It is because of an opportunity that recently came about that I may not be able to have the time to keep this blog updated. I also expect to be unable to spend much time updating the software that I have previously written. I am not sure what will be in the future of this blog, nor am I sure about the future of the software that I have written. However, I am quite sure that I will miss working on these projects, and I will look forward to working on them again.

E-mail may often be considered a medium of communication that tends to be between two individuals. However, it has been made so that it can be a one-to-many communication medium in addition to being a one-to-one communication medium. Electronic mailing lists have been in existence for a long time, so e-mails have been sent in bulk without them being considered spam for a long time. Also, websites that are often updated tend to include the option for users to receive updates about them via e-mail. Some websites simply send e-mail alerts to users who have accounts set up on them by default. This type of e-mail gets sent out so often, the term “Bacn” was coined for it. Users can limit the amount of Bacn that they receive by not subscribing to e-mail lists, and by subscribing to RSS feeds instead whenever possible. However, e-mail updates can sometimes be necessary.

E-mails from mailing lists and websites tend to be characterized as being sent from the same sender, and these e-mails tend to have similar text in their subject lines. Therefore, users can easily set up filters in Gmail so that messages that match characteristics of Bacn that they receive can have appropriate labels applied to them. For example, I use a WordPress plugin named “WP-DB-Backup” to send myself backup copies of the database that this blog uses via e-mail. The e-mails sent by this plugin all list “WordPress” as the sender of them, and have “Jake Kasprzak Online Database Backup” in the subject lines of these e-mails. As these e-mails have these characteristics, I was able to set up a filter so that all messages that have these characteristics will have the label of “blog backup” applied to them. Therefore, any time I want to display only the backup copies of this blog that I have received via e-mail, I can select the appropriate label. There may also be times that I may not want to see my inbox cluttered with Bacn such as this. As I tend to label the Bacn that I receive, I display only unlabeled messages to filter out the Bacn in my inbox. There are Greasemonkey user scripts for displaying only unlabeled messages in Gmail, and I use those ones. One titled “Gmail Unlabelled” can be used with the older version of Gmail and the version of this script that can be used with the newer version of Gmail can be found here.

There are other reasons to use these labels. This is because e-mail account inboxes are sometimes used for purposes other than storage of messages from other people. When e-mail services offer large amounts of space for storing messages, users use these services for storing large files. The storage capacity offered to Gmail users is one of the reasons many Gmail users, myself included, use it to store files. In fact, GmailFS was created for storing files on Gmail accounts. However, Google’s terms of use prohibit the use of their services by any automated means or any means other than through the interface provided by Google, so GmailFS violates these terms. Nevertheless, Gmail can be useful for storing files, albeit through non-automated means. I sometimes store files there, and I sometimes perform searches through Gmail’s interface to find these files. I also create filters that apply labels to essentially save the searches that I perform most often.

In the time that I have spent blogging, I have sometimes found that I have needed to send notes to myself. I sometimes need to e-mail links to myself, and I annotate these links with information on them. I am often at different locations when I find interesting information on the web, and so I often have my information stored on and accessible from my Gmail account. As you may have surmised, sending myself many e-mails leads to clutter in my inbox. I have found that when I e-mail information such as links to myself, I tend to use similar subject lines. I often include the word “notes” in the subject lines of these e-mails that I send myself. Therefore, I can create a filter that looks for what I tend to include in the subject lines of these messages, and applies appropriate labels to them. I can also have these filters search for appropriate text within the messages that I may want to bring up at later times.

What I have mentioned here may certainly not be considered novel or innovative by those who already try to get the most out of Gmail. I do not plan on being one of those who will submit a video on how I organize my Gmail inbox. However, there may be many who may not be getting the most out of Gmail, and may find that it is even more useful than they thought it was. This blog entry is intended for those who have yet to see how useful Gmail can be. E-mail accounts may often be used for storing personal information, and Gmail seems to have been designed with that in mind. Gmail truly is an e-mail service that has been made better than users have previously imagined an e-mail service could be.

I found that I needed to update the Greasemonkey user script that I wrote titled “Do Not Remember Me” a few weeks ago. There was a very minor adjustment that I needed to make to it after a change was made to the Google Accounts login form. I chose not to write a blog post about this update, as this update was a very minor one. However, if I had a Twitter account at the time, information on this update could have been posted there. Also, the Firefox extension that I wrote titled “Bookmark Current Tab Set” is now considered public and is no longer considered experimental. This change of the status of this Firefox extension is more information that I thought would be better suited to a Twitter post than to a post to this blog.

