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It might be a little sad, but apparently today is 1337 day, or "leet" day. That's right, the date today, written properly, is 13/3/7. I have to confess, I'm not quite sure what would be an appropriate way to celebrate.

Update 13 Feb 2007: The copied content has been removed.

I'm no stranger to plagiarism. Plenty of the articles on this site have been lifted and reproduced elsewhere. There's not much I can do about it. Usually a quick email to the perpetrator solves the problem. No sense getting worked up about it - it takes a little of my time once in a while to stay on top of it.

Sometimes, though, one of these incidents just surprises me. Recently, with the help of the brilliant Copyscape, I tracked down a copy of my article on the robots.txt file.

The shock? It was ripped off by a University! Indiana University, to be precise - here's "their" robots.txt guide. As with most copies, the person responsible has endeavoured to hide the copy by slightly reworking the content. Copyscape provide a page highlighting the matching passages from the two documents, which shows more or less exactly what was copied and how the duplicate was put together.

Content on this site is released under a Creative Commons License, which allows people to reproduce and build on content here. The conditions of that are that due credit must be given and derivative works must be similarly licensed. Given that the university has failed to give credit, their use is clearly not covered by this license.

I'm surprised that the university couldn't find the time (or maybe they couldn't find a person) to put an article on something simple like the robots exclusion standard by themselves. I can only hope the rest of the content they have in the same area of the site is their own.

The Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet and accompanying article have been translated into Italian by Luca Magnani.

I love that Creative Commons licensing can allow, even encourage, this type of thing.

I am aware of other translations in the works too - someone is putting together German versions, and I have a French version of the CSS Cheat Sheet to turn into a cheat sheet and post.

I'm working on some interesting personal projects at the moment, including a piece of tracking software that's been in the works now for about 2 years. Every time I start up work on it again though, someone else comes along and releases something that does what I want and my little app is shelved again. First it was Mint, and then Metrics from Performancing, and when that was closed I resumed work. And then more recently came the exquisite Reinvigorate.

However, one of the features I implemented (inspired by the clever thinking from the guys at 103 Bees) was a pane to view questions people typed into search engines in order to find my site. This really is a great idea - you can see what (a small percentage of) people are looking for from your site. And you can tailor content accordingly, as the questions you'll find in your referral traffic are great inspiration for articles.

Inevitably, not all questions lead on to full blown articles. Some only require short answers, and it's those I'm interested in today. Without further preamble, here are some of the answers you apparently seek.

which are you?

The most popular individual question, by far, used to find this site is simply "which are you?", a question that will land you in the middle of the World's Worst Quiz. Unfortunately, this is a question I simply can't answer for you - the nature of human consciousness is beyond the scope of this site.

how to cheat on/at/in world of warcraft

While the previous question is the most popular single question asked that leads to this site, traffic from variations on the "how to cheat in world of warcraft" theme simply dwarfs everything else. There are, of course, ways to cheat in WoW, as with every other game. However, these questions will lead you, on this site, to the World of Warcraft Cheat Sheet only - a disappointment, I fear, to many visitors in search of automated levelling tools and hacks.

css?

Not all questions are created equal - some provide more information to go on than others. At the risk of being horribly wrong, and assuming the people asking this succintly put question are looking for an introduction to Cascading Style Sheets rather than Counter-Strike Source, I highly recommend the W3Schools Introduction to CSS.

is php secure? how secure is php

PHP Security is something I've written about before, because it is an interesting and important topic for PHP developers. The security of PHP applications, as with any other language, is dependant primarily on the skill and awareness of the developers writing in it, and in that sense PHP is as secure as any other language. PHP does have a reputation for insecurity though, and that is because PHP makes it very very easy for someone with no development experience to write a basic application. Many scripts and sites are built by people with no idea of the potential security issues they face.

what is a white hat

That might not be quite the right question to ask. The answer is that a white hat is a commonly used term to describe search engine optimisers (SEOs) who use techniques deemed ok by the search engines. The opposite is "black hat", a term used to describe SEOs that use techniques deemed bad by the search engines. In practice, most competent SEOs are actually somewhere in the middle ("grey hats"). Each website, and customer, is different, and to obey the search engines' every wish is not always in the best interests of a client.

I said that "what is a white hat" might not be the right question to ask - a better one might be "why should I care about white and black hats?". And the answer to that question is that you probably shouldn't. There are people that obsess about hats and SEO techniques, but in the real world success is a matter of picking the right techniques and balancing risk with reward.

what is css "faux columns" what is faux column

Faux Columns is a technique published by Dan Cederholm to overcome a shortcoming in CSS. The basic principle is that two unequal columns can be made to appear the same height through the use of a background image, that gives the illusion of equal height columns in fixed-width sites. In June 2004 I wrote about achieving the same effect for liquid layouts in Liquid Faux Columns.

when is jack daniels birthday

The precise date of Jack Daniel's birthday was lost to a courthouse fire, unfortunately. However, the date is known to be in September, and for that reason Jack Daniel's (the company) celebrate his birthday for the whole month of September every year!

are cookies dangerous?

Not the web kind. You can choke on the tasty kind though if you're not careful.

meta tags useless?

More often than not, yes. For a breakdown of which ones are useful and which ones are not, check out my article on Meta Tags.

how to go back in time

I know, I know. This site is about web stuff. But time travel is interesting. [Incidentally, it was this post about the design switching gizmo that our wannabe temporal tourist found.] If time travel is in fact possible (and causality may have something to say about that), the likelihood is that it will be achieved using wormholes or black holes. According to Wikipedia, travelling faster than the speed of light or harnessing the power of cosmic strings may also provide the key to travelling back in time.

