using here right now (127 of them) and the script
Upload to your site
Open comments.php and change the gravatar code to
<img src="< ?php gravatar("", 80 , "http://your-domain/your-folder/ctar.php"); ?/>
After saving the changes your comments should now have the same images that I am using. Once you see it working all you need to do is change the images in that folder.
If you want a long example, click the link in the top right to the “What makes you happy” post.

If you want to batch resize, I recommend ImageBadger on Windows.
If you want to batch rename – again on Windows – 1-4a Rename is excellent.

And should you want to keep the images in the download for some reason, not a problem.
Of course you don’t need to use all 127. Delete all but a couple. It’s there for testing. (It’s an 850kb folder to upload so deleting a few will speed things up).

An improvement would be to check for an author url and link the gravatar to that and if there is no author url to then link to a default of the blog owner’s choice.. The latter is easy – wrap the code above in a href – but the ‘if’ bit throws me. Plugin territory probably.

I liked the idea of gravatars when they came out – mine was until recently an image of my right hand with the implant – but then for some reason it sort of dropped off the planet for me. No idea why. But now they are back (not that they left) and back in a better way. Like favicons though I like gravatars.

Unlike the amazingly boring and uninspirational M (I will change it later) that adorns the address bar here some favicons are little works of art. Completely constrained yet people can create wonderful images which can convey so much. Like gravatars. It surprises me at wordpress.com just how many people have their faces on their avatar there (but then it surprises me just how many people look at their stats too) but also the diversity. There’s a sticky thread just for testing avatars and while many are images taken from the web, images that are part of images taken from the web (looking at them now faces seem to figure higher than I thought. Maybe it’s a “I am a person not just a blog” thing going on) but there are some which look deliberately created. Created because nothing else fits, nothing else conveys the meaning they want to get across. And that’s really cool – especially to a person like me who has all the talent of a brick when it comes to art.

I tried to bring them into my comments at some point in the past but gave up with the styling for some reason or other. But I can and I probably will. There’s a support angle here though. There is a plugin at the gravatar site. and although it mentions WordPress 1.2 (I loved that version!) it probably still works. No doubt an uptodate version will appear. Anyway, there are many themes out there that have no gravatar code in their comments.php file and that means there are some issues ahead.
The gravatar help mentions the ‘Comments Loop’. The word ‘Loop’ used to throw people at the wordpress.org forums and although comment loops are probably fairly uniform it’s still a code insert. While there may be some hooks in the default themes – because hooks are good according to those that code – that will not do anything for existing users. So people will be going to forums saying ‘Loop?’ Soon after they will return saying things like “They overlap” “It broke the layout” “But I want them on the right/left/top/bottom?” “Instead of the author name” “drop shadow” and others too. The gravatar code does not specify anything in the way of placement, and neither should it. But people want their placement. And that’s where the fun starts. It’s adding a significant chunk of something that needs it’s own div, margins and all that other styling stuff. Forums will get busy and probably unavoidably so.
It’s not just a WordPress thing. It’s all the platforms – unless code is there waiting then code needs inserting and CSS writing. As gravatars become more popular then more people will ask “How?” and when someone asks, someone needs to answer (I know all about that bit). Maybe theme authors will produce something, not that they have to, but I can imagine they will be asked. The forums might keep known solutions. Again it’s not just the wordpress.org forums but others too. Possibly theme authors start to code this in by default and have the choices in the CSS – who knows.
None of this is bad, it’s just the effect that happens when something new comes along that lots of people want. And regardless of who actually bought it all the above would still apply.

And there are still some really good little pictures.

18 Oct edit:
Favicon now the same as my gravatar which is the same as my wordpress.com avatar.
Gravatars added. The gravatar is in a class which floats left and has a right margin of 10px.
The time/date is followed by br clear=”all”
The Author name is followed a br because I couldn’t be bothered to try any other way.

Yesterday was pretty cool. Matt had been in London for the Future of Web Apps conference and yesterday he popped up to our village to meet the family. We met up at the Castle Hotel when we spent ages chatting, had food then came back here so he could meet Winston – Matt was surprised to say the least at his size. P got to play with the iPhone and now wants one (at 900 quid for phone and contract a pop, that’s a no) and Matt saw Support Central – a couple of computers and monitors anyway. Jacq and the girls have finally met Matt and they all think he’s a very decent guy. Which he is. And he now has faces and voices to put to the names and initials I use here. A very pleasant evening.

I blogged the WP / meet Matt / Conference thing in London a while ago. It’s next week. So if you are planning on being there, are you aiming for Thursday or Friday? I’m not doing the conference so I’m just there to lounge around, take photos and imbibe large quantities of caffeine. I have T-shirts (the red ones), I have stickers if you like stickers and Matt and others will be around.
Mathew has proposed a couple of venues but we just need to know who and when. I’ll find an old sim card for my mobile and post that here just before too. So, are you there?

Ignore the above – go read Matt’s blog.

Stephen Fry not only has a blog, but it’s a WordPress blog. (src. Linkbunnies)
Did you see his programs on being bi-polar? Very very good.

There is a job opening at Automattic for someone else in Support. When I started we had less than 200,000 users and we now have 7 times that number. On the day I was made a mod at the wordpress.org forums Matt gave me the title of ‘Support Maven’ – a word I had no idea about so I went and looked it up – “A person who has special knowledge or experience; an expert.” and that title has stuck. It’s not a bad title and it looks okay on any forms I may have completed. But I like the new job title so much better:
“Happiness Engineer”

There is a conference in London called The Future of Web Apps. It takes place October 3rd – 5th. There are lots of speakers and Matt is one. So, seeing as he’s here, want to meet up?

The venue will be Excel London. They have bars we can use, their site lists travel links and if there are others at the conference they would be close by. Date will be October 4th, maybe October 5th too.

Interested?

And if you will be there, or are pretty sure, leave a comment so I know if to organise tshirts and if so how many.

(In response to an email, the cost is just getting there. And any drinks. Entry to the conference isn’t included or required. We’ll meet at a bar outside the conference but in the same building).

Another great week in San Francisco ends. It was excellent to meet everyone be it the first or subsequent time. A few photos I took are up here.
It was a very long 10 hours back on the plane, then the coach was delayed a bit and as I write in 15 hours we are on our way to Gran Canaria. Somewhere my sleep will catch up. I am amazingly tired. I’m not complaining about it at all, but I’m pretty done in right now.
(And no, I didn’t go in. I’d bought yet another Zen at Best Buy the day before. That photo is a perfect rectangle too.)

They sell vanilla diet pepsi at Walgreens just up the street from the hotel. A bottle of that while wandering around Union Square was perfect. I think I left my camera at the pier earlier so I wasn’t able to take any pics of this herd of cyclists who came down one side on the Sq and headed along another. I caught some of it – I’d been sitting high facing Macy’s – but the tail end, followed by 2 police cars and a police van, looked good. Some sort of organised parade I think it was.

Most of the others are at a TechCrunch party tonight. It would have been cool to blog that I’d been but it would have bored me senseless and I’m not up to that. Hence my sitting in 506 at the Chancellor Hotel on Powell.

And tomorrow is the last day in San Francisco. I have a list of a few things the girls want so hopefully that will be fulfilled.