WordPress is easily the most widely used blogging CMS and the extension of WordPress plugins has allowed the functioanlity of WordPress to expanded tremendously by the development of plugins by independent developers looking to solve a problem and contriute to the community. The quality of the plugins vary a bit, but a little bit of searching and testing should uncover a plugin that solve the problem you need.

The challenge with plugins is detemining if they work properly and what problems it may cause to your website. Depending upon the skill of the developer of the plugin and the testing that was done, it is not uncommon for plugins to crash your site or cause other parts not to work properly. The other challenge is that the core WordPress software is constantly being upgraded which requires the plugins to be upgraded depending upon the compatability with WordPress.org update. When the two are incompatible, it can cause problems with you website.

This recently happened to my site with a Linkedin plugin that was being used to populate the About page with the information from my Linkedin profile. The plugin simply imported your experience, education, and bio sections from Linkedin and updated the page of your site that you requested. If a page was made to your Linkedin profile, then it would also be reflected on your website.

The plugin that I was using must have failed with the recent upgrade to WordPress 3.0 which caused the Linkedin profile of the plugin developer to be displayed on my about page instead of my Linkedin information. The unfortuante thing about this is I am not sure how long this problem existed before it was pointed out to me. Vry frustrating, but also the downside of open source software that is rarely talked about.

Take some time and review your site and ensure that everything is working properly. It should only take a few minutes, but could find some issues that you did not know existed due to problems with plugins. Although I am appreciative of the effort and quality of most Wordpres plugins and the WordPress platform in general, I will routinely take a few mintues to review my site. It will be definitely be time well spent.

If you are an image fanatic that needs the functionality to make volcanoes explode and other amazing actions that are available within Photoshop, then this post is not for you. But if your requirements are simple image editing and some intermediate layer type functions without the need to pay the high price tag of Photoshop, then this post is for you and I would recommend that you give Paint.net a try.

This free software was developed by a few former Microsoft employees and is very impressive software that handles most of the editing, special effects, and layers that are available with Photoshop and in many cases is not the system process hog that Photoshop can be. I have been using paint.net for a few years and there have been dozens of improvements over that period of time and continues to offer more than enough functionality for the basic image needs.

Paint.net also is significantly better than most of the image handling programs that come pre-installed on computers which typically just have the ability to resize, crop, brighten, and sharpen images. This software blows those programs away. There is not too much more that I can say about the software because of the price point of free should make it an easy decision to give it a try. This will not work for all people especially if you use a high percentage of the functionality of Photoshop. If you decide to give it a try, I would be interested to hear your feedback.

Unfortunately, the United States is still in the middle of a recession/depression where depending on whose stats you listen to, between 10%-16% of adults can not find employment. Even at the low end, that is an alarming statistic that does not bode well for our national economy or the world economy. For our economy to do well, we need a larger percentage of people employed and contributing productivity.

But in the last week, three major companies released their quarterly earnings and based on the results, I have to wonder if the economy is really as bad as the media would have us believe or if there are parts of the economy that are doing well and that many of those that are unemployed are in industries that probably will not recover for a while or are supported by other industries.

Microsoft, Apple, and Google all released earning statements that far and away exceeded Wall Street expectations. What makes them important as I consider the real status of our economy is that for the most part they sell luxury items that in theory are not purchased as frequently during down times.

Microsoft reported revenue of over $19 billion and net income over $6 billion  as sales of personal computers and it’s new Windows 7 software saw strong sales. Consumers are buying computers at a record pace during a recession?

Apple, which sells primarily high- computers and phones, also had a record quarter and sold the most Iphones that they have in any quarter. Sales of their Mac computer were also up. What is also interesting is that their future forecast is even more rosy with many analysts predicting even better quarters with the introduction of the Ipad. Consumers are buying $2,000 laptops and $400 phones during a depression?

Google which generates over 90% of it’s revenue from advertising also had a record quarter with revenues increasing by 19%. They also have a rosy outlook as they expect growth in display and mobile advertising although the company does not make future predictions. So companies are advertising at a record pace during a recession?

There are other factors to consider with Google’s growth, like the decrease in traditional media spend could more than offset their gains, but what I find interesting is that it is typically believed that in tough economic times, advertising is the first budget to be cut. But it looks like companies are still advertising and doing a lot of it.

So maybe the economy is not as bad as projected and that it would even turn around more quickly if all the doom and gloom stories would stop. The people that are employed would feel more comfortable making purchases again which would stimulate the economy and create jobs. There is still much to be said about the jobs that are going overseas, the transition from manufacturing jobs to service jobs, and the increase of automation. All those things have an impact, but based on the earnings that have been released in the last week, there is money being spent, so there is some upside to the terrible economic stories that we are force fed on a daily basis. Let’s try to stimulate the economy by changing the messaging about the status of the economy and I would be willing to bet that would have an instant impact and increase the number of jobs. That’s just my hunch.

I have started using Google Chrome over the last few weeks and although it is a very fast browser, the downside is that it lacks the number of quality extensions as Firefox has plugins. One of the plugins that I was able to use with Firefox allowed me to block certain sites. This is great if people have kids, but helped me with productivity as I was able to reduce access certain sites while I needed to be productive.

Until that extension is available for Chrome, another option is to restrict access to those sites using your HOSTS files if you are using a Windows operating system. Windows uses a HOSTS (located in c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc) file to maintain a personal list of web addresses and associated IP addresses for accessing them. This is can be used when setting up a new site and DNS setting have not propagated the internet entirely. When a request is made for a URL, the HOSTS file will be checked first. If a corresponding address is found, it will direct you to that IP without first consulting a DNS Server. The original intent of this file was to define where sites exist, but in this case I am using it to restrict access and direct all DNS calls back to my system drive.

Lets first look at a HOSTS file entry

127.0.0.1 localhost

This is the loopback address for your machine for those cases where an application needs to reference the local machine by IP address- the loopback address will always be valid. This entry should never be changed.

Now lets add an entry to block

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

We are telling our local machine that Facebook actually exists on the local machine, so when it looks to open the website in the browser, it does not go to the internet, but only references the local machine.. Any request for www.facebook.com will be directed to the local machine and therefore effectively blocked. You could also use the IP of another website if you wanted to be creative.

A HOSTS file entry will disregard the transfer protocol so it isn’t needed. However, the host does play an important role. A webmaster may choose to define a host for his/her website. “WWW” has become the universal standard for the default host. It is just as common to define a site with no host as well. This means that as far as DNS goes www.facebook.com & facebook.com are two totally different sites, even though they resolve to the same place.  Because of this to effectively block the all parts of a domain including the subdomains, you must also block all hosts. Each subdomain would have to be added separately. This would usually mean:

127.0.0.1 yahoo.com

127.0.0.1 www.yahoo.com

There are probably other methods to block sites like filtering the IP address through your router, but that is tough as the IP address for many sites change or rotate. Hopefully, an extension becomes available for Chrome and this will no longer be necessary.