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Jason Kottke's mnemonic device contest (in which all and sundry were invited to submit a new mnemonic by which to remember the order of planets) has finished, won (very deservedly) by Josh Mishell. Well done Josh, and great idea for a contest Jason.

My effort, in case you were wondering, was one of three runners up, and was "Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet".

While pottering around online this morning, I decided to see what was happening with SMA UK - originally intended to be a search marketing organisation for the UK - as I'd not heard anything from, or about, them for a while. It appears that the last post to their blog was one year ago today, while the last event listed was 9 months ago. Has SMA gone? Does anyone even know what's happening, or has happened?

There's little doubt that the industry needs representative organisations, and SMA looked originally to be one of the better attempts at creating one so far.

If it's still active, why no public news for a year? If it's not, why no news explaining that? For an organisation that was founded in part in response to SEMPO's problems (SEMPO being another search industry association with a heavy bias towards the American market), and especially SEMPO's lack of meaningful and open communication, they have done remarkably poorly on the same front themselves.

In case anyone was wondering about the recent inactivity on the site, I am still here, and will be posting again soon. I have been a little busy at work over the last few weeks, as I've started a new job with The Sports Nutrition Company as Group Web Development / E-commerce manager.

(While I'm on the subject of work, I've added a Portfolio / Work page to the site. It's a sort of pseudo-CV, detailing what I've worked on and where for the last few years. I'll be expanding it over time.)

I enjoyed my time with Propellernet as an Internet Marketing Consultant, but agency work has its down sides, and I decided it was time to move back into managing sites directly. Working in-house means a lot more time can be spent on any one site, and you have the added benefits of not having to rely on a separate company to get things done, and being able to directly monitor and respond to the effects of your work.

I've been at SNC for a little over a month now, and things are moving along nicely. It's early days yet, and there's a lot of work to be done, but so far things are very promising indeed.

Among others, I'll have the chance to develop and market sites for brands like Reebok and Gold's Gym over the coming year - including some interesting foreign language projects. New challenges are what keep me motivated, and this job looks to have plenty of them.

So yes, I am very busy at the moment, and am taking a break both from writing here and from freelance work. I'm reclaiming my evenings for a few short weeks, but I'll be back later in the month.

Xara Xtreme is my graphics software of choice. It's a vector graphics package designed to make creation of web graphics easy. Almost every image on this site was created with Xtreme.

Xara was, many moons ago, a Corel product. Now, Xara is a company that release Xtreme, and have just recently announced that Linux and OSX users will be getting an open source version of the product soon. Forward thinking from a graphics company? I think so.

Xara turns 25 today, though, and for today only all of their products are half price. Xtreme is US$39.50. Get it while you can!

The actions of Dr. Lance Chambers, Scumbag got me thinking about this site, and the way in which content on it can be used. I, like (I imagine) many publishers, face a bit of a dilemma when it comes to licensing content for other people to make use of.

There are some things I mind, and some things I don't. It's difficult sometimes to think clearly about other people using content - when it's my own work being used, I am prone to let emotions affect my judgement.

Ultimately, I'd like to stop people like Lance selling my work, but make it easy for people like Brian Warren, Kim Evgeniy, Diego Eis and Dapuzz, among others, to produce their own work based upon mine (the people I just mentioned are among those who have created dashboard widgets, and translated the cheat sheets and articles).

After some deliberation, I have decided to change the copyright on this site. I am releasing all content under a Creative Commons License. This license allows people to use the content I've created for non-commercial purposes (anyone wanting to use it for commercial purposes, please e-mail me), as long as they give appropriate credit and release derivative works under an identical license.

I think where I have gone wrong in the past is I've looked at these issues on this site from my own perspective. What I should have done is look at things from the perspective of those who actually use and read the site - those people (yourself included, of course!) are the reason this site is here.

It is entirely possible that this decision may backfire. There is an argument that releasing work under a CC license potentially encourages others to use content but ignore the terms of the license. That said, if it encourages more positive uses of the content, then it's the right decision.

How much would you pay for one of these cheat sheets? Personally, I believe £0.00 is a fair price. It seems I may be undervaluing them though - someone (Dr Lance D Chambers JP a.k.a. lance1949) in Australia has decided to start selling them on eBay (screenshot). Without permission, of course. And without the "Available free from AddedBytes.com" note. Bastard.

They have been posted on other sites before, which is one thing - but conning people into paying for something that someone else produced and distributes for nothing is very very low indeed.

He's not alone in making money from the cheat sheets, but at least this guy is more subtle - he's selling laminating and postage of the cheat sheets.

Thanks to Kevin Futter for letting me know about this.

(Of course, the cheat sheets here are free and always will be.)

Update: It appears he's made a sale! Feel free to forward AU$1.50 on to me when you're ready, Lance.

Another Update: Good news - it seems Lance has ended all of his cheat sheet listings on eBay! Perhaps it was the attention he received from this site and others, or perhaps he had a sudden attack of conscience - either way, he's finally done the right thing.

Interesting to see that eBay themselves failed dismally to do anything, despite at least five people filing separate reports about the listings.

Thanks everyone, for the comments and emails - the support was definitely appreciated!

All of the articles and cheat sheets on this site have so far only been created in English. Much as I'd like to offer them in a variety of language, I unfortunately lack the linguistic skills to be able to do so. Fortunately, there are some multilingual saints out there who have taken the time to translate various parts of this site into other languages.

Where translations exist (and I know about them) they are now linked to from the bottom of each article. If you know of a translation I'm missing (or would like to translate something into a different language) please e-mail me.

Update: I've added the "hreflang" attribute to links that point to translations.

Andy Budd has just announed the lineup for the 2006 d.Construct web development conference in sunny Brighton. Speakers this year include Simon Willison and Jeffrey Veen, and tickets should be on sale soon!

Opera, the revolutionary internet browser, hits version 9 today, with a host of new features - some better than others. I've been using Opera since version 6 and consider its speed and email client to be streets agead of the competition (not to mention tabbed browsing and mouse gestures).

With the addition of a BitTorrent client and Widgets, Opera should be able to make even more headway in the browser market. Their addition of a content-blocker, however, may lose them support of plenty of small-scale web publishers. We shall see.

First impressions are all good so far. If you're using a different browser, I recommend you check out Opera 9. It's free now (until recently it was ad-supported, with an option to pay for a full version without ads), and while it isn't everyone's favourite, it's definitely worth a good look.

I've added in some more feeds. As the topics on here tend to be many and varied, and so not necessarily all of interest to everyone, I've added category-specific RSS and Atom feeds. If you visit any category page, you will see links to the feeds at the top.

So, if you wanted to keep up to date with new cheat sheet releases by RSS, you would subscribe to the Cheat Sheets RSS Feed on the Cheat Sheets category page.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day turns eleven years ol

The Astronomy Picture of the Day turns eleven years old today. It really is a great site, with one new photo every day. They've shown stars being born, shots of Mars, the Earth at night time, the Aurora Borealis and even the occasional observatory. APoD is one of my daily must-reads - thankyou NASA!

d today. It really is a great site, with one new photo every day. They've shown stars being born, shots of Mars, the Earth at night time, the Aurora Borealis and even the occasional observatory. APoD is one of my daily must-reads - thankyou NASA!

For the last few months I've had nothing but problems with blog spammers. I have run a few various systems for keeping the spam in check, and most of them have been quite successful. Unfortunately, they require quite a lot of maintenance and updating, so I have changed the comment spam prevention system to use Akismet. So far, it has caught every spam posted to the site with no false positives - excellent.

What I found disturbing, though, was when I visited the Akismet site and took a look at their stats. Apparently "93% of all comments are spam" now, a far higher proportion than I had thought previously. On AddedBytes.com the figure is about 85%, and rising. So much for the search engines' promise to deal with the problem!