Six Apart announced an update to the TypeKey service, one of which is that you can now choose to remain logged in to TypeKey for up to 2 weeks. For those of you who may have held off registering with TypeKey because you hated having to log in every couple of hours to comment on someone's blog, now you no longer have that excuse. I use TypeKey registration for my blogs, though it is not required. Should you choose to comment without signing in via TypeKey, your comment will simply remain in limbo until I approve it. TypeKey registration is simple, fast, and free.

Jon has provided a great way to look up CD info on Amazon. I've already got it bookmarked in my mobile.

Why is it that any time I look at the recommendations Amazon puts forth for my viewing pleasure, half of them are already on my wish list? You would think that with all of the web services, back-end stuff Amazon is in to these days, they would have devised a system where the recommendations I'm shown contain nothing that is on my wish list. Update, 11:00 PM CST: So I put my money where my mouth is and sent an e-mail with my suggestion to Amazon's General Questions box. I did get a response, but it seems to be of the form letter type. One thing it mentions is tweaking the recommendations, and I looked in to that. The problem here is that I can see the items on my wish list that are included in the recommendations. There is a box next to each item that is checked, and the caption reads "Use to make recommendations". My issue here is, I want Amazon to use this type of item to make future recommendations, but I don't want this specifc item to show up in my recommendations. So do I uncheck the box or not?

John Gruber notes that the Microsoft fonts typically associated with and installed with Internet Explorer are still present in Mac OS X Tiger. Good news for web designers, and all those who appreciate a good font; Verdana and Georgia are among my favorites in their respective categories. Verdana is my default web and e-mail reading font, and I generally use Georgia for all of my styled text editing. As a matter of fact, it's the font my resume is set in.

Stephen O’Grady has assembled a good introductory article for those who may not have gotten in to the blog-reading thing. For those of you reading this right now, this site is a blog, so you're already reading at least one. [Via Michael Hyatt.]

Adobe GoLive CS2 is going to have integrated tools from Six Apart for MovableType and TypePad users. Maybe this will be a way to speed up generation of new site looks.

John Manzione is trying to locate his son Andrew, with whom he has had no contact in 18 years. If you know Andrew, or if for some reason Andrew is reading this, here is John's e-mail address.

I have joined the Flickr bandwagon. You can see my first set, from February of last year, "Winter Wonderland 2004". I am in the process of looking for a permanent residence on the web for my digital photos. I'm a little tired of the do-it-yourself routine I've been experimenting with, and I'm not looking forward to having to oversee yet another software backend, such as Gallery. The photo set you can see at Flickr took me about five minutes to create. Granted, most of the hard work was already done in iPhoto (photo titles and captions). I used FlickrExport by Fraser Speirs to upload directly from iPhoto to my Flickr account. I uploaded the full-sized images, so my free Flickr account is currently full. I had been looking at SmugMug, but now am having second thoughts, and am seriously considering upgrading to a Pro account with Flickr. More to come...

Mozilla offspring Camino has a new site. I like the new look, and downloaded the latest nightly build. Maybe it will be more stable on my system than 0.8.2. I really want to use Camino more, as I feel it's faster than Safari on my systems, but it doesn't seem as stable when it comes to running out of real RAM and having to subsist on virtual memory. [Via DF via Daniel Bogan.] UPDATE, 10:30 PM CST: After downloading and installing the latest nightly build, I happened across the site again, and was greeted with this banner near the top of the main page:

Fun, fun, fun! UPDATE 2, 11:30 PM CST: You can find all of Camino's keyboard shortcuts on one handy page. And its hidden preferences, too.

An example of "practice what you preach"?

For those who may care, having been inspired by Hugh Hewitt's Blog, I have resumed blogging at Godblog, as of March 1st.

I am not referring to an airline hijacking. Michael informed me this morning that our host for ATPM told him we went over our bandwidth limit for the month of February by 17 GB. After further investigation, we learned that most of this extra bandwidth is going toward serving up various JPEGS to other sites. In other words, rather than downloading the desktop pictures we offer to our readers each month, and hosting it on their own server, people are linking directly to the file on our server for display on their sites. They are hijacking these images, and our bandwidth. This is nothing new. It's just never happened on such a large scale before with any site I've been involved in. People, this is not cool. First off, those desktop pictures are the copyrighted property of a photographer or artist who graciously donated their use to ATPM, and subsequently to our readers, as desktop pictures. This means if you want to use said picture on your web site, or any other medium, you should be contacting that photographer or artist for permission. Second, if said photographer or artist grants you permission for usage, you then host the picture on your own site. To link to the picture directly on ATPM means you are stealing our bandwidth, and driving up our costs. We are not a for-profit publication. Our staff is all-volunteer, from the top down. Any moneys generated from ads and sponsorships goes in to our hosting costs, and after ten consecutive years of publication, those costs can be considerable. Thus, bandwidth is not something we can afford to give away, and certainly not at the rate of an extra 17 GB every month. If you are one of the many persons out there linking directly to one of our pictures, please stop. You are violating legitimate copyright and stealing bandwidth from a group of people who do something each month out of love and joy.

This week is the week of site birthdays, I suppose. Lee's Second Initial turns one today. Congratulations, compadre!

