Well it looks like Google have released a PageRank Update on New Years Eve, 31.12.09.

And actually, it turned out to be a great update for me.

I started this blog in the middle of October, and already it’s gone from PR0 straight to PR5. I have no doubt that it’s because of the support for all of my WordPress plugins. Thanks guys

Another rather interesting thing is that loaaaaads of my posts have PageRank on them. My blog is DoFollow. Get commenting guys!

I hope you all have a happy new year!

When is a laptop not a laptop? When it’s a netbook, of course. The line has clearly been drawn – anything 12 inches and below can be classified as a netbook while anything above is a standard laptop. In fact, most netbooks are actually perfectly happy to keep themselves in the 10 inch range where the added portability finds the best balance with control systems and screens. However, there’s a growing market for 12 inch netbooks which are easy to carry around and yet feature nicer displays and full size keyboards. The S12 is one of them.

The system looks good if not quite as stylish as efforts from Samsung, Sony and Dells ‘designer’ range. The overall plastic doesn’t look as good as some netbooks, especially the cheaper looking white version, although the actual build quality is pretty sturdy and befitting of a device that’s going to be carried around quite often. At least it isn’t

The two main reasons for having a larger 12 inch system – the screen and the keyboard – are both top notch on the S12. The glossy screen offers up 1280×800 in a world where most netbooks can only manage 1024×600 and offers up a 16:10 aspect ratio, even if the gloss means usage outside will result in all sorts of annoying reflections. The keyboard is a full sized laptop keyboard so if you’re major complaint about netbooks is not being able to type easily, the S12 might just be a perfect solution.

Entry level S12s come with a 1.3 GHZ processor but we strongly recommend spending the extra £20 and grabbing the 1.6 Ghz Atom, which is the standard for just about every modern netbook. The system speeds through XP with 1GB of ram although an upgrade to 2GB could make multitasking easier. As the deep technical specs of netbooks are all very similar right now, there’s nothing really remarkably ‘stand out’ from the S12s performance but really, it’s good enough.

Overall, the S12 might just be the perfect design for a netbook. Yes, the 12 inch screen makes it a larger and heavier choice but having a higher resolution and bigger keyboard alone will justify this for many people. If you want more screen real estate or you simply have bigger hands, the S12 is well worth a glance.

Hi guys,

I’d just like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, despite the fact that I’m not really in the Christmas spirit much this year

Some of you may have noticed the falling presents coming from my blog, which was made using my own JR Effects plugin. I feel that it added a bit of an extra touch, whereas every other blog is using snow.

Anyway, as for creating WordPress plugins, I will probably be back making them and releasing updates on boxing day (26th December) or possibly the day after. Obviously I can’t really create anymore today as I have other commitments, as will a lot of you who visit my blog.

I’d also like to personally thank everyone who has supported my plugins and are using them at the moment. Obviously they’re all free and it does take quite a lot of work to create them and manage them, the only thing I get out of it is a small link. I will aim to produce even better plugins in future, and keep updating the ones I have made. As usual, if you could give me feedback about any of my plugins I can work on the improvements, as quite a lot of people have found out. I do actually read the feedbacks.

One last thing I want to mention, happy birthday to my hero Tuomas Holopainen of Nightwish. It must be so nice having your birthday on Christmas Day and I’m sure quite a lot of people would wish him a happy birthday too. Just a shame it’s quite difficult to personally contact him.

Enjoy the rest of your day, have a merry Christmas!

Well in the last week or so, it’s been a big week for… URL shorteners.

To start with, Google have announced that they’re going to be releasing a URL shortener. The domain they will be running this on is goo.gl. If you go to the page currently, Google claims it’s only for google products at the moment. Nobody is yet sure whether (or when) they will release the use of it to the public, but at the moment, we just have to see what Google decides to use it’s shortened URLs for. I’m not fully sure why they’d need to shorten their URLs, Google seems to be pretty memorable and short, and to be honest, I’m more likely to forget goog.gl.

Not only that though, they’ve also released a URL shortener for their YouTube service. This is live right now. If you have a link, such as:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9thA0bUkA

Then you can use their service by typing in http://youtu.be/jZ9thA0bUkA. This will then redirect you to the video you were looking for. This is absolutely pointless, I really don’t see many people using it. People seem to have got used to the old, traditional YouTube video URLs.

And finally onto the last one – The Facebook URL shortener. Apparently Facebook are currently testing out theirs, which will be put on the domain fb.me, which I suppose is much smaller than the original. I still don’t see this being very popular either, but I’m sure Facebook will make it a viable solution to use.

That is all the main URL shorteners announced recently. I’m still quite baffled how Google, YouTube and Facebook all seem to be getting these URL shorteners at more-or-less the same time.

Most of you will probably never heard the story about this song, The Heart Asks for Pleasure First. Originally created by Michael Nyman, Nightwish made a cover version of it, adding lyrics and other instruments to make it “Nightwish-y”. Nightwish weren’t allowed to release it though as Nyman refused to give them permission.

Nightwish then played the song as an outro on the last gig of the Dark Passion Play tour, in Finland. That is where everyone started to campaign to get Michael Nyman to change his mind and let Nightwish release it. Pretty much everyone seemed to love the song.

Well after months of campaigning, we’ve all won! Michael Nyman has officially changed his mind, and now Nightwish have the right to release their version of The Heart Asks for Pleasure First. According to Tuomas Holopainen, they WILL release the song, but aren’t quite sure when yet. I’m really hoping that I don’t have to wait for the next album in 2011 to hear this song, so let’s hope it’s released before then!

