trassare.com

New Golden Gray is now hosted at Wordpress! Download NGG from Wordpress.

New Golden Gray is based on William Pramana’s Golden Grey theme. Golden Gray was originally written for Alex King’s 2005 Wordpress theme competition. In the last few years Wordpress has undergone many changes and the coding requirements for themes has also changed. New Golden Gray is a rewrite of Golden Grey to meet those requirements and to exploit the new functionality of today’s Wordpress, version 2.6, while preserving the aesthetic quality of the original theme.

Features
New Golden Gray has been written to include:

• Support for widgets!
• Accessibility features: access keys and friendly text browser support.
• A 404 page.
• An archive page.
• Support for GaMerZ’ WP-Print plugin.
• Gravatars.

Screen shot

Download
Download New Golden Gray 1.8 (81K).
Download William Pramana’s original Golden Grey (29K).

Support
Use the comments section for all requests for support or to recommend improvements to NGG.

What’s Next

• Improved navigation bar.
• Improved support for mobile devices.

Known Issues

• If your blog contains more than about eight page links, they will not all fit in the navigation bar and they page layout will distort.
• Some CSS3 code is used in the style sheet which won’t validate against W3C’s current CSS validation.

Trassare.com is now using the Winksite plugin to support the Wii and the DS Lite.  I do not have either of these neat toys so if someone out there does, please visit this site with your device and upload a screenshot for me.

I’ve been on an accessibility kick with my websites lately.  I’ve long supported the PSP with the Winksite plugin but today I decided to add activate the plugins for the other two game systems as well.  In the coming days, months I’ll be updating this site with accessibility controls to improve navigation and appearance on multiple browsers.

George Carlin, one of my favorite performers, has died.  Read the AP obituary.

Toying around with my PSP tonight I selected the Network Update option from the XMB. Lo and behold there is a new firmware update available even though Sony has not yet updated the PSP website with the new version. Version 4.00 has the following updates:

• [Internet Search] has been added as a feature under [Network].
• You can now change viewing speed during video playback. Use this feature if you want to watch a video quickly, or if you want to slow down playback and listen to the dialogue carefully.

So that’s it! Or at least that is what is reported during the firmware update process. Earlier other features were rumored to be added such as Adobe Flash 8. An early check by me reveals that this is not the case.  So we’re all still stuck using an old version of Flash on the PSP.

Immediately after posting my six-month review of the PSP-2000 I received a trackback from a site I had never heard of before (I am NOT going to post the site’s address.  If your curious send me a message and I’ll give you the address).  I thought it was pretty strange as there was no way someone could have read the post that soon after me posting it.  I took a look at the site the trackback came from and found that the site contained no original material at all.  The site contained nearly 10,000 uncategorized posts all linking to other sites and every page had a huge advertisement for a paid file download service. 

I decided I’d let that one go and not delete the comment but a few days later I received a very similar post from a different website (again, I’ll withhold the address).  This second site didn’t contain any overly intrusive advertising other than Google’s AdWords.  The site was once again nothing but a collection of excerpts to other blogs.

I Googled “wordpress site reposts” trying to find any reporting on this practice. My first item in the search results was for a plug-in called “rePost”.  Ah, so now I’m starting to understand.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame any author or plug-in, especially rePost.  What I began to realize is that with user-friendly publishing tools like Wordpress and its plug-in system it is now incredibly easy to set up a website that exists solely for the purpose of leveraging bloggers content to slap blatant affiliate network advertising in front of the viewer.

I’ve never understood what the logic is in this. These websites must work or they wouldn’t exist but who really cares to surf on over to a website that contains no original material and whose only intent is to reap the money skimmed from affiliate advertising networks and dubious subscription services? The money made can’t be that great nor can the traffic be that substantial.

This kind of comment spam is another way that spammers are getting around spam tools. These comments also devalue original content by implying through use of the trackback that some kind of positive relationship exists between the blogger with valuable original content and the site containing affiliate advertising or lame subscription services. I’ve now marked the comments from those sites as spam and removed them from the article.  I hope the other authors linked from these spam sites have done the same.