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First tutorial (to achieve this stunning effect):

Fireworks How To: The Ultimate Aqua Button (tutorial) (by Brian Edgin)

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A few days ago I was recommending to people not to upgrade to version 2.5 of WordPress, because at the time I believed WP 2.3.3 to be as stable and safe as the new 2.5 series. Besides, I liked (and still like) the old, ‘classic’, 2.3.x admin interface much more…

OK, I must take my words back and confirm that WordPress 2.3.3, the last stable release before the new WordPress 2.5 branch was released, is not safe anymore, and you can become a victim of the link injection hack (vulnerability).

What happened?

In one of the blogs, which I support (luckily, not my personal blog, which I have upgraded to 2.5/2.5.1 long ago), I have found ‘hidden’ links (code: <u style="display: none">[ bunch of spam links inserted here ]</u>) in one of the regular posts there.

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Some time ago I was using and I was pretty excited about a small app, called DU Meter.

What it did, exactly?

Well, it just monitored my Internet bandwidth (current speeds of download/upload).

These were the times of good ol’ dial-up connections (33.6 kbps or, when you were lucky, 48-56 kbps).

Now these times are long gone, and speed is measured in Mbps, not in kbps… :-)

But DU Meter is still there, and Hagel Tech even released a brand-new version - 4.0:)

You can download it here: http://www.dumeter.com/download.php

It’s a trial, which will work for 30 days; after that, you can either stop using it, or buy a single license for USD 24.95.

Still, you should be aware, that a similar app exists now, and it is called Net Meter (current version is 1.1).

It does exactly the same things as DU Meter, but it’s freeware (you can make a small donation, though, if you like the program).

I tested both apps. Net Meter, to be frank, simply copied most of DU Meter’s interface look & feel (which is a good thing, if you are accustomed to DU Meter, but do not want to pay 25 dollars to buy it), and, apart from that, I do not see any major differences between them.

Which one to use, you may decide for yourself; still, it’s nice to know you have more than one option! :-)

Do I see wrong, or Google have just changed their favicon??

I think I kinda liked the old one more… Besides, the new one has a lowercase ‘g‘, and the old one was with an uppercase, as in their logo.

Maybe Google will change their logo soon, too?… :-)

I saw some of the Erik Dasque’s excellent work by accident, following a link from the Zen Photo gallery.

See his portfolio here:

www.frenchguys.com/gallery/

I myself, being an amateur photographer, have tried numerous times to make beautiful macro photos of flowers and such, but this nice defocus I see in the example of Erik, made with a Canon 5D, shows clearly how far away are small digital cameras from the professional DSLRs…

This flower, by Erik, I liked very much, so I am using a resized copy of it here, with link & credits; I hope this is not a problem… :-)

Sometimes you forget about some photos.

…And sometimes you can find one, while browsing your own photo archives on the hard-disk, and say to yourself ‘Wow! I like this one! Why don’t I post it on my blog?’…

And so I did, with this one:)

I like it. It was made while on the bicycle, after a heavy rain, and with the sun shining brightly…

Today, exactly at midnight, my blog (www.optimiced.com), as well as Ani’s blog (www.molif.com), are getting rid of their ‘clothes’.

Today is ‘CSS Naked Day‘ — the day which promotes Web Standards!

This ‘CSS Naked Day’ is 24 to 48 hours long, and will show, that a blog or website with well written HTML+CSS can look pretty well even without its clothes (without its CSS styles).

So, if you see my blog without CSS today or tomorrow (without its design), don’t be puzzled by this fact — we ’stripped of’ our CSS styles for a good cause — and, as you can judge by the photo above (which we made together a few hours ago), not only of our CSS clothes, but also of our real clothes! (Read also a story at the Blogherald) ;-)

Long live Web Standards! :-D

Yesterday I made an upgrade from WP 2.3.3 to WP 2.5 (with full backup of MySQL database and files before that, of course). Looks like everything works fine:)

First, about the good things in WP 2.5:

1. Editing tags is now built-in feature, which is great;
2. A better visual editor (Rich Text Editor) — I don’t use it, but they claim it’s better;
3. Fixed an old bug, which didn’t allow you to specify a directory for uploading files, which is one or more levels higher than the current WP directory (I just had to dig in deep, just to find that you have to fill correctly both fields in Settings → Misc ["Store uploads in this folder..." & "Full URL path to files (optional)..."], or this won’t work);
4. A better Image Uploader;
5. Possibility to automatically update plugins, with just one click (nice!).

There a lot of others, but these I noticed at first glance.

And now some rant from my part:

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It was almost winter in the Borissov’s Garden, a few days ago, but today Spring can be felt stronger and stronger in the air and the birds start singing on the trees, thinking of Love…

I always liked graphic design. As Web designer, up until now I did not need any 3D skills in my work, and in the rare occasions, when I was imitating 3D or 2.5D (as this pencil, for example, created with Fireworks), I did it for fun:)

If you watched Ice Age or Shrek, you certainly know how advanced is now the 3D animation. Of course, I watched these movies, too, and I know that nowadays, almost every real object can be drawn in such a way, so it looks really real:)

Notwithstanding this fact, I was amazed to see this:

[©Steve Moody, virtualcoder.co.uk]

Looks incredible!

Yes, I know it’s not a photo, I know these balls were created using a 3D program, and for all that, my mind cannot accept this fact, somehow… I was even trying to convince myself not to check for available EXIF data in this image, it looked so much as a photograph to me:-)