After testing out Movable Type and Blogger, I decided to give WordPress a try. I didn’t have a lot of experience in manipulating MySQL databases, but I was decided to learn it, since WP is using SQL databases.

So, after downloading the small 300KB zip file, I installed it in my local PHP server directory. At first, I got some problems in installing the “software” because I had to create a database with PHPMyAdmin, which was a pain to do, for me. And after understanding how SQL is working, with users, tables, etc; I got it.

The user interface is pretty interesting. Better than Blogger’s one I must say. I don’t know if it’s better than MT’s one, because I never reached this step in the process of trying Movable Type ;) Also, a nice function of WP is the Import System. You can import your posts from MovableType, Blogger, GreyMatter, LiveJournal, etc. But the perfect Import option for me was the RSS 2.0 import. WP retreives all your posts written in your RSS feed. Isn’t that wonderful? OK, it can’t import entries’ comments via the feed… but I guess it does when importing from MT or Blogger.

But I found it quite hard when it comes to editing templates. A load of XHTML tags with PHP variables. How can you integrate an already existing CSS layout to this? I guess it’s impossible. You have to design a new layout to match WP items.

In conclusion, WordPress is the best blogging software I ever tested. If the author, Matt Mullenweg, would be able to code a Cutenews import module (which would import categories and comments correctly), I’d switch to it right after.

I’ve just realized that the fact that Cutenews’ code is public helped hackers to discover some exploits in it. I won’t mention any of the exploits here, that’s not the goal of this entry! Just wanted to tell an advice to Cute users:

I discovered that the number of potential exploits can be highly reduced if the ‘hacker’ doesn’t know where Cutenews is located.

P.S. - Many exploits in Cute has been fixed in latest versions, but I’m still using 1.3.2 version. So, risks of exploits are lower if you’re using 1.3.5+.

Yes, you can change the style of this page! Well, you can since several months, but I don’t know if many of you have tested the “alternate” style sheets. Anyway, I’ll explain each, one by one.

Column

The Column style has been created just to experiment if it was possible to make a fixed-width style easily. Yes, it was. This is probably the only style I’m style improving, when I have nothing else to do, I like “modding” my style sheets.

Fizzy

I created that style to see if I was able to produce the same design as my previous (full tables) layout. I think I succeeded. It looks ‘almost’ the same as the original fizzy!

Classic

The heir of the rounded boxes style. I don’t know why, but I wanted firstly a — what we call ‘liquid’ — relative width layout. Made with the same tints of blue as Column.

No CSS

The plain one. The simplest one. The greatest one.

Here is the list of some of the software we’ll be using in our 3 years formation:

• 3D Studio Max
• Adobe Photoshop CS
• Adobe Illustrator CS
• Adobe GoLive CS
• Finalcut 2.0.3
• Macromedia Flash MX 2004
• Macromedia Director MX 2004

Cool, eh?

I did the same thing with all the single-letter domain names ending with “org”. Only one — yes, one — was registred.

X.org is the website of the X.org group. Weird, isn’t it?

However, I found another “special” domain name: org.org. It’s seems — no home page — to be the website of a person, which likes cars… Anyway, have fun on the Internet :-P

Note for my-self: “Now Remi, do the same thing with .net’s. You know, to make a sort of trilogy… But wait some days, to keep the punch!“

I find my-self with a couple minutes in my hands today. So I did a little search around the web to find out where some single-letter-domain-names (with .com) would take me.

I found my self astonished about the fact that only 3 of them were linked to a website. They are q.com, x.com and z.com.

Q.com is a “shortcut” for Qwest.com website.
X.com redirects to Paypal website?!?
Z.com takes you to the Nissan ‘Z’ website.

Interesting search huh? I thought that companies would have register those domain names and make them redirecting to their website, in case of a mistyping error by a user.

Update: As someone said (BruB, in that case) you can’t register a dot com domain names if it doesn’t have more than 3 letters. He said that he was wondering how much companies gave (in cash) to be the owner of those domain names. I don’t know, but let me remind you two of the well-known sold domain names:

Business.com was sold to eCompanie for $7.5 million on November 1999.
Year2000.com bid on eBay ended at $10 million on January 2000.

It’s Google 6th Birthday! Here are some of Google’s latest realisations: Gmail, Blogger and Orkut.

Google.com

Yeah, it must arrive sooner than you’d think… ;)

P.S. - Esthetica is the new modzine (or shell-shocked), in french. A customization e-zine, in french. Stay tuned!

This entry is the 101th I post on ifiz blog. 101 entries (including the daily picks), and almost 101 comments (if we exclude all those spam comments I got and deleted), which represents in average one comment by entry. I know my entries don’t get 30-40 comments like Dan and Dave ones do. But I’m quite satisfied with the results of this blog: I can experiment things with CSS and XHTML, I’m posting entries from my school, since I don’t have a computer at home. And I’m receiving nice comments from people :-)

So I want to thank all the people who posted comments on my blog entries. Thank you so much! For other “Thanks” go here.

Because I study Multimedia stuff, I’m working on an eMac all week long, exept for Programmation class, when we are on PCs. So I’m on Mac OS X all week long, and at home, I’m on my good old PC with Windows XP. Which I’ll use on weekends.

So I sat tonight in front of my computer (the PC, remember) and I boot it (turned it on) up. In a single week working on a Mac, I had forgotten how Windows is slow to boot, Explorer is so slow to start, programs are so slow to open. In few words: it’s slow!

Why do things we do are so simple to do in Mac OS X, and so complex and long to do in Windows, even XP?

I know it didn’t take me a lot of time to get convinced that Mac OS X is more powerful than Windows… Anyone got the same opinion?

P-S: Don’t forget that the GMail invites “contest” is still open! Now with 6 invites to give! But still post your request in the previous entry :-)