Some general observations (or rants). I write about whatever captures my attention - and also post a few useful tips and PHP scripts for webmasters, too, as I learn from my mistakes, requirements or other people's experiences.

My mate Chris is on holiday in Costa Rica. He has been posting updates on his blog. Seems like he’s having a whale of a time! There have been highs and lows… it’s all documented there and you’ll be wanting to know what’s happening next.

Whether reading about his dislike of currency exchange or exactly how he’s "roughing it", you’ll be eagerly awaiting to know what’s next and find the upfront style of writing entertaining. Or you’ll even find yourself wishing your were on holiday there too - who wouldn’t want a holiday in a tropical paradise?

You know you want to, yes you’ve gotta do it… you’ve gotta Visit Chris’ site and read all about it for yourself!

I recently needed to set up some cron jobs for new scripts I had been developing and found an ugly blue screen when editing the cron file with crontab -e (which opens the current user’s cron file in the default editor). I had been expecting vim (Vi Improved) but instead I was faced with "joe", which is not my editor of choice.

Fortunately, though, it is a simple enough task to change which editor is used when editing cron jobs. For anyone else in the same situation as myself, instructions are provided below on how to change the default editor. Note: This changes the editor used by all software which respects the EDITOR variable.

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There is a lot of fuss about Page Rank in general, but in particular the current "update". The update has seen many sites lose Page Rank; some sites lost Page Rank due to penalty and of course some sites lost Page Rank indirectly due to the penalties. What does this mean?

Site A is a vote for Site B however Site A has had a penalty due to the current update and Site B has a PR reduction as Site A’s vote is not as strong as before. The reduction in PR does not necessarily mean your site was targeted directly by Google but rather the reduction was due to the recalculation due to other sites’ losses in PR. A simple way to look at it is: previously, your vote was 4 + 4 + 4 and this gave you PR4. However, due to the penalty on the other websites the vote changed to 2 + 3 + 2 and this caused your Page Rank to be recalculated to 2. (Please note: I do realise that Google does not use such a simplistic equation; this was just an easy way to give an example of what is going on.)

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My web directory is now closed. It will not be reopened as I feel that my time is best focused elsewhere. Additionally, I believe directories have very little role in Today’s way of searching for for what we are looking for. Their usefulness has ended as search engines have evolved and results have become very relevant.

Frankly, it is quicker to type a search string in to Google, Yahoo!, Live, Ask or whatever search engine you prefer and (usually) find what you want within a few seconds than spending 5 minutes or so browsing through an often spam-filled directory.

After the cancellation of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (2003) and Angel (2004), along with little hope of even a made-for-TV film concluding Angel, fans of the vampire and demon-filled universe Joss Whedon had created were left with an unfilled void which no TV show at that time seemed to be able to fill. However, in 2007 that has changed: there are a couple of interesting TV shows and the continuation of Buffy’s and Angel’s stories in their own comics.

Buffy’s comic is Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 8, which was published by Dark Horse Comics, and the first issue was released on 14 March 2007. The comics follow on from where the TV series left off and Joss Whedon is, of course, involved in the writing so fans are assured of quality. It does of course feature the "Scooby Gang" and guest appearance from an old "favourite" - Spike! The comics have been very successful and look set to run longer than the originally planned 25 issues.

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