See what I mean?

For example, if I want to sync a folder like D:\My Videos, the program accepts the folder I want as D:\y Videos and then creates this new folder for syncing. Or it might sync D:\Archives as D:\rchives. On my other computer — no issues.

Investigating a bit, I discovered it doesn’t happen on my other drives (C:, F:). My D drive is different, in that I’ve moved the location of my My Documents folder to D. In a quick test, I discovered that moving it again to a subfolder of D removes the issue. It’s not a permanent solution however, as a) I like having my documents folder in the root of my secondary drive, and b) I would have to move 220Gb of data to an external drive and back again as you can’t move the location to a subfolder of the current location.

So I’ve sent feedback to Microsoft using the inbuilt “report a problem” menu in the beta. I did it in two parts though, so this post is my way of putting it all in one place, and on the off chance that someone is having a similar issue, they might get some comfort knowing that it’s not their fault (well it is, but only ever so slightly).

My Small Issue With the Windows Live Sync Beta is a post from The Geekorium

“This is probably the single greatest breach in the history of privacy.”

Steven Conroy on Google’s (accidental) collection of unsecured (and essentially public) wifi data from people who don’t know how to set a simple password on their wireless Internet connections.

I once caught a clue THIS BIG! Then I let it go.
By kjd.

Really, he needs to stop talking if he ever wants anyone to take him seriously in a technological capacity ever again. Can’t he just have a 13 year old check his speeches before he gives them so they sound at least vaguely knowledgable?

Bozo, the Clown Communications Minister is a post from The Geekorium

A bunch of favicons
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/ / CC BY 2.0

Favicons are those little icons that websites display in the address bar (or in the open tab in Chrome). They’re usually about 16 pixels square (which is tiny) but it adds a bit of professionalism to your site, and lets people figure out which site is yours if they have dozens of tabs open. You can get plugins for photoshop that will let you save files as “.ico” files so you can create a favicon.ico file. Then you can upload your file to your website and link to it and… well it’s easy, but kind of annoying to get right.

Enter Shockingly Simple Favicon:

Shockingly Simple Favicon
A simple way to put a favicon on your site.matias s

Install and activate and follow the instructions on the configuration page. The page includes better information than I’ve provided here, and a whole bunch of ideas for creating your own favicon.

Go to it!

Favicons is a post from The Geekorium

Previously I wrote about some plugins I love for making writing posts easier. This is a list of the little plugins I love that just do cool things around the place. They’re all useful, and most are ones I use on both sites I maintain. I would highly recommend them to anyone.

• Akismet
  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key<?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.Matt Mullenweg

  Akismet keeps me spam free. I’m using it conjunction with Disqus for a double layer of protection. It’s pretty accurate — think Gmail spam filters for your site. Anyone who isn’t using this is asking for trouble.

• Author Exposed
  Simple and elegant way to get more information about author.Igor Penjivrag

  I used to have a plugin here that showed more details about myself using a third party service. When I started First Waves I felt like I wanted a similar tool to promote my guest authors a bit but didn’t want to have to ask them to create an account on the service. So this plugin does something similar based on the information they fill into their profile on this site. When you click the Author’s name a little hovercard shows you their gravatar and a link to their other websites.

• AddQuicktag
  Allows you to easily add custom Quicktags to the editor. You can also export and import your Quicktags.Roel Meurders, Frank Bultge

  I can’t stand WYSIWYG editors, so I choose to use the HTML editor to write my posts. It doesn’t mean however that I don’t want to use shortcuts occasionally. The AddQuicktag plugin lets you define custom tags to wrap around your HTML while editing. For example, I have a <cite></cite> tag in addition to the normal <blockquote></blockquote> tag and a “Caption” button that wraps my image caption text in <span class="caption"></span> (to save me writing them out every time).

• Broken Link Checker
  Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.Janis Elsts

  This plugin creates an area on your dashboard that reports any broken links it finds — any sites that you’ve linked to that are no longer there, or resources that get 404 errors. Then you can go through and relink or ignore them as you like. Keeps your site tidy. You can also give it permission to cross out links that don’t work so your visitors know not to bother to click through.

• Clicky for WordPress
  Integrates Clicky on your blog!Joost de Valk

  Ultimate Google Analytics
  Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site. Check http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/#versions for version updatesWilfred van der Deijl

  These two add the Clicky and Google Analytics tracking codes on my pages so I can be silly about the number of visitors my sites get. Clicky is particularly cool, as I can see people come and go in real-time and can feel a bit like Jack Bauer.

