We’ve been working with an anonymous blogger who writes a fascinating gossip blog for people involved with technology PR in the UK. The blog has been building a lively audience and it was about time to give it a really original design to matched the unique content. We’re really proud of the result. Visit the redesigned site here!
Stephen coded up a little plugin a while ago so I thought I’d share it with everyone.
Login Logger v 0.1 keeps track of recent logins to Wordpress for all users, as well as all failed logins. It records username, time, IP address and how long since each login attempt as well as time since last active for each user. These tables can be accessed from the Users menu, and the list of failed logins can be cleared at any time.
The plugin has been tested in 2.5
It was mainly written quickly for personal use - so we can’t make any claims regarding its safety or extendibility (it does not use any localization methods, etc) but please let us know if you find it useful!
To install, unzip and upload the entire folder to your plugins folder, then activate from the plugin menu.
Updates:
April 10, 2008: Updated for Wordpress 2.5.
January 24, 2008: Fixed another minor wp prefix bug.
October 2, 2007: Fixed the wp prefix bug and submenu path bug.
Thanks for your kind wishes, cards, flowers, prayers and thoughts over the last month. Tomorrow it’ll be 5 weeks since the operation. I’ve gone through so many feelings, emotions and heartache but have pretty much completely come through the other side now and looking forward again to what the future holds.
I have found some new sites (for me) which have been a great source of help over the last little while. The internet is amazing - the connections you can make, the people who can share their stories and can be supportive along the journey with you. It reminds me of how powerful online communities can be for people at different points in their lives. It encourages me once again how blogging, forums and the like are helping people communicate with each other all around the world and designing them is a worthwhile thing to be doing.
Aside from topic-specific sites that I’ve found useful, I’ve recently discovered Facebook. It is still practically unheard of here in New Zealand as Bebo is the most popular social networking hub, followed by MySpace.
The little designer-snob in me finds MySpace and Bebo so frustrating. The errors I get on MySpace are endless, let alone the number of clicks I have to do in order to achieve anything, the difficulty in organising my “friends” or remembering who on earth they are, the hard-to-read pages, the spam comments… need I go on? Oh, and privacy seems to be minimal by default on MySpace. I tried so hard to get into the MySpace world which others talked about endlessly, but I failed. I decided just to go there to listen to music, to search for a long-lost friend and see what they were up to if I was bored.. and that’s about it.
Bebo is similar. All the kids I know are on there and their pages are usually just as hard to read. It’s less buggy than MySpace, and seems a bit more user-friendly.. but I’m just not hooked on it. It’s scary reading messages kids are sending each other. I could find out a lot of info about people, without doing anything but read their Bebo comments.
Facebook, however, has such a clean and simple design. It’s easy to use, easy to organize your friends, great for tagging of photos (one of the only times I’ve gotten really into tagging), and privacy seems to be more important. So I’ve gotten a little hooked recently on Facebook. I’ve caught up with long-lost friends and enjoyed the connections via Facebook.
But is the design that important? Or is it the people? Or is it both? With people constantly saying “MySpace is so 2006″ when talking about Bebo here, I realised that it’s firstly about the people. Social networking sites fail without lots of your friends being on there too. But it’s also about being the cool place to hang out, a place that works, a place that is easy to use.
Facebook, the first social networking site I may just be getting hooked on using 
Life has a way of throwing surprises at you. Just when you think the three month safety window has passed, you learn that your little one’s heart has just stopped. Just when you think you’ll be able to begin to move on after a simple operation, your life hangs in the balance. Just when you think you will be able to recover, you’re told you must have a blood transfusion. Just when you thought you were having a couple of days of work for Easter, two weeks of being told not to lift a finger have gone by.
Sometimes plans have to be thrown out the window and new ones dreamt of when you have strength to dream again.
Thank you for all your kind messages, prayers, flowers and support.
I’m proud to announce that my brother Stephen is now working with me and doing a fantastic job coding in Wordpress and Drupal. He recently was part of a team that won a bronze medal in Japan at the ACM-ICPC programming competition and has recently completed his degree in computer science and mathematics at Auckland University. It was about time I had someone else to help me which leads me to my second announcement…
I’m also very excited to announce that I’m pregnant! The baby is due in October and things are going well. Thankfully no sickness ever but I am needing an awful lot of sleep (I feel like a hibernating bear at times) and get tired incredibly easily. Will keep you updated.