John Diary

Mozilla Leak Monitor extension says that sardalya’s _.chain method leaks if you decide to attach the event explicitly bypassing the EventRegistry.

In the core of sardalya , at times, I explicitly bypass EventRegistry attachment if (and only if) I am 100% sure that the code would not leak (no closures, no expando properties etc…).

The author of the plugin also confirms my action:
Some of these leaks are things that are clearly bugs in the extension (such as registering observers with the observer service forever) and some are things that arguably shouldn’t leak (at varying argument strengths).Although some of those leaks may be real. Most of those leaks are due to a bug in the extension (or FF1.5 or both).

Currently there is a lot of buzz around in blogs and forums telling;
… and also XYZ Framework Leaks, I’ve installed the Firefox Leak Monitor plugin and oh my goodness; every single site I visit is leaking! gmail is leaking, dojo is leaking, prototype is leaking.

Hey look! sardalya leaks as well.
I am in need to write this blog post; because I’ve received a pile of e-mails telling that the current version of sardalya has leaks in it. Thank you everyone for your feedback. I very much appreciate them and use your comments and suggestions as a means to improve, enhance and re-shape sardalya.

…Coming back to the leak issue. Well I (think that I) have adequate knowledge on what causes a JavaScript memory leak, in what circumstances the memory leaks etc… I’ve even written an article about it. And I am pretty (99.999%) sure that the former version of sardalya does not leak.

To keep the long story short I’ve converted expressions like

_.chain(document,”mousemove”,
this._onMouseMove,true);

to

_.chain(document,”mousemove”,
this._onMouseMove);

in the current version of sardalya.

I think this is a better approach (whether there is an actual leak or not) because
First of all it is a defensive coding practice. Better be safe than sorry.

Secondly reclaiming memory as soon as possible in window unload, instead of leaving the decision to the garbage collector will positively affect performance.
There is a caveat though: If there is an excessive amount of event registration going on the page; the internal array that holds pointers to event handlers in the EventRegistry object may increase in size and this will result in a slightly increased amount of memory consumption (a.ka. a pseudo leak)

But I guesstimate that this pseudo leak won’t be recognizable in practical situations.

And yes I’ve released a new version of sardalya (2.2.5). It has some minor fixes and this leak issue implemented.

A question that I often see on the Internet is what are the steps to introduce a new cat into a household. This is a great question because cats are typically solitary animals and the addition of a new cat can cause stress and possibly some bad behavior. However, I’ve also noticed that it seems to cause much more stress to the humans involved than it does to the felines!

First, be certain that another cat is a good idea. For some tips and suggestions see my article Cat Math: Does adding one more cat cause four times the havoc?

Once you’ve decided that another cat is right for you arm yourself with information! For a great article about what to expect when you add a new cat to your house see Introducing Pets to a New Cat at the Humane Society of the United States.

When you add your new cat, remember that it is very important for you to stay calm. No sense in creating more stress! Also, keep in mind that cats know what steps to take to meet a new cat. They really can in many cases sort it out for themselves so don’t be afraid to let them interact while you watch quietly near by. Step in only if there is significant reaction. Ignore hissing and growling that’s just part of the process and it does not hurt either cat, unless someone has really bad breath!

If you feel you need heavy artillery to ease your new cat into your home, pick up some Feliway. This nifty product plugs into an outlet and releases cat pheromones into your house. This will help your cats feel calm and cool no drugs needed!

Finally, enjoy watching your kitties get to know each other and discover the games they’ll play together. Two cats are so much fun you might even cancel your cable!
catcatscat humorcat comedynew cat

The Things That All Affiliate Marketers Need To Success

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.
There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that is focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.
Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.
Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving…

Silly season, eh? Well, this sort of thing seems to be stacking up (incidentally, who here saw Volver? When something grisly I shan’t specify happens and a neighbor knocks on the door to ask about something and then, startled, asks Penelope Cruz why she’s covered with blood and Penelope says, “female problems” with a wave of her hand. Hilarious).

