Technology

Sorry for the extended downtime over the weekend everyone - all the maintenance is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

CAPTCHA has become a standard device to trap and block spam on sites like this one.

The idea is that if someone writes a computer program to drop spam comments on this blog, the computer program will be asked to solve a problem first. That problem (like “what letters are below in this squiggly image?” or “what’s 4+12?”) is not Turing-computible. So only a human being will solve it.

At long last, I’m please to present a new piece of software, Bible Reading Plan Generator.

There is a page dedicated to it on this site: http://www.oakleys.org.uk/software/bibleplan.

Visit the software’s homepage for more information.

In essence, though, it’s free software that takes a list of Biblical books, and devises a reading plan for you over any number of days you want.

My final post (for now) on internet etiquette – which (you will remember from the first one) is about helping those who wish to be courteous online to avoid unwitting discourtesy.

Time to talk about forwarding e-mails / attachments on to other people.

Continuing a mini (cathartic?) series on internet etiquette:

Just so we’re clear, the convention on capitalisation is that capitalising a phrase / sentence / paragraph is intended to convey shouting. One of the downsides of e-mail, and forum posting, is that it is hard to convey emotion, a twinkle in the eye, a gentle tone of voice and so on. It is easy for people to misunderstand the nature of something you say.

You’ll find the introduction to this series of posts at the top of my first post on net etiquette.

Here’s number 3.

You’ll find the introduction to this series of posts at the top of my first post on net etiquette.

Here is my second plea. Please type a subject when you send an e-mail.

Websites / blogs / e-mails / forums are increasingly a part of modern life. One side-effect is information overload.

There are ways in which people can contribute to the net that help with this. There are ways that do not help. This is the first of a series of short posts that plead for considerate net use. I’m sure nobody is deliberately obstructive in any of the ways I will outline. In which case, people need to point out what consitutes good etiquette and why – otherwise considerate people will continue making cyberspace more difficult to navigate – without realising it.

I get so many bizarre search-engine queries leading to hits on my websites that there are too many to mention.

But one of my favourites has to be the one from today: the person searching for why do pitta breads last so long who ended up on the website for Edible Words

Each to their own!

Yes – but it’s no big deal!

Partly, I can’t quite decide what I like.

Partly, Edible Words is nearly ready to launch, and the colour scheme I chose for myself was converging a little too close to the scheme for that site. My scheme was chosen on a whim. The scheme for Edible Words was chosen quite deliberately (if you’ve been there you’ll know why Burgundy Red and Ripe-Grain Gold were the two colours I went for). So mine was the one to budge.

But I still can’t quite decide what I like, so this may not be the end of it…