Net Sieve

Hey, let’s get serious for a sec. The Internet has brought a lot of cool into our lives. It’s fun, it’s gossipy, it’s informative. It can also save your life.

If you have an addiction to drugs or alcohol, you know how hard it is to admit it and then to get the help you need. There aren’t always people we feel we can trust in the circle around us. Even if there are, we know they aren’t always going to understand what it feels like and what it takes to get a life back.

Alcohol Rehab is a free .mobi blog that can connect you to people who know where you are because they’ve been there themselves. Go on over (the site is accessible with regular browsers too) and read up on what people have experienced with rehab. You can see both sides of the coin, people who are/were addicted and people who love them.

Take a look. You don’t have to sign anything or register anywhere. It starts with a click.

Tired of building models of the structure of DNA? Try a real world example of the passing of genes with GreatFamily freeware.

Graphically design your family tree and generate web pages in a snap. This easy-to-use program approaches family tree making from the user’s point of view. Simply draw your family tree using nothing but the mouse, it’s that easy. Navigate, zoom in and get the complete image of your family tree. Share the tree with your friends and family – generate nice, graphical web pages in a mouse click. Easily create your family chronicle using the MS Word report generator. You can print the tree or any part of the tree exactly like you designed it – as big or as small as you like. GreatFamily is designed to make it fast and easy for anyone to create and edit their family tree. Why spend long hours reading manuals, when you can have fun instead? You do not need any HTML knowledge to use the web features. Simply click once – and the tree will be presented in nice, graphical web pages, including any pictures and additional information you have supplied.

Latest spam that has me scratching my head:

“best search engine resource to buy people on a site”

The words “buy people on a site” were the hyperlink. It was a .ru domain so I’m hoping it was just a matter of faulty English. Although … I’m sure I could always find good use for a Russian bride. Damn my fast finger on the delete button!

You gotta love computer translation. The lovely German who put up this sweet bit of freeware called Free Number 1.0, kindly wanted to make it accessible to English speaking friends. Here’s what came of it:

“Away with the advertising garbage: Who leaves its genuine telephone number approximately for a classified advertisement, must on a tide unsolicited advertisement count: The combination of announcement and telephone number permits conclusions on the consumer behaviour of the advertiser. If for cases like these the free erhätliche service offers itself call number.”

It’s like poetry with a free download. I love the Internets.

I’m no fan of the music industry and its stranglehold on “its” artists and their free expression, but copyright is something I do stand behind. The Web is all about sharing and freedom, peace, love and happiness, but somewhere in there we still need to respect the content creators in the morning.

Fair use. Citation. Quoting. Giving credit where credit is due. It’s not a hard concept and for the most part, if you do screw up and get overzealous with a creator’s work they’ll usually just write a note asking to remove their content before they go reporting you to the authorities. (Your service provider.)

If this happens, respect the request. If you can’t live without this content consider – gasp – offering them compensation. Barring that, ask if there’s a way you can work it out by citing, linking, something. If you’re not going up against the RIAA you’re probably not dealing with blatant flaming arseholes.

And should you find your own pearls of wisdom appropriated on someone’s site, try a civil discussion before you pull out the RPG. Most times, copyright violation is simply a lack of knowledge and not maliciousness. Of course, if the little offender doesn’t respect your request you are free to blast away.

Egregious thieves suck. A great place to learn more is Copyright Website.
(This post is copyright 2006 Net Sieve. Natch.) har.

So far so hot.

Other than the fact it took one million internet years to ftp to my server, FireStats is a huge go. Nothing buggy so far and I’m just looking forward to a few days of information accumulation to proclaim it good.

I make no promises that my posts will actually be spelled correctly from now on, but I’m very happy to have found Orangoo nonetheless. It’s a super simple online spell checker for any text you can copy and paste. It’s developer is Amir Salihefendic, so as you may guess the Website’s English is a bit … freeform. Still, it’s quick, easy, doesn’t log your text, uses Google spell checker and Aspell, is open source and you can download the code right from the page. Sweetness!

Amir says:

• This little application lets you spell correct from any system or computer that has Internet access.
• Spell check in 27 languages: Bahasa Indonesia, ÄŒeÅ¡tina, Dansk, Deutsch, ελληνικά, English, Español, Eesti keel, Français, עִבְרִית, ? ��? ��? ��? ��? ��, Hrvatski, Italiano, LatvieÅ¡u, Lietuvių, kalba, Nederlands, Norsk, Polski, Português, Română, Slovenščina, Slovenčina, Suomi, Svenska, Türkçe and �? УССКИЙ! (eds note: Let’s see how WordPress handles all that)

I’m going to give FireStats a go to track this site. It sounds good from the features page:

• FireStats protect the privacy of your users, unlike services like Google analytics.
• Basic hit statistics (hits ever, in last 24 days etc)
• Recent popular pages
• Recent referers
• Browser and OS trees, grouped by what matters
• IP to country – know where your visitors are surfing from (New)
• A list of recent hits
• Excluding unwanted hits from the display
  • By IP address
  • By Logged in user (to be used mostly to filter blog administrator(s))
  • By user-agent (to be used to filter bots)
• Import statistics from Counterize, to allow easy migration.
• Ajax UI, no need to reload the whole page – just press the ‘refresh statistics’ button to get the latest data.
• Designed to work on all browsers. (Tested on Firefox, Explorer, Opera and Konqueror)
• Internationalization ready (Translating to additional languages is easy)

If I encounter any grief, I’ll let you know. Or if this site suddenly disappears that may be all the warning you get. Now let’s crunch those numbers.

Ok, I don’t know why they make applying this plugin this so difficult. I’m refusing to believe that it’s just me, but when I create a WordPress blog from Fantastico (all y’all with cpanel will know) I don’t get an API key to activate Akismet and it gets all cranky with me.

Akismet is a righteous splog blocker and it comes free with every account. You just access it from the plugins option in your dashboard. But as far as I can tell, if you haven’t signed up for a WordPress blog from their site, you don’t automatically get a key. What am I missing? Help me out here.

WordPress tells you that you can find your API key in the “your account/your profile” option, but I got nuthin. I used the API key from a previous account and it seems to be working. Unfortunately I may be breaking some hidden TOS somewhere and will likely cause the end of the world.

Here’s to no splog in the afterlife.

If you’ve been looking for the tool to create a world map that pin points where in the world your visitors are coming from, try Digital Point Solution’s Geo Visitors code.

With a simple copy and paste of some html you’ll get a small, clickable graphic bar that opens to a world map. The color of the tags on the map represent how recent the visit was. It’s a fun tool and it’s free.