First, who remembers this from the other week:

August 12 - Britney Lessons

Sunday Telegraph - Tragic Britney, brought down just like Lolita. By Jenny McCartney

…At no time in history has the message been pumped out so forcefully to pre-pubescent girls that the primary import of any woman’s life is to be sexually desirable to men. What follows from that message in less stellar lives, one suspects, is a brief flurry of coquettish triumphs followed by decades of eating disorders, plastic surgery, and quiet self-loathing.

Well, yesterday, via a post of Mark Steyn’s on The Corner, I ran into this (it’s quite a long essay, but well-written and worth reading) (she starts out with Britney Spears in the school girl uniform too, so everyone seems to be thinking along the same lines):

Macleans - Why are we dressing our daughters like this?
Eight-year-olds in fishnets, padded ‘bralettes’ and thong panties: Welcome to the Junior Miss version of raunch culture, by LIANNE GEORGE

Meanwhile, in an odd inversion of the Lolita trend, women old enough to vote are embracing the trappings of girlhood, with varying degrees of tongue-in-cheek. Victoria’s Secret’s lingerie collections have innocent, girlie names like “Angels” and “Pink.” Starlets such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears tote around miniature dogs in tutus — called Tinkerbell and Bit Bit — as though they were cuddly stuffed animals. In her latest video, Fergalicious, the musician Fergie is dressed in a sexed-up Brownie uniform, surrounded by a troupe of bootie-popping Brownie dancers. Last month, the British retailer Tesco landed in hot water over a pole-dancing kit for sale on its website. The kit, packaged in a pink plastic tube, featured an illustrated Barbie-type character and bubble letters that read: “Unleash the sex kitten inside.” It was inadvertently placed on the site’s children’s toy section, where it looked so entirely at home that none of the Web designers questioned it. Perhaps most creepily, we’re in a moment when one of the latest celebrity “trends” — exemplified by Spears and Lindsay Lohan — is to expose one’s privates, completely waxed to look like a 10-year-old’s, from the backseat of a car.

The eroticization of girlhood — once the stuff of Russian literature, Atom Egoyan films, Japanese comic books and good old-fashioned American porn — has been seeping ever more into the larger culture. Now it is one of our dominant aesthetics. In a Lolita-tinged culture, whether the sell is “my body is underdeveloped, but I am precocious” or “my brain is underdeveloped, but I am stacked,” the message is the same: exploit me. “For adult women, that notion of being kind of girlie and innocent and sexually pure, as well as very sexy, has been in men’s magazines forever,” says Lyn Mikel Brown, co-author of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes. But whether it’s because of the pornification of culture or the extreme worship of youth, the trend has migrated to ever younger age groups. Add this to the fact that the physiological onset of puberty itself keeps inching downward, and the definitions of “girl” and “women” have become moving targets. Which raises the question: what does it mean for little girls when the very things of their lives — kilts, puppies, angels, pink, princesses — become fetishized to the point of rendering them obscene?

And today:

The Times - At times like this, it’s better to be just one of the boys
Our correspondent on the feminist dilemma, from Anne Hathaway to Diana, by Magnus Linklater

(After a moment of confusion, I’ve learned that Anne Hathaway isn’t just that annoying American actress that seems so popular in an English accent these days, but is also the name of Shakespeare’s wife.)

The early Weldon bestsellers, about women trapped in oppressive, male-dominated societies, have become, she said, “historical documents”, their arguments meaningless to a generation of women who are in charge of their own lives, choose to marry or not, to have children or not, and who generally pursue their careers with exactly the same goals in mind as their male competitors. Only the older career woman, worried about a life ahead without a family to fall back on, still feels there is a battle to be fought.

At a stroke, Ms Weldon seemed also to be disposing of the famous Naomi Wolf argument, which once claimed that the fashion and cosmetics industry, dominated by men, dictated how women should look, forcing them to strive for a state of impossible, male-imagined, perfection. Those goals are still there, of course – in fact if anything they are more demanding than ever – but they are set, or rejected, by women. It is women today who control the fashion industry, the magazines and the television shows that dictate standards of taste, and it is women who decide what they should wear, how much they should drink and how badly they should behave, whether in public or in private. “Most women now feel there is no reason or cause for feminism,” concluded Ms Weldon. It was only as they got older that they might begin to appreciate what a previous generation had achieved.