In case you've ever wondered why you keep getting pop-up or pop-under ads, even though you have pop-up blocking enabled in Safari or Firefox, MDJ has the answer in today's issue:

Several people have noticed more pop-up and pop-under Web ads recently, even if Safari's pop-up blocker is turned on. Safari can't block them because they're not coming from JavaScript - they're coming from Macromedia Flash content. Macromedia has spent the past few years bragging about Flash's browser ubiquity, convincing developers to create everything from simple animations to full-fledged video in Flash because every browser can run it.

Now we're seeing the dark side of that - Flash content can also open windows, and advertisers are using it to subvert standard pop-up blocking, which typically prevents JavaScript code from opening new windows unless you clicked on a link to do so. So there you have it. Yet another reason to hate Flash.

Am I the only one who doesn't get the whole del.icio.us craze?

So I just left a comment, in reply to one left by Raena, and a thought occurred to me: If I'm logged in to my Movable Type installation already, why can't I already be logged in to my TypeKey account as well? It just seems silly to have to go through a separate login procedure to leave comments on my own blog. Speaking of Movable Type, the web site has undergone somewhat of a makeover, and the old .org domain redirects to the link just noted. The new menu across the top left reflects all of Six Apart's products, including the newly-purchased LiveJournal.

Thanks to inspiration from Lee, and code from Chris, I have the master archive index page I've been wanting. You will note there is no longer a monthly archive list in the sidebar. You can always get to the site archives by clicking on that "Archives" button in the navigation menu at the top right of each page.

Enormously, incredibly stupid. Michael was right. I was insane. I am man enough to admit such. No more blogging at Godblog or digitalpembroke. (I do not link to the former because that domain will eventually go bye-bye, but do to the latter because I will keep it; it was my first domain, my first blog, my online baby.) So while Retrophisch will maintain its focus on Macs and technology, items that were previously reserved for the above blogs, plus the already-retired Ludichris and Forty Caliber, may find their way here as well. Fear not, dear reader. Those other blogs were woefully underposted to begin with, which was what led to their retirement. You will not see a sudden influx of firearms or political-based postings. There are other bloggers doing a far better job than I on those topics. Yeah, there are bloggers doing a far better job on pretty much any topic I choose to cover. So I'm an egomaniacal narcissist at heart. All bloggers are. ;-)

Tom notes logging in to his Gmail account this morning, and finding 50 invitations to offer to others. This prompted me to do the same, wondering if I would also have 50 invites, seeing as how the last time I looked at my Gmail account, I still had 4 from the previous 6 given to me still available. Sure enough, there's the little box, just like Tom has in his post, with 50 invites ready to go. How am I supposed to get rid of this many invites? Has Gmail already reached a saturation level, and it's not even out of its invitation-only beta program? Maybe it's just me; I have a fairly close-knit group of online friends, with a slightly larger group of acquaintances. Everyone in these two groups who wants a Gmail account already has one. Heck, the reason I have a Gmail account is because one of my friends pointed me to a post by Tom offering Gmail invites back when they were hard to come by, and this is how he and I began chatting. (FYI: my winning funny is #2 in the comments.) I've had a hard enough time unloading the last six invites Google gave me. I've joined Gmail for the Troops, but have yet to unload any invites that way. My own attempt to have fun while giving out invites met with one whole reader taking me up on the offer. So now I've got 50 invites. Want one?

Everyone seems to be linking to The Register's interview with a link spammer. This is what caught my attention:

"The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas. Or those where you have to reply to an email, click on a link in it; though that can be automated too. Those where you have to register and click on links, they're hard as well. And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that's a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations' folder names." So now you see why I'm using TypeKey.

His Gruberness has written, on behalf and with the input of, Six Apart, a comprehensive guide on weblog comment spam. This has given me some ideas for moving forward, though since I have instituted comment registration via TypeKey, I haven't had a comment spam problem. Registration through TypeKey is free, easy, and fast, and it allows you to comment on any site which supports the protocol.

Anyone else out there find the 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist to be a total yawner?

I have come to the conclusion--and many of you may be wondering what took me so long--that Amazon's search engine could be vastly improved. Viz: I enter "Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" in the search field, with the pull-down menu set to Books. In the first page of results, nada. By inserting "The" at the beginning of the search phrase, the book pops up as the number one item returned. One would think that the search phrase I originally entered would have been enough. Likewise, I entered "Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World" in the search field, again with Books selected in the pull-down menu, and again, got nothing returned in the first page of results. I entered the author's name, "Wesley J. Smith," and his tome appears as the first search result. Only it has a capital "A" in the title. Again, the original search phrase should have been enough for Amazon's search engine to figure out what I wanted.

So some of you may have noticed the site was down earlier this evening for about an hour. My sysadmin pulled the plug, so to speak, because those scum of the 'net were hammering our server so badly, Apache may as well have been under a true DoS attack. I am referring, of course, to comment spammers. So, henceforth, we're going to try comment registration. It's free, doesn't cost you anything but a few moments of time over at TypeKey. With your TypeKey login, you can comment on any site that supports the protocol. (Nearly all of these will be those that use Movable Type or TypePad.) I'm sorry it's come to this, but as with most things, a few bad apples ruin the whole barrel.

The previous entry marked number 800 for this now two-year-old blog. Despite it being noted on my calendar, I completely missed the two-year anniversary of retrophisch.com on the tenth of this month. So, two milestones this month, and here's to many more to come.