• Organize Series
  Darren Ethier<

  WordPress doesn’t come configured out-of-the-box to incorporate posts into series. This plugin makes it feel like it does. This plugin post is an example.
  

• Page Links To
  Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.Mark Jaquith

  A good plugin if you want pages in your menu that go to pages off-site (like First Waves and nunnone email in the menu above). Create a new “Page”, and in the new option at the bottom of the post tell WordPress where you want the item to link to.

• YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter
  Create short URLs for posts with YOURLS (or other services such as tr.im) and tweet them.Ozh

  This is the best plugin I’ve found that lets me use my Bit.ly pro account (using my own domain for shortened links) to display a short link on my site for each post. I was originally using YOURLS to shrink my links, but when bit.ly offered theirs I switched over. Comes with a widget too, to display the link in the sidebar if you’d prefer.

• Smart 404
  Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL Michael Tyson

  This is such a simple plugin, but it can make such a difference to your site. When visitors try to visit pages that don’t exist, normally your site will give them a 404 Error (telling the browser that the page doesn’t exist). What this plugin does instead is tries to match up some content with the URL they entered, so for example when you try “http://nunnone.com/batman” (a page that does not exist) you will be automatically redirected to the page for my Batman tag (of which there are quite a number). Or if you tried http://nunnone.com/disqus, you’d be taken to a post with “Disqus” in the title. There are a lot of queries that it won’t work with, but it’s neat when it works.
  

There are a few more extra-special plugins that I want to share, but they’re the sort of plugins that you dedicate whole posts to, so I’ll share them soon. In the meantime, if you like the sound of any of these features give them a whirl. The great thing about WordPress is just how easy it is to install and try out new plugins.

Some Neat WordPress Plugins is a post from The Geekorium

See ya!
BYE by Taz etc.

So as an experiment (and due to my underlying desire to stop handing stuff over to third parties), I turned it off. Here’s what I installed in its place:

• CommentLuv — puts a link to the commenter’s most recent post under their comment.
• Gravatar Signup — if a user doesn’t have a Gravatar associated with their email, offers to sign them up for one.
• Simple Facebook Connect — lets a commenter register using their Facebook account.
• Simple Twitter Connect — lets a commenter register using their Twitter account.
• OpenID — lets a commenter register using their OpenID account.
• Subscribe to Comments — Adds a check-box so a commenter can have follow-up comments emailed to them.
• Live Comment Preview — Shows a mockup of the comment being left as it’s written. Kinda neat.

So that’s seven plugins, plus an hour or two mucking around with site templates and CSS to get them looking vaguely acceptable (so many themes have very ugly comments). I had to style my comments separately, fix the threading, and alter the layout of the comment form. And I still have less functional comments than I did with Disqus. The only benefit I have is… I… don’t know. I can say I don’t use Disqus?

That’s not including the plugins I decided not to turn on — Backtype to pull mentions from Twitter etc., and Ozh’ Absolute Comments to enable reply by email (for me at least). I’ll miss reply by email the most.

Maybe those of you who can’t see the point of Disqus don’t care if your commenters can’t log in with Facebook. And I’m yet to see anyone but Techcrunch with an attractive and functional comment area using a vanilla WordPress setup. Disqus isn’t gorgeous, but it’s a lot better than what WordPress out of the box can do.

So now I’ve done it I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. As an added bonus, none of the comments that were in Disqus are threaded any more, and if I go back to Disqus it might screw up the comments people have left since disabling it. And none of my comments before today are associated with me as administrator any more. All in all, I probably should have left it alone. But at least I can maybe help some one make up their mind about their comments — use Disqus and get a whole bunch of features, or install some of the plug-ins listed above.

Just so you know, although I’m a fan of the software, I’m not such a fan of Disqus the company. Trying to get assistance for a problem is like pulling teeth, and there’s at least one feature they promise when you set it up that just doesn’t work. When I tried to ask them why my comments weren’t “real-time” they told me they were and that they were disabled for maintenance — which seems odd, since it’s been at least a few months now… So take from that what you will — if you don’t think you’ll need support, Disqus might be perfect.

Bye Bye, Disqus is a post from The Geekorium