And in one of those articles is mentioned that awful store at the mall where little girls go to get make-overs. RC2 had a thing on that a while ago but I’ll let her get the link for me cuz I can’t find it.

And then, an anecdote: Over the weekend Peter and I had to go to that Vegas for Yuppies, Bellevue, and walk around the mall looking for some home-necessities. And I started to wonder if Mother’s Day had been moved to August and I was missing it because there seemed to be everywhere teenagers shopping with their fathers. Which, you’d think, is fine, except every one of them, I wanted to throw a cape over them and ask them what the hell they’re doing dressing like that for when they’re out with their dads.

This part of the Macleans reminded me:

Even before Britney Spears paired a kilt with pigtails and a midriff-baring blouse in the 1998 video that launched her career, the kilt was a source of deep discomfort for Catholic schoolteachers, administrators and parents. Rules evolved to control its power: it should be three inches from the knee — no higher — and one Canadian uniform manufacturer even patented the X-Kilt, with built-in shorts to prevent girls from transforming them into miniskirts. So far, in Ontario alone, at least seven Catholic schools have voted to phase out the garment altogether. “It always has been an issue,” says Ron Crocco, principal of St. Augustine Catholic High School in Markham, Ont., where the kilt was banned in 2003. “As a male, it’s difficult to enforce, to say: your kilt is too short. Because then, why am I looking there?” In a post-Britney era, it seems, the kilt is just too sexy for school.

Yeah, well, well. I always see girls dressed like that, the worst was once when we were on the ferry heading to Bremerton, and you don’t do much on a ferry but stand there, which makes it worse, and there were all these little girls and younger teenagers standing there in the most ridiculous outfits and I just kept thinking, “Are we promoting paedophilia now?” Because you really just can’t help looking. And why would anyone want to put a father in that sort of position? You’re always “daddy’s little girl” and all that sentimental schmaltz, but you’re forcing your own father to look at you in those clothes? It’s just wrong.

[I asked all of the FOPAB left-handers about the best and worst of being left handed. -Ed.]
From Patricia:
My biggest association with the special preference of left-handedness was in grammar school learning penmanship. It was mandatory to use cartridge pens and big ring binders. It was enough, the challenge of mastering the formation of the letters. Then there was the challenge of avoiding smearing the ink and the awkwardness of dealing with the rings that were in my left hands way. And most desks were designed for right-handers. There was often confusion……leading to inhibition about which hand to do stuff with like throw and bat.

I remember as a young kid worrying about my odd physical traits, including my left-handedness. Another something, I was missing my lateral teeth (the two front teeth just on the other sides of the centrals) and had to go through braces and bridges……..often embarrassing somehow. And I have a rather large “birthmark” on my leg that seemed a significant defect. Amazing how glaring those “imperfections” felt back then.
Interesting, it seemed as I got older, others were more bothered by my unusual tactile style than me. It was very clear, my first husbands impatience with me and what he perceived as inept dexterity. He would often kid me, that blur of joking and seriousness.

Perspectives change and actually now, I’m quite grateful to be left-handed. Its a special gift. A lesson in flexibility and another opportunity in difference. Something I’m enjoying more and more in my mid-life.
Hope all is well with your family.

Love, Patricia

From Bob C:

The pros and cons of a 66 year old born and bred left-hander.

First and foremost, left-handed people are smarter. It is very nice to be smarter than most of the world. I’ve been told that left-handed people that play golf right-handed make better golfers. I don’t think this is true.

The reason left-handed people write funny is because when you hold your left hand upright and you use a pen that has to be dipped into an inkwell, on the right hand side of your desk, your left hand follows the wet ink and smears the writing on the paper. This is also true of chalk when writing on the blackboard in front of the class. The old desks that had the folding seats had the inkwell on the wrong side. The desks that came out later, with the armrest, had the armrest on the right side. Since there was no armrest on the left side, you had to put your arm on the desk and write upside-down, to keep your arm from getting tired and smearing the ink.

