• Larger screen size than previous, around 21″ or 22″
• Widescreen aspect, either 16:9 or 16:10
• Lower energy consumption, both in operation and especially of standby
• Better stand, with ideally both landscape and portrait modes
• A USB hub built in to provide desktop extensibility
• A quality screen, with good colour reproduction in support of Adobe products for the photographer
• Not too expensive

After a sensible scan around the field, I considered a few options, including another LG, and a Dell. I picked the Dell.

Why? Well, for a number of reasons:

1. Good match to the requirements
2. S-IPS LCD screen, giving excellent colour fidelity and wide vertical viewing angle
3. High-ish resolution of 1680×1050 (not full 1080p, but then it isn’t aimed at watching HD video)
4. Quick (6ms) and bright (300 cd/m2)
5. 3-year warranty
6. 1 watt power consuption in standby

Dell 2209WA Review — From a Photographer’s Perspective
Dell 2209WA Images – Page 3 – Monitors
DELL Dell Ultrasharp™ 2209WA 22-Inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor

OK

Zen Photo (sample theme)

In making the change, that meant I also had to create a new WordPress widget to replicate the existing Coppermine widget, and display a random image from Zen Photo in the sidebar.

To get hold of the Zen Photo WordPress widget, and to get updates, go to my widgets page.

Actually, there are probably several hundred CMS applications now available, both commercial and open source. As a result, trying to pick the ‘best’ CMS for your site is almost impossible. To make the decision easier, I decided to turn to the web, and look for some comparative reviews. And the best place I’ve found so far is CMS Matrix.

Run by Plain Black Corporation, the site was created in an attempt to provide a comprehensive list of CMS systems. It is a place where someone can search on very specific criteria and see a list of CMS systems that match that list. I’ve certainly found it useful!

Received wisdom (mainly from the local ISP) is that I should install a dedicated nanny application onto each PC that I have, and keep each of these up to date as and when the software and the black/white lists change. And this of course is good and sensible advice.

However, I am generally too lazy to do all of the above, and besides, I didn’t want to slow down my connection even more with another application clogging up my MB and CPU. So I started looking for an alternate solution – a net nanny enabled router perhaps?

In the end, I came across this instead – OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet. So, how does this work?

Well, OpenDNS replaces your normal DNS resolution servers, as provided by your ISP. Instead, you go to a special set of DNS servers, which intercept any bad sites and instead send you to a nice warning page instead. Like this…..

In addition, because you access the site through a unique ID, you can also configure OpenDNS to provide additional functionality. Like:

• Phishing protection
• Domain blocking
• Adult site blocking
• Web proxy blocking
• Domain whitelisting
• DNS statistics

And, best of all, this comes at a dollar value of $0! Frankly I think it’s a brilliant solution, and it works on each and every PC on my home network, and on any guest machines as well.

Powered by ScribeFire.

However, over the past few weeks I’ve started to have trouble – first of all ScribeFire started to report errors in the API calls, and then when I tried to reregister with my site, it reported that my username and password were incorrect.

Smelling an upgrade rat, I started to track down 2 possible causes – a new version of the ScribeFire extension (1.4.2), or a recent upgrade to WordPress (2.2.2).

To help track things down, I obtained a copy of the PHP XMLRCP 2.2 library, and built a simple wordpress xmlrpc test script (which can be found here if you are interested).

What this told me was that WordPress was rejecting any xmlrpc calls containing newline characters (\n). To fix this, I just tracked back into the xmlrpc.php file, and then up to the wp-includes/class-IXR.php library. Inside this standard library the IXR_Message is instantiated as follows:

function IXR_Message ($message) {
$this->message = $message;
}

To strip out the newlines, this is replaced by….

function IXR_Message ($message) {
$this->message = preg_replace(‘/\\\\n+/’,”,$message);
}

This doesn’t seem like and ideal solution, but it does work (this post was written back in ScribeFire!)

Powered by ScribeFire.

The GUI is quite simple, clean and clear.  In fact you can quickly forget that this application doesn’t exist on your desktop at all, as this snapshot shows….

The overall feature set is pretty basic so far (it lacks certain key functions such as pre-filtering of the messages into folders) but that doesn’t detract from the overall positive impressions that I’ve had so far.

This certainly isn’t the perfect webmail application (yet) but if you want to see AJAX making email on the web much nicer to use, then give this a go.

Powered by ScribeFire.

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