But why would you want to travel back in time? You could end up in a place before the internet existed or, worse, when IE4 was the best web browser on Earth! Dark times indeed.

John Sheehan has been a very busy developer! He's been working like a man possessed on a selection of .NET Cheat Sheets (ASP.NET primarily). Available for free, as all good cheat sheets should be, and very very smart indeed.

Advertising on blogs and personal websites is tricky. On the one hand, running a site isn't always cheap (both in terms of hours and capital), and a small income is very welcome. On the other hand, in a perfect world the ads would be unnecessary. In my case, I've tried a variety of advertising models to support the site, and the previous one has served me well for the last year.

Removed have been, and continue to be, extremely effective for advertisers and provide a decent stream of revenue. They're also not too intrusive. I'm happy with how those are running. AdSense, however, has not really performed well enough to justify the placement of 3 ads on the page (my own fault entirely - my advert placement and styling, I think, has been all wrong).

With that in mind, I have changed the style and placement of the AdSense advertising on the site. It is (currently) a single block advert above the fold. I plan to experiment with this and test different styles over the coming weeks and months, and will let you know how it turns out. My hunch at this stage is that the block approach is probably going to provide the highest clickthrough rates, but I don't know whether or not it will also prove to be the most intrusive and inflexible of the formats.

Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer is a great tool for checking HTTP status codes, redirection, and so on. I've been unable to find a bookmarklet, though, for sending the URL I am viewing to the viewer automatically, so I put one together:

Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer

tool for checking HTTP status codes, redirection, and so on. I've been unable to find a bookmarklet, though, for sending the URL I am viewing to the viewer automatically, so I put one together: Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer

Browsercam rocks, but it's priced for business, generally making it too expensive for the average blogger to justify joining. However, it is possible (indeed, encouraged - this group is using a Browsercam special offer - Premium membership for one year for the price of one day) to join as a group. There is a group forming now through Fundable, so if you've thought of joining Browsercam before and have been put off by the price, now's the time to join!

I'm going through a sort of Christmas clearout, fixing a few things that have been bugging me, and making a few small additions (tags and the designs thing being the other recent changes), and have now finished making some changes to the feeds on the site.

I've removed some outdated ones, and consolidated virtually identical ones. I've added 301 redirection so each feed has just one URL now. I've also put the whole lot through FeedBurner, so I can find out how many of you lovely people actually use the main feeds.

Hopefully you'll see no negative changes, and may even notice a few positive ones (I've fixed the problems with images not being displayed by readers and line breaks being deleted, I think). Any thoughts, complaints or suggestions are very welcome!

I have added tags to this site, finally. I looked at lots of ways to add them and had a few issues I wanted to address.

First, the idea of going back and tagging years of posts myself did not sound particularly appealing. Second, any tags I pick aren't necessarily going to be useful to you. And third, I really like to write code to do stuff for me :).

I finally completed the tagging system, though, and you can see it in action on most of the posts in this site. Tags come from del.icio.us, so some posts (the kind that don't warrant bookmarking, mostly) won't have tags. I like to think of that as a rather nice side effect.

Thanks Sophie. I normally don't participate in memes like these, but this one strikes me as a particularly useful one, helping users to get to know better the authors of the sites they read.

I have been known to talk code in my sleep when I'm particularly busy or stressed. My wife refuses to write it down though, so I if I want to find out if it's actually functional I'll need to record myself. If pushed, I would guess that it will not be functional but may be better than code I have created when actually awake.

I went on a trek through the Himalayas (the Pin-Parbati pass in Spiti valley) when I was 17. I loved it. We went with a company called World Challenge, who help young groups like ours do treks like that and send along an experienced leader (helps keep us safe etc).

The day we did the pass, we got up at 2am to start what was supposed to be a 7 hour trek to a camp site on the other side of the glacier that was supposed to be clear of snow by this time of year. However, it wasn't, so we had to continue to the next site. Which turned a 6 hour day into a 14 hour day. And I had no sunscreen, because it had exploded in my bag 2 days before. Nobody could spare any, as they were all running very low.

If I could offer a piece of advice - walking on snow for 14 hours in the height of Indian summer without sunscreen is a bad idea. Take 2 tubes. Big tubes. Factor 1000. And if I ever hear you complain you have sunburn, then unless chunks of your face are actually falling off, I am more likely to laugh than be sympathetic. (In case you were curious, I got very very lucky and escaped without scars - E45 cream FTW.)

I believe it is physically impossible to eat less than a whole pack of Maryland cookies. I've tried. I can open the pack, and I can eat a few. But then they're gone and I'm left feeling confused.

I am half Canadian. One day, I will move to Montreal. I anticipate worldwide maple syrup, waffle and bacon shortages almost immediately following this. These events will be related.

Sometimes, on the rare occasion I am being snowed on (and when I think nobody is watching), I run around trying to catch snowflakes on my tongue.

I think the Opera browser is awesome, especially the email client. Oh wait, you probably already knew that ...

Have a cookie, Andy Budd, Chris Korhonen, Paul Silver, William Lawrence and Nick Tong.

Look to the right of this page. You will see some new links (under the distinctly misleading heading "Design"). If you dare click them, you will be magically transported back in time, to a place where beauty was a concept unheard of, and usability a forbidden word.

Yes, that's right. While everyone else is redesigning and improving their sites, I am, in fact, going backwards. I have put all the older designs for this site back online for your viewing displeasure - and displease you they may very well do.

While I have so far only added the major designs that have previously adorned this site, I hope in the future to add some of the designs that never made it. I will also be putting together new designs "live" using this system, once again, in the future.