In addition to the problems with the ink, pencil sharpeners had the handle on the wrong side, making it hard to sharpen pencils with your right hand.

It is almost impossible for a left-handed person to teach a right-handed person how to tie a shoe.

You also must be careful if you have a belt with a name on it; like the one I had that said Buffalo Bill. When you put it on left-handed, Buffalo Bill is upside down.

Zippers on mens pants are made for right-handed people, making it inconvenient for left-handers.

It is almost impossible to learn to shoot a rifle or semiautomatic shotgun left-handed because the shells are ejected on the right side of the gun and fly out and hit you in the face. Therefore, you must learn to shoot right-handed or give up shooting a semiautomatic gun.

Automatic can openers and the kind you turn with a key are strictly right-handed.

Scissors are a left-handed person’s nightmare. Last but not least, you tend to deal cards backwards.

RAC, sr.

From Ted:

The best thing about being left handed is: We are smarter than right-handed people. Also I can use the mouse and write stuff at the same time.

The worse thing about being left handed is that your hand smudges whatever you just wrote. But who actually writes anything anymore?

The funniest thing about being left handed is that many right-handed people halfway believe that left handed people are smarter. Also, in Thailand they still teach everyone to write right-handed so they would smirk at me if I was writing something with my left hand since, for them, that’s the hand you wipe with. So I had to carry my own pen since they wouldn’t take theirs back if I borrowed it to write something.

Do you wish you were right handed? Why? No. I like being different. (and I made up the part about the Thai pen; left-handers are also very creative)

From Anthony:

One of my earliest memories is of digging through boxes of scissors in kindergarten. About one in twenty said “lefty” along one blade. These were the ones I could cut with. In a pinch I would cut with the right-handed ones, but the edges of the construction paper would end up bent and frayed. Like a lot of things about being left-handed, I didn’t see this as a bad thing, just something that made me stand out.

When I was about ten, I was playing catcher in a church baseball game in Brunswick. I didn’t have a glove so I had to use the right-handed catcher’s mit. After each catch, I had to take the ball out of the mit with my right hand, fling the mit to the ground, and transfer the ball back to my left hand so I could throw it. It would have been difficult to throw out somebody stealing second, but I don’t remember anybody doing that. I heard the preacher talked about my perserverence in his sermon that day, which made me feel good.

Those dainty little butter knives are right-handed and I always have to use the wrong side to cut into the butter. Might as well use a stick. When eating, lefties have to sit with nobody to their left. Otherwise we bump elbows with righties.

Most righties wouldn’t think of this, but rulers are right-handed. I have to turn them upside-down.

There are many items people use every day that you don’t realize are right-handed. If lefties were the majority, it would be lefty tighty, righty loosey. That makes more sense because are brains are setup that way.

The worst thing about being left-handed is getting ink all over the side of your hand when writing with a pen. Wouldn’t be a problem if we wrote right-to-left.

I’m glad I’m left-handed. It looks like Robert III is carrying on the tradition of his grandfather and father. He seems to do better with the scissors, though.

RAC, jr.

From Carol:
The best thing about being left handed is the instant bond you have with other lefties. When another left handed person notices that you are left handed, it’s like you’re both from the same small town.

The worst thing about being left handed is spiral notebooks.

The funniest thing about being left handed is that I can’t do anything except write with my left hand. I walk the dog right handed, play sports right handed, chop food right handed, but luckily I can eat with either hand

From Carol E.:
The best thing about being left handed is the instant bond you have with other lefties. When another left handed person notices that you are left handed, it’s like you’re both from the same small town.
The worst thing about being left handed is spiral notebooks.
The funniest thing about being left handed is that I can’t do anything except write with my left hand. I walk the dog right handed, play sports right handed, chop food right handed, but luckily I can eat with either hand.

From David E.:

The best thing about being left handed is that I get to write this cool entry to FOBAB. The worst thing about being left handed is that at school when you write with erasable pens all of the ink rubs off of the paper and onto your hand. The funniest thing about being left handed is that I am right footed. I’m glad I’m left handed and you’ll see why at the first sentance I wrote.

