But have you ever really thought about what makes a password strong? well this article is a great explanation of how hackers can attack a website and looks into great detail on what makes for the most secure passwords.

It’s changed how I think about password security and has made my passwords easier for me to remember while still being secure… Well, all the ones I’ve updated so far anyways

Hindsight

If you are a fan of the loudness that is “System of a Down” you should be familiar with this song, but possibly not the musicians, a fantastic cover version and a lot *ahem* easier on the eye

Hands up if your surprised by how much Violins can rock, I was.

Getting married? Looking for idea’s for a wedding cake? take a look at this…

I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with wordpress a lot in the last few month’s and while I’m not using all these plugins, I’m definitely going to be testing them, thanks for the post Conor

And finally as the F1 testing season kicked off last week and the anticipation is building for the new season, I stumbled across this video of Bruno Senna training and being the king of all multi-taskers

Aerobic training, Core muscle & balance training, concentration, Focus, as as well as eye hand coordination training, inspired!

Wise words

Work continues apace behind the scenes here getting the house in order. It’s slower progress than I expected though.

I’ve now spent 2 days sorting and tidying up the ‘Categories’ for my posts. I’m down from almost 400 to exactly 200 as I type and I’d like to get that number a lot lower, as I still have more categories than posts on here.

Why? I hear you ask, well it goes back to when I first started blogging and my lack of understanding of categories and tags, I thought they were the same thing and as I wanted to make sure that my ramblings could be found on search engines I was very liberal with the application of categories and as tags were less accessible to me, in wordpress at that time, I ignored them.

This was a monumental mistake of epic proportions. Essentially, categories help organise the posts on your blog where as tags are what search engines look for to help them organise the massive amount of data that they contain.

So once, I have sorted out the categories to my satisfaction, I have to apply tags to all my old posts. Thankfully, one of the many new features that WordPress now includes is a “category to tag converter” so once all the categories are sorted out, I’ll be looking into that a bit further to see if it will help me out in my quest to sort this mess out.

There are a number of reasons/excuses for this

Not enough time
Nothing that I wanted to write about
General disillusionment with the world
Tired of all the work required to keep WordPress up-to date
Tired of dealing with the random curve-balls that WordPress used to throw my way

I could go on. Long story, short I now have more time on my hands, there are thing’s I want to write about, the world ain’t so bad and WordPress has moved on so it’s now a lot easier to update.

I know this because I’ve spent the last while building a new site around WordPress which launched recently and now that I’ve smacked all the curve-balls out of the park why don’t you pop over to Not Junk Food and see what it’s all about. I’ll be keeping that site focused on my favourite topic, food and the rest of my posting will happen here.

So will I get back to regular posting here, who knows, but I’m going to give this place a bit of a makeover and a tidy up, so expect to see changes shortly.

Also, it came to my attention a while back that Paris Hilton has borrowed my blog title for a perfume so I’ll be changing that as part of the makeover.

Now I’m off to look at new theme’s and plugins.

So, I’ve upgraded WordPress and some of the plugins, I’ve even installed Donncha‘s Wp Super Cache Plugin. but there’s more to come. so long as what I’ve done doesn’t explode first, Fingers crossed then.

Wow, is it really August since I posted last? Well, seeing as how I know the answer is ‘yes’ that’s a bit of a dumb question really.

Anyhow, how to start back? There is the old reliable ‘what have I been doing?’ format or the ‘ignore it and pretend it never happened?’ format (Well it’s too late for that one now) or how about the ‘come clean with the reason you haven’t been blogging’ format.

Well the last one’s easy, I didn’t feel like it. :p and that’s because a lot has happened in my life since last August. I guess that brings me into the ‘what have I been doing’ format but not for long.

So what have I been doing?

August was spent working, September was spent travelling all over Europe, October was spent visiting mum, November didn’t see an improvement for mum and she passed away peacefully at home on the 11th, December saw a Christmas of adjustment, January until now was in general a bit quiet and mostly about connecting with some old friends online, getting ready for the move into our new home, oh and I went to Creative Camp.

So am I likely to change my posting schedule? Well, let’s just wait and see

Well I’ve already caught up on all my blog and news reading, my Google reader has no unread feeds left for the first time since I switched from Newsgator. although it seems to not want to allow me to add more feeds which is odd cause I know I don’t have as many as the likes of Robert Scoble but I can’t add anymore now

From my reading frenzy this morning, I see Grandad has Blognapped Granny’s Blog to wish her a happy birthday, the oul romantic! Well at least he didn’t head off tourist hunting for the day

Gizmodo seems to be getting less about the gadgets and more about the gags, these days, so much so that I hardly seem to read it anymore, could it be that the volume of posts is costing them quality? Surely not.

And Finally, over on the Blather Zeitgeist, Damien has posted a brilliant short film from Blur Studios, very funny and well worth the bandwidth and time it takes to view it.

So am I going to mow the lawn and fix the Media Centre PC today or just laze around the house all day and do nothing, It’s my day off after all.

• Make my “Archive” page work
• Make a “Category” Page
• Make an RSS news feed page

This probably sounds fairly simple and straightforward but unfortunately my knowledge in the whole coding area isn’t the best, so these thing’s may take quiet some time

So I’ve been investigating and it seems that there is something in certain posts that is causing the sidebars to vanish from the page. There are a few common threads with these posts…

1. They were all written in WordPress “rich text editor”
2. They all contain images
3. They were all saved as drafts and edited over an number of sittings

For now I’m just not going to use the Rich text editor, hopefully as I post more and the effected posts move off the front page the issue will become less prominent. I guess I’ll just have to live with it, until I work out whats causing it.

On the upside, the new plug-ins mean people can now digg my posts if they feel the need and I have some added colour thanks to the images feed. The new category cloud in the sidebar looks so much better than that horrible mess that I used to have and I finally have a functioning Spell-checker, I’m sure I’ll hear all about it if it’s not up to the task

It’s one of those things that bugs me about technology at times, it’s just not as simple as we’d like it to be. There’s a lot more going on with modern technology than most of us realise and it just doesn’t always do what we expect or want it to. That said It’s great to have the technology working for us… most of the time anyway.

Good luck Pandora, I can only hope that you can resolve the issues soon. I would be happy to signup for a pay per play account if it meant I could use Pandora’s service again. I’ve blogged about Pandora before and it has helped me find some great music I would never have heard without your service.