Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 7:40 pm. 1 comment
I don’t really care much about pingbacks and trackbacks but I guess they have their usefullness to the blogging community. Its not just bloggers who use it, but spammers as well. They use this easy oppurtunity to get their site listed because Akismet won’t moderate pingbacks. You’ll need a seperate plugin just to block them completely. I do recommend using two plugins to combat two different types of pingback spam which we’ll go into detail below
Blocking Pingback Spam from Spammers!
The plugin I suggest using is Trackback Validation Plugin. Its pretty good and has been filling in the holes that even Spam Karma left behind. It places all pingbacks on moderation allowing you to not have to wake up each day worrying about how someone found your post interesting but they didn’t agree with parts of it.. ya right.. You can try out the Trackback Validation Plugin.
Examples of Pingback Spam include:
Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts…..
I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view…
May I use some of your content on my website?…
I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….
Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin…..
Blocking Pingback Spam from You!
I am one of the bloggers who insist that pingbacks should only come from external sources, not your own blog. If you want to show related posts, you should instead use the related plugin. This isn’t really the point though, pingback spam from your own blog is irritating only because it automatically adds it self to the comments even when you just wanted to link to a previous entry. Since there is no internal option to disable yourself from sending pingbacks, you can instead use the no self pinback plugin.
So I hope you try those out because quite frankly I’m tired of this whole pingback mess.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 6:48 pm. 3 comments
One thing I noticed during skinning Aim 6.0 is that most of the buttons you see are not pictures. Infact "Boxely" the engine that renders the program has the capability to create gradients on the fly. If you had experience with making web 2.0 style buttons on the web, you’ll know already that the secret effect that gives a button its shine or glossiness comes from where colors are placed along a gradient. If your new to this or don’t understand what I’m talking about, I’ll show you a little demo of how colors are handled in Aim 6.0.
Solid Brushes
Aim 6.0 has a Solid Brush function. solidBrush tells the program that the particular ID of what your editing will have ONE color. The solid brush markup goes like this…
<solidBrush id="textColor.defaultButton" fill="#000000" />
Note fill="#000000", this is where you place the HTML Color Code. #000000 is the color code for black text. If you want to change it to another color you would change the letters and numbers after the # sign. Also there must be 6 Letter/Number combination in order to work.
Linear Gradient Brush
Aim 6.0 also has a Linear Gradient Brush. linearGradientBrush tells the program that the particular ID of what your editing will have multiple colors. The linear gradient brush markup goes like this…
<linearGradientBrush id="gradient.aimWindow.windowContent">
<rotateTransform center="50% 50%" angle="-90"/>
<gradientStops>
<gradientStop offset="0%" color="#121212"/>
<gradientStop offset="100%" color="#363636"/>
</gradientStops>
</linearGradientBrush>
Ok woah what happened here!? This got way more complicated than the solid brush. Well a gradient needs more than 1 color to become an actual gradient. Most of the entries in your skins will use linear gradients. In theory all solid brushes should be able to convert to linear gradient and vice versa. Now there are a few rules with linear gradients though. It needs to have a gradientStops tag and that tag must be closed after your gradientStop offsets. You also must close the linearGradientBrush tag at the end of the particular ID. Another rule is that you should begin the gradientStop offset at "0%" and end at "100%". Your free to place whatever values you want between those two colors. Aim 6.0’s boxely engine will render the blending it will take to those positions.
GradientStop Offset.
This is particularly hard to visualize if your new to creating gradients in photoshop or paint shop pro. What you need to do here is start off with one color at "0%" and end at "100%". The percentage tells you where that particular color will start and continue to. At the same time that particular color will also blend with the next gradientstop offset unless you specify otherwise.
Now your not limited to just 2 colors, in my skin, I use 4 to 5 different gradient offsets. By positioning the colors in a certain way you can create an effect where the colors smoothly create a bump like effect, or abrupt colors that creates a sheen glass like effect. Lets take a look at one of the mistakes I used in my skin.
<gradientStop offset="0%" color="#f3f8e7"/>
<gradientStop offset="25%" color="#8cc110"/>
<gradientStop offset="51%" color="#abd747"/>
<gradientStop offset="100%" color="#abd747"/>
Now you may not see anything wrong here, but if your as picky as I am, you’ll notice that the send IM button’s colors does not match the bar beside it. Take a look at the markup. According to my percentages, these colors will blend smoothly. The farther apart the percentages are, the more smoother bump-like the colors are… [however this isn't always true since you can just use 2 similar colors at the top and 2 similar colors at the bottom to make use of the abrupt glass like effect.] Lets fix this up to create a similar style.
<gradientStop offset="0%" color="#abd747"/>
<gradientStop offset="40%" color="#8cc110"/>
<gradientStop offset="41%" color="#D9FF82"/>
<gradientStop offset="44%" color="#8cc110"/>
<gradientStop offset="100%" color="#abd747"/>
Ok now you’ll see a major difference. Take a look at the markup, I’m using 5 gradient offsets to achieve this effect. Note that at 41%-44% the brightest color is used. Then it continues back to the regular gradient. This can be cleaned up better since its kind of redundant to have 5 colors doing that style when I could just fake it with 4 colors.
<gradientStop offset="0%" color="#abd747"/>
<gradientStop offset="41%" color="#abd747"/>
<gradientStop offset="44%" color="#8cc110"/>
<gradientStop offset="100%" color="#abd747"/>
There, nobody will notice the difference unless they have really keen eyes. Thats all for this lesson.
Learn More About creating Aim 6.0 skins
- Download Aim Skins -
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 4:25 pm. 25 comments
Finally, the ability to skin Aim 6.8 is here. After months of skinning AIM, here are some tips and tricks to get you started on creating your own AIM skin. After you have created your skin you’ll be able to save it and it will create its own folder at
C:\Program Files\AIM6\services\imApp\ver6_8_10_1\theme\ This blog entry will have additional tips and tricks dynamically added once its been found.
= Download Aim 6 Skins =
Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 1:55 pm. 0 comments
This entry is technical gobiltygook skip this entry please…
For the rest of you…
Open your .htaccess in the MU root Directory.
Add the line "AddType x-mapp-php5 .php" to the top.
This Fixes Signup and Valid.php Captcha hack.