P.S. If you’ve never heard Nightwish before, you really need to listen to them sometime. Great band.

I seem to be getting bombarded with spam comments lately (Upwards of 10 spam comment a day). I do manually check these comments because sometimes valid comments get accidently sent to the spam box.

I do think that I could spend my time doing more productive things though, so I’m going to try my best to stop as much spam as possible.

I do want to keep the comments on this blog DoFollow because I do a lot of commenting myself so I’d got to give something back to the community, I suppose.

Don’t be surprised if you suddenly see the comment system suddenly changing. I’ll do a bit of tweaking today and see what I can come up with.

Hi Guys

I just thought I’d let you know that I still have some Google Wave invites available, so if you’re still needing one then you can comment on my blog post at Get a Free Wave Invite!.

For the people who have commented on this post but not received a personal email back from me, I have invited you to Google Wave, don’t worry. You should receive your invite very shortly (Basically, as soon as Google decides to send it. It doesn’t take long).

I hope everyone enjoys Google Wave! (Despite the fact that I hardly ever use it…)

For those who don’t wish to read the rest of this review and just need a simple opinion, we’ll put it up here first: Spotify will change the face of the modern music and it’s the most important thing you’ll download this year. Now read on!

Spotify is essentially a frontend for an online music streaming service, and if you’ve enjoyed using sites like last.fm or listening to internet radio then you’ll be instantly familiar with the idea. If not, you may just be won over by Spotify. The program runs on Windows and is currently only available in a select number of countries due to the complicated process of working out licensing deals across borders. This list currently includes most of Europe but not the US.

If you happen to be lucky enough to live in the country that does support the program, you’ll have access to literally hundreds of thousands of albums from just about every type of music available from soft rock to death metal. Despite having an already immense collection that will put any jukebox to shame, the Spotify team are adding a huge amount of content – singles and albums included – every single day.

The programs interface isn’t perfect, it doesn’t look particularly attractive and it’s certainly more bulky than it needs to be, but it functions well enough and you get used to its many quirks. You can access music through either searching directly or using the ‘radio’ function to play music from a specific year or genre. The radio function is alright but it doesn’t really set Spotify apart from a service like Last.Fm, and isn’t much good at recommendation either.

However, if you know what you’re looking for Spotify works a treat, and allows you to do all number of searches for title, album, year and even record label. An impressive amount of big names have already signed up to Spotify although only a few use the service to promote their newest albums and many don’t have a full library available. A very select few brand new releases are only available to subscribers paying around £10 for the service.

The catch with the program is that the free service has adverts throughout, including banner ads and voice ads. The voice adverts are obviously the most annoying and do ruin the immersion a little bit, but honestly, they are more than worth putting up with for free music and you can remove them completely for only a tenner a month – not bad for access to millions of songs.

The HTC Hero has been a long time coming and for many it heralds a new coming of age for Google’s android system. The other landmark phones using the system including the T-Mobile G1 and the HTC Magic were interesting first steps, but it’s clear from just a few minutes with the Hero that despite the rather corny name, we’re looking at the next generation in terms of how well Android works and what it can do – well, sort of.

One of the power of Android was always going to be its ability to let OEM’s mess around with it to a huge amount, and the complete overhaul HTC have given the system have showed just how well this has paid off. The brand new home screens and keyboard are both far better and more configurable than the original. The design of the Hero is also very clean and professional and certainly gives the iPhone a run for its money – something that can’t be said for many Smartphones on the market right now.

The 3.2 inch screen is also pretty much the same as the iPhone and thankfully it’s got about the same level of excellent responsiveness. The display is bright and clear and perfect for standard phone usage as well as photos and videos. To round things off the Hero finally combines Android with multi-touch, making the phone a joy to control even if they on screen keyboard is a little poor.

Unfortunately, despite a promising start in both design and software, the hardware ends up letting the phone down overall, making the actual experience with the phone far more worth than it should be. Despite the excellent controls and smart software, it’s simply not fast enough to keep up with normal usage. This is even more annoying considering the phone runs at a full 528 MHz – much faster than the original iPhone, despite being slower for it. This isn’t a good show for Android at all and marks the system down quite considerably in our books – HTC had the right choice for the hardware but unfortunately, the operating system couldn’t keep up.

While the Hero makes some great innovations and is solid in both software and form factor, this speed problem means that the Palm Pre, Apple iPhone or even the older HTC Magic are still the best choices right now.

Yes, that is Finnish you can see in the title of this post. Nope, I’ve not gone completely insane, I’m starting to learn Finnish

I’ve learnt some of the basic words so far, but I haven’t really had time to get into any real detail yet. Luckily, thanks to a few nice CDs I found, If I so choose I can go up to a random Finnish person and say “Misså lentokone on?” without looking very weird. Okay, maybe I will if I ask where the aeroplane is.

Anyway, I just thought I’d make a personal post on my PERSONAL blog for a change, after all, if you look at the recent post history it basically just goes like this:

WordPress plugin
Wordpress plugin
Wordpress plugin
Tech tutorial
blah blah blah…

So yeah, I might have to start making some different types of posts on here. Unless of course you’re only here for the wordpress plugins. In that case, I’ll do my best to keep pumping them out, although don’t expect many around Christmas (Which isn’t far away now, woo!) because obviously I’ve got other “family commitments”, but I’ll still make some attempt to code them.

Of course, I am running out of ideas for plugins as you can probably imagine, so if you ever have an idea for a plugin, feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do