You may find me on Twitter here. I am not sure how often I will be posting to my Twitter account. However, I plan on posting to it, as I plan on continuing to post to this blog, and I plan on “tweeting” about updates to this blog.

As I stated when I first started this blog, I may not be able to choose what my side projects are. Instead, these projects seem to choose me. While I may update and maintain the software that I have written, I have considered doing other work. And as it might take some time for that work to be done, I may need to spend less time writing about my work. Therefore, those who read this blog may find that they will need to wait for longer periods of time for new material to be posted here. I could post the occasional update about what I am doing, although I only plan on posting updates about what I do when that information might be of some interest to those who read what I write. However, I will continue working on this blog, as I have enjoyed working on it.

This blog post was one that I discovered at a time when I was unsure what to write about next. It was one of those serendipitous moments that sometimes occur when I am unsure what to write about. I was testing a Greasemonkey user script with sites that have login forms. And it was while I was testing that script with the login form on Reddit that I came across a link to this comic on how programmers read resumes that was a part of this blog post.

In that blog post, that comic preceded what the author of it referred to as “real tips” that were in the form of links to articles elsewhere on the web. While that post may have been intended to be comical, the humour in it must have been based on the author’s opinions. And from what I was able to glean from viewing his website, he is a programmer who has been involved in hiring programmers. Perhaps what was noted there was based on his experiences in working with other programmers. He as well as some other programmers may be biased toward those who have their e-mail addresses at their own domains, and have compiled their resumes using LaTeX. There may be those who would be disinterested in candidates who would list Visual Basic first among the programming languages that these candidates know. And I can certainly understand why programmers would prefer to hire those would write their own compilers or operating systems.

I cannot be certain as to how accurate that comic may be. Its accuracy, or lack thereof, is debatable. However, that comic was found to be humourous by many individuals. It was the kind of material that I would occasionally like to have here. I would like to be able to find a way to make my own material amusing. Until I can find ways to do that, perhaps I will work on writing a compiler or an operating system.

I have recently found that a number of individuals have found their way to my site after entering “writing firefox extensions” into a search engine. It was after finding that more individuals than I expected were viewing a post that contains that search term in its title that I decided to conduct a Google search using that term. I then found that the blog post that I wrote titled “Going Beyond Programming When Writing Firefox Extensions” was on the first page of search results when I Googled that term. You can see where that blog post currently ranks in search results when that term is entered if you click here. Since the time that I first discovered where that post ranked when that search term is used, I have found that that post did not rank as high as it previously did. However, I am unsure if it should be ranked among the first ten results, ahead of hundreds of thousands of results returned when a search for that term is conducted.

The term “writing firefox extensions” may often be entered by those who would like to join the many individuals who write extensions for Firefox. When a search for information on writing Firefox extensions is done, what individuals may want is the best information on how to write these extensions. However, my aforementioned blog post does not contain the best information for those who aspire to write Firefox extensions. Inclusion of the text of this search term in the title of that blog post is what may be one reason it ranks as high as it does among these search results. However, I never meant for that blog post to be considered an authoritative guide for those who want to write Firefox extensions. If I had known that that post was going to be ranked that high among search results, I would have put more effort into making it contain as much useful information as possible.

I would like to apologize to those who tried to find information on writing Firefox extensions only to find that any of their time was wasted by coming across this information that may not have been very useful. I have mentioned before that Google is not perfect. That blog post being ranked as high as it is appears to be evidence of this fact. However, Google’s algorithms were designed and written by those who have much knowledge of search engine technology. To dispute where pages should rank among search results would seem to be arguing with these individuals. And who am I to argue with them? I suppose I will need to accept that some my blog posts rank higher among Google’s search results than they should.

However, during this vacation, I have taken time to make one change to this blog. One change that might have previously been noticed is that there was a CAPTCHA installed here for a short period of time. After discovering how little the CAPTCHA was doing to prevent spam from being posted here, I installed Akismet. After installing Akismet, I was finally once again able to not be concerned about manually marking posts as spam. I was also able to disable the CAPTCHA, as it became redundant after the installation of Akismet. I apologize to those who would prefer not to solve CAPTCHAs to post comments, although installing a CAPTCHA seemed to be a good idea when I first installed it. I have also been working on my own WordPress plugin for bloggers who want information about who is trying to post spam on their blogs. I am not sure how much more work on WordPress plugins I will do in the future. However, I can tell you that this plugin will be released before long, now that I have returned from this vacation.

