Arne Brachhold

I can’t stop watching it

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Explanation:
- On Monday I’m finished with school already around 2 pm.
- Wednesday is a long school day so I’m tired and don’t have time to Google
- Friday is my free day, much time for Googling!
- On the weekend, I do something else

found on Scobleizer

If you’re working in a team on a .Net project, all devs should use the same coding guidelines as well as the same code formatting. Visual Studio 2005 has powerful options to automatically format your code how you like it. Unfortunately there is no way to export this settings from Visual Studio, so every developer has to configure the formatting settings by hand.

This is not very comfortable and fail safe so there must be a way to export or backup these settings, so you can import them on an other computer or ideally set them as a group policy in Active Directory.

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This is a little Microsoft .Net class which allows you to use the powerful Akismet comment spam protection in your .Net wiki/blog/website/software.

It’s well documented and available as a precompiled library or C# project. It’s compiled as .Net 1.1, but also works great with 2.0. Note that you need to obtain a WordPress.com API key to use it.

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In June 2005, Google announced a new service called Google Sitemaps. This program allows webmaster to submit an index of URLs which they want to have included in Googles web search. It’s free to use and helps Google to get a more complete overview of your pages.

This FAQ answers the most asked questions reached me per mail. Feel free to contact me if you have suggestions or corrections for this page!

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Yeah, Google updated their data of Google Earth, Google Maps will follow soon. Now i can finally see my house and explore my neighborhood

Sure, it still hasn’t the same quality like NYC, but you can identify the Schlossplatz in Stuttgart and the beautiful Gottlieb Daimler Stadion (FIFA WORLD CUP™ information, Wikipedia) much better than before. Nice!

Some months ago, I coded a small tool for my MP3 player which copies the content of a M3U list into a specified directory. This is useful if your MP3s are distributed over several folders and you use M3u files to organize them.

This tool takes one or more M3U files and copies the contained MP3 files into a directory or MP3 player. Additionally, it can rename the files to keep the correct order.

It requires the .Net Framework 1.1 which should be already installed on your computer. If not, download it at microsoft.com.

Features:

• Takes multiple .m3u files
• Copies the content to a specified directory (or portable device)
• Can keep the correct order by renaming the files (like 0_1_Your first track.mp3)
• Can create sub directories for every .m3u file
• Full drag n’ drop support
• Allows you to exclude files

What is a M3U file?
A .m3u file is actually a list of audio file names. It just contains the path to every MP3 or audio file as well as some additional information like artist and title. Note that the .m3u file is a text-only list and doesn’t contain any music so you still need the associated MP3 files. M3U lists are used by a large number of audio players including WinAmp or Windows Media Player.

Download:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/get/M3UCOPiER/M3UCOPiER.msi

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This is just a minor bugfix release. If you are using the "custom pages" feature, I recommend you to update the plugin due to incorrect handling of the last modification date in custom pages, which was displayed as YYYY-DD-MM instead of YYYