Longboarding, also often referred to as downhill skateboarding, has always been around really. It can be traced back to the earliest days of skateboarding. As skateboarding grew, the shortboard form of skating became more popular with skateboarders always trying to come up with more and more technical tricks.

In recent years, there has been a return to longboarding as surfers took to longboarding when there were no waves. Downhill skateboarding is most popular as longboards are more stable for this discipline than their shorter cousins. The sport has evolved so much though that there are many more disciplines of longboarding now. From downhill skating to freeriding, carving, cruising and sliding.

If you are into longboarding, also be sure to check out the forum on the website, forum for longboarding in South Africa. Share the stoke!

So after Googling around a bit I came across an interesting piece of information. It is possible to update your Twitter account using Google. And to be more precise, Google’s Feedburner. It’s quite simple.

First off you obviously need an account with Feedburner and secondly you need a feed to burn (duh). Then once you have your feed setup, you go to Publicize and on the left you click on Socialize. Then you’ll be presented with a few options, you link up your Twitter account and Bob’s your uncle!

But now, I have been wondering how to get my Facebook updates into Twitter. A while ago Facebook changed their security policy once again and made it virtually impossible to get your status updates to Twitter. It’s quite easy to do it vice versa, but let’s be frank, not all of us want our Twitter updates to go to Facebook. What happens on Twitter should stay on Twitter! So, originally I was using TwitterFeed as I mentioned earlier, but then I thought, I might as well give Feedburner a bash.

Now it’s not quite that easy to setup, but once you know how, it’s a blast. And you know at least when it comes to Google, it works!! One difference is though, the update frequency is not quite as often as TwitterFeed USED to be, but it works a charm.

So how do you get the feed to your Facebook status updates?  Here comes the tricky part:

• Log onto Facebook.
• Go to your notifications page, www.facebook.com/notifications.php
• At the top you’ll see a little link that says, “Via RSS”. Click on it.
• Then in your browsers address field. Change the word notifications to status and hit enter. You’ll now we presented with your own status updates only.

And there you have your feed. Pop it into Feedburner and voila. You can publish it to Twitter or just about anywhere you damn well wish.

Have fun

I’m not entirely sure exactly what the script does, but it seems that they get into the sites via FTP. Which means that my PC must have been infected by a trojan which has been sending them my details. I have so far spoken to another developer and have also seen a comment on another blog post about the same guys, here, which suggest that the trojan targets Filezilla specifically and that way gets all the saved login details to your sites. If you follow that link to Nate Stillers blog you will get some good advice on what to look for.

What I have been doing up until now is just to download all images and template folders, delete the entire installation, then re-upload the images and template folders to the CMS systems. Then I go about changing all the FTP login details as well as the admin login details on the systems themselves.

So far I have had WordPress, Joomla and just plain html sites hacked. I have also downloaded a nifty little application called UnHackMe, which helps with detecting rootkits and trojans which your normal anti-virus won’t pick up.

Hope this helps someone as I have not seen many posts so far about these guys. I you have anything to add, please comment here or on Nate’s Blog post.

According to IT news website, ITWeb (article here), the website www.fifaworldcup.durban.gov.za, will have features such as a live webcam of the stadium as well as interactive postcards and galleries.

After scrutinizing the website myself, I am unable to figure out where the high costs come into play. As a web designer, I can’t help but be critical about the site. The design is definitely nothing to write home about and looking at some of the code on the site, it was built using outdated coding standards, such as tables. Even though the site was built using ASP, it is not any different from any open source content management systems I have seen before. In fact, I know of far more advanced CMS’s than what I see on that site.

True, there might be something going on behind the scenes which the public is not aware of, but R6.5 million??

There is a discussion on this at the famous Port Elizabeth website, MyPE.

I would really like to hear people’s opinions on this! If any professional web developers read this, please leave your comments! I would like to believe I am missing something here!

You do not have to have a website in order to own your own domain name. Domains are not expensive and neither are hosting accounts, especially if you only use it for email.

I recently noticed that there is some confusion about this and decided to make it more clear to my clients on my website. Having an address like, yourname@yourcompany.com is much more professional than the alternative.

How many emails do you send out everyday? Do they reflect your company or brand? This is a very cheap way of getting your brand across.

Find out more on my company’s website, personalised email.

We have never really had much to go on. The problem in the past was that as soon as there are multiple queries in a URL, the search engines do not follow the links. The reason for this being out of fear that the ‘spider’ might get trapped in an infinite amount of queries as might be the case with a calendar for instance that dates into the future.

It seems that this issue has been resolved though and is no longer the case. Hoo ha! Good news for us struggling with Apache’s mod_rewrite.
You can read more on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog, here.

One very annoying thing I have found in the new version is the LinkScanner component. When you do a search on the search engines, it checks all the results and displays a little icon next to each link telling you whether the site is safe and free from malicious software.
This slows down the whole process and in general is just very annoying. So I eventually found the following instructions on their website on how to install without this component:

If you wish to install AVG 8.0 Free Edition without the LinkScanner component, or uninstall this component from your program, please proceed as follows:

* Download the AVG 8.0 Free Edition installation package from our website.
* Run the installation with the parameters /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch. One way to achieve this is to:
o save the AVG Free installation file directly to disk C:
o open menu Start -> Run
o type
c:avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
* The installation will be started, and AVG will be installed without the LinkScanner component.

Replace the * with whichever version it is you downloaded. Also make sure you get the path to the file right, easiest way is to just stick it directly in the root of your C:/ drive, that way you can just copy and paste the command above (remember to replace the *).