From Bob E:
Thoughts on Being Left Handed:
Having been a member of the left handed minority all of my life, I find it interesting that we, as a society, have come so far in the last 40 years but still have so far to go.

My parents worked extremely hard to make me a “normal” right handed person. They failed. After starting school, the nuns worked to make sure that I could avoid the stigma of being left handed. They failed. They could not “fix” me.
It’s obvious to all that I have been “wired” to be left handed. It is not a choice. No one would “choose” to be left handed with all of the discrimination that a left handed person endures. Yet we are still an unprotected minority. The rest of the world needs to change to accept us the way that we are.

Until then, we find solace in the company of other left handed persons. We look for each other in crowded areas and make eye contact. We acknowledge each other with instant recognition of our condition. Until we gain the acceptance that we deserve, we will continue to share that phrase that gives comfort and understanding. “Oh, you’re left handed too!”

Bob E.

P.S.
Next Issue: Americans with Disabilities Act and How It Relates To Short Balding People
Following Issue: Being an “Outlaw” From the North

The Seattle Mariners are one of the last baseball franchises on earth which have never hit Craig Biggio with a pitch. They hit 53 batters last year. 8 of them played 2nd base. One of them had over 200 career HBPs. But none of them were even named Craig, much less Craig Biggio. The Mariners opportunities to plunk Biggio have been extremely limited, but this year they have what is almost certainly their final chance. Three games in June to add their franchise to the list of teams that have helped Craig Biggio become the most plunked batter of all time. Are they the sort of people who would jump in at the very end and throw the record breaking plunk, claiming the entire accomplishment for themselves like one of those people who puts in the very last piece of the jigsaw puzzle after someone else did the rest, or solves the Wheel of Fortune puzzle after the other player goes bankrupt greedily trying to fill in every letter with spin after spin? Are the Mariners that kind of team? We’ll find out June 15th, 16th and 17th in Houston. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s the kind of contribution the Mariners want to make. Better late than never. It’s not a great analogy anyway, because the accomplishment is Biggio’s - the guys throwing the pitches are more often hapless witnesses to greatness.

53 plunks tied the Mariners with Detroit for 9th place on the American League plunk chart. The top two contributors to that total, Joel Pineiro (10) and Gil Meche (8) have both left the team, leaving Jarrod Washburn as their leading incumbent plunk thrower. But, they’ve signed Jeff Weaver, who hit 10 batters last year and has thrown 110 plunks in his career. Also new to the team is Miguel Batista - he threw plunk #280 last year and plunk 182 in 2001 (both plunks were in the 3rd inning with a runner on 2nd base).

The Mariners only hit 6 batters in June last year, if they match that number this year, and throw them all at Biggio, he won’t need any help from the rest of the league (in case you haven’t been paying attention, Biggio needs 6 plunks for the all time record). 6 plunks would tie the single season team record for hitting Biggio with pitches, and it would break the single series record. Biggio has never recorded his 6th plunk of a season on June 15th, 16th or 17th, but he did get his 70th hit of the 1992 season on June 16th. Biggio’s 70th hit this year (if you still haven’t been paying attention) will be his 3000th.

Rocco Baldelli, Ron Belliard, Hank Blalock, Aaron Boone, Jorge Cantu, David DeJesus (twice), Mark DeRosa, Mark Ellis (four times), Lew Ford, Alex Gonzalez, Luis Gonzalez, Curtis Granderson, Nick Green, Vladimir Guerrero, Ramon Hernandez, Aaron Hill, Omar Infante, Maicer Izturis, Conor Jackson, Derek Jeter, Reed Johnson (twice), Jason Kendall (twice), Adam Kennedy, Paul Konerko, Gerald Laird, Rob Mackowiak, Doug Mientkiewicz (twice), Kevin Millar (twice), Melvin Mora, Mike Napoli, Greg Norton, Pablo Ozuna, Corey Patterson, Wily Mo Pena, Jorge Posada, Juan Rivera, Ryan Shealy, Matt Stairs, Nick Swisher, Miguel Tejada, Marcus Thames, Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, Vance Wilson and Eric Young were all plunked by the Mariners in 2006.

