Zo'C

IE6 is dead. Who should applaud?

Picture by João Miguel Silva Last week Google announced they are phasing out support of IE6. This follows the attacks to gmail accounts of Human Rights Activists originated in China, apparently consequence of a security flaw in IE. Even before Google, the German government decided to advice against the use of IE6 and a the French government [...]

Make your own inexpensive fish eye webcam

Native fish eye lenses can be very expensive, a cheap and nice alternative is a multiplier lens that you can attach to your native lenses. Last week I bought for Anna a Opteka .35x Super Wide Angle Panoramic Macro Fisheye Lens (Amazon Uk, Amazon US) that I found to be affordable and very good. Now, instead [...]

Sourdough: Bread hacking and social baking – Barcamp London Slides

I’m at Barcamp London 6 having a blast and I’ve made my presentation on Bread Hacking and Social Baking. Sourdough: Bread Hacking and Social Baking View more presentations from Guilherme Zühlke o’connor. Yes, there is a lot of geek-ish and hack-ish goodness in baking bread and if you wish to incorporate this goodness onto your life, you may [...]

Image optimization for the web: Slides

Image Optimization for The Web View more presentations from Guilherme Zühlke o’connor. (tags: filesize web) I’ve put in Slideshare slides on Image Optimization for the Web from a presentation I did yesterday. By optimization I don’t only mean reducing file size, but also colour precision, http requests and optimized coding and deployment. The slides also show and extensive benchmark of [...]

Colour reduction algorithms in Photoshop

Domain redirect wizardry with .htaccess rules

So you decided your domain doesn’t fit you as well as you’d like. And you are also afraid you’ll be losing all the old links and search engine ranking if you move to a new one. Maybe you also want to use the current domain for a different project that suits it best. Or maybe you just [...]

Using Gravatars on your site

You may have noticed that, thanks to the magic of Gravatar, commenters on this blog now have faces besides the comments. Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar and what it does is to allow people to create an account, register as many emails as you may have and attach avatars to each. This image [...]

Wordpress iPhone App

I may be a bit outdated, I know, but I just discovered the Wordpress iPhone App, and nothing better than using it to write about itself. I don’t think there’s much to say. If you use wordpress you know you should expect a quality tool and you can do most things you would do on the [...]

Spotify, Music in the cloud in a timely service

Moving further towards the life in the cloud, I’ve been beta testing Spotify, a new music service, and I’m loving it. Cloud computing is a term referring to the web as an abstract cloud providing you the services you need without having to rely on a local system for more than connecting to the internet and [...]

Fight Poverty: Action + Attitude

Today is blog action day and the theme is poverty, and I’ve been struggling for weeks to find a subject to write on and following discussions today, I realized many other people are in the same boat. I did wrote yesterday a post saying that poverty isn’t off-topic in any blog niche, and I certainly believe [...]

Blog Action day 2008: why is not off topic on your blog

If you believe in blogging at all, then you have to believe that bloggers united for a cause can be a strong driving force to change. The motivation behind Blog action day is that bloggers around the world gather one day a year to discuss subjects that concern all of us as individuals. On October 15 [...]

Videos of FOWA London

Last week I’ve attended to the 2008 London Edition of FOWA which was quite interesting. Being the geek I am, I mostly preferred to watch the keynotes on the developer track, rather than the business track, but the good news is that the organizers are publishing the videos of all keynotes for free, so I’m catching [...]

3, 2, 1… you are back in the room!

Is the Zo’C blog dead? I hear you asking. No. Not at all! But in the last four months or so a series of serious changes in my life have drained most of my energy and I had little choice but to stop writing for a while. The good news are that the serious changes are mostly [...]

Win problogger book and help the blogosphere

Chris garret has just launched a blogging survey and if you answer it you can win his new book, coauthored with Darren Rowse ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. The book alone is a great reason to join us and contribute to the survey, but actually there are better reasons. Blogging [...]

Zo’C featured in Designers Who Blog

Being the author of the Zo’C Powerblogroll — A Wordpress Plugin intended to transform the bulk blogrolls commonly are into powerful link-love tools — I couldn’t resist to offer Catherine Morley my plugin when I saw her blogroll was, literally, a few hundred links long. I could tell you myself the story of how this happened, [...]

Categorizing Pages and Posts in Wordpress

Having authored a plugin to display sub categories on wordpress, I’m often faced with users that realize they can’t use categories on pages, and they turn to me to explain how can be done. This post is meant to help all these people that want to learn why they can’t use categories on pages and, [...]

Writing the perfect blog post

My good friend Michel Martine has written Jazz Blogging – It’s the Notes You Don’t Play an excellent post in which he fiercely defends a blog post shouldn’t be perfect and shouldn’t try to be, because one of the key features of a blog is conversation and space should be left to the reader to [...]

On Twitter, IRC and Chat Rooms

There has been much discussion lately about twitter, how to use it and heavy criticism, so I’d share my view on twitter and tell you how I use mine. The year of 1997 was the one I took the deep plunge on the internet and, among other things I started to use the IRC chat system [...]

Tutorial: A category based archive on Wordpress

I followed Lorelle’s advice advice and added a category based archive on Zo’C’s archive page, and now I’m going to tell you how to create yours. At the end of this post, you’ll find the complete code in a single piece. Step 1: Create the template file and find the content area The first thing to do is [...]

Snow from my window: One of the virtues of working free-lance