I have had some interest in writing a plugin for WordPress, although I was not sure what kind of plugin to write. I had not experienced much difficulty in working with WordPress in my time using it. And any time there was some functionality I wanted WordPress to have, I found that a plugin for including that functionality was available. However, after a certain amount of manual link checking that I had done, I wanted a plugin for automatically checking links in blog entries before these entries that contain these links are posted. Reading the section on link verification web bots in Michael Schrenk’s book on web bots titled “Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers” may have also inspired me to write this plugin. And after not finding that a plugin for automatically verifying links existed, I found that I had every reason I needed to write this plugin.

I decided to use the cURL library for checking the HTTP codes that would be returned after clicking each link in the window for editing posts, as cURL is useful for retrieving this kind of information. For this reason, the cURL module needs to be installed for this plugin to work. I needed to retrieve only the HTTP codes in this plugin, as these codes are all that is needed to determine if links are considered “broken” or not. Any time a page is found to return an error code, the link is considered broken. And in this plugin, a filter is set up to modify what is in the editor window to include the error code in the link. Perhaps there might be better ways to alert the individual who is posting the link that the link is broken than to add text to the link. This is one issue that I will consider when writing future versions of this plugin, and there are other ideas that I have for future versions as well.

This plugin may be useful for finding links that are broken. However, it cannot determine which links are links to incorrect pages. Sometimes when entering a URL incorrectly, the user is taken to a page that is not the correct one, although not one that will give an error code such as 404. For that reason, I have considered including functionality for checking valid links for information such as their titles, and returning this information. In addition, the plugin works only with absolute links, and not relative links. I personally always use absolute links in my posts, although in the future I might include functionality for checking relative links. Whether or not this functionality will be included may depend on how much demand there will be for the inclusion of this functionality.

The plugin can be downloaded if you click here. Feedback on what I write is always welcome, and I would be interested in hearing opinions on this plugin. This is the first WordPress plugin that I have ever written, and I decided to get it released at this time to meet a deadline that I have set for myself. However, I have found that it worked correctly in tests that I have run with it, and I would like to know if there are any bugs that it has so that I can correct them. This plugin is one that may not be considered very useful now, although future versions of it may be more useful. I know that I would prefer to have one less concern when I write posts to this blog. And hopefully, I will not need to be concerned about this plugin not working properly.

During this time that I have needed to access the web from other places, it has been a challenge for me to keep this blog updated. In addition to the most obvious difficulty of being unable to log into my account as often, there are other difficulties that I am having. I am unable to work on any of the software projects that I have been working on, and I am unable to spend as much time looking online for anything to write about. I knew that I was quite dependent on my personal computer, and I did not think that I needed this reminder of exactly how dependent upon it I have been.

However, it has been during this time that I have found that I may have relied on my PC more than I should have. With my PC unavailable to me at this time, I have considered this a time to read a few books that I have been trying to find the time to read. It was in my last post that I said that people tend to read from paper differently from how they read what is on a screen. And so it is during this time that I have been able to take time to learn about concepts that I have been trying to learn about in what may be a more thorough fashion. Finding other ways to occupy my time has given me an opportunity to find different ways of approaching problems other than approaching them through the use of a computer.

I can think of this as a break that I am taking from the routine of looking online for information and from the work I do in writing software code. Time away from the computer can be valuable and I am getting a reminder of how valuable that time can be. I certainly do need to have access to my PC and the web for what I do. I have been looking to take the time to give Firefox 3 Beta 2 a test drive, and I am considering getting those Greasemonkey scripts that I have been working on released as soon as possible. I have not been sure what exactly should be considered a higher priority among what it is that I have planned on doing. However, time away from what I have done has helped me find out what is most important. And that is one of a few reasons that having to take this break from my usual routines could be quite beneficial for me in the long run.

It might be best for me to look for advice specific to blogs, as opposed to advice on how one can improve on one’s writing in general. I have found that people tend to read what is on a screen somewhat differently from how they read from a sheet of paper. This is something that perhaps I should have known and considered, and I may need to know what I can do differently to make what I write more appropriate for a blog. And so this has made me consider buying a book on this topic, despite that fact that these books often contain information that I may not find useful.

I have thought that I will look back on the first posts to my blog and consider them ones that were written before I became very good at blogging. I have expected to improve over time. However, I may not be able to do that without some advice, whether this advice can be found online or in a more old-fashioned way.