When Monet, Renoir, Bazille, Manet, Degas, and Cezanne revolutionized painting in the nineteenth century, they were ridiculed by the French press and rejected by the judges of the Salon, the most prestigious of France’s art exhibitions. Because few art dealers would buy their paintings, they were always in debt, often buying paints before paying their landlords and grocers. Recognition and admiration were decades away.

Seen on BBC and PBS television, The Impressionists is a three episode miniseries full of light and color, just like the paintings of these impressionist painters. Based on letters, diaries, and interviews of the time, this dramatization shows an aged Monet (played by Julian Glover) remembering the lives of his friends. Much of the film appears to have been shot at historic locations (or good recreations), as viewers are shown both settings and the resulting masterworks throughout the presentation.

Teachers might consider showing the miniseries to their students, as the characters discuss their methods and philosophies. Viewer learn much art history effortlessly. One of my favorite scenes has a young Monet (played by Richard Armitage) at his easel in a field painting his family standing among the wildflowers; they will not stay put while he works, so he paints them in two spots on the canvas. I also really liked the scene of Monet running from canvas to canvas as the light changed on haystacks.

Readers who enjoyed The Judgment of Paris by Ross King should see this three hour miniseries. Viewers might also like Un Dimanche à la campagne (A Sunday in the Country), a beautiful French film about an aging impressionist painter remembering his life work.

Impressionists. Koch Vision, 2002. 2 DVDs. ISBN 1417229527.

EMI has signed a deal with YouTube. “It means all four of the world's major music firms are now YouTube partners. The terms of the agreement should eventually allow users to incorporate recordings by EMI artists into their own projects.”
BBC 05/31/07

Salty sea-dog Russell Brown has teamed up with friend & FX pro John McConnell to create a new Photoshop Films production, Software Pirates of the Caribbean. Despite Russell’s Malkovich-style multiplicity (playing a dozen characters, including the odd parrot), the credits swear that “No Russell Browns were harmed in the making of this feature.”  Heh–most excellent stuff, and I do believe I caught some ace usage of the Wilhelm Scream :-).  A little advice to Russell: just don’t try to transport that mustache across state lines.
In related news, you can see the same 3D ship used in the movie get attacked by a sea monster, all inside Photoshop CS3 Extended, in Russell’s new tutorial.  The good folks at Daz3D, creators of the sea monster, are making the file downloadable for free for use in Photoshop.  And elsewhere Terri Stone shares some piratical photos from the just-wrapped ADIM Conference, where attendees had their heads scanned & turned into action figures.  More on that soon!

I updated my Joomla! template this weekend but forgot to change the auto-discovery for RSS feeds on Joomla! What does that mean?It means when you go to a page your browser can automagically figure out what syndication options are available. For Firefox users you would get a cool orange RSS icons like this right of the URL in your navigation bar.

Safari users would get a blue RSS box, and IE explorers would get something else I suppose.

The simplest thing to do is alter the new template with the following lines of code not the URLs are specific to my feed, you would substitute your own:

<link rel= alternate type= application/rss+xml title= RSS xhref= http://mysite.com/rss.xml />
<link rel= alternate type= application/rdf+xml title= RSS xhref= http://mysite.com/index.rdf />

<link rel= service.feed type= application/atom+xml title= Atom xhref= http://mysite.com/atom.xml />

To do this, login to your sites administration interface and then go to Site -> Site Administration, click the radio button for the template and click the Edit HTML button in the upper right hand corner. Then add the code from the example above between the <head>and </head> tags (remember to change the feed URLS for your site). I use Feedburner’s SmartFeed Service so I am adding only one line, but it all should work the same.

While this works fine there’s a problem you then have to update every new template you need to remember to do this, ideally you should have a way to update the Global Configuration with this information, I am going to look at some SEO modules that allow for specific meta data so I can add this site wide. This is especially useful if you have multiple templates and don’t want to update each one individually.

Tags: RSS, Joomla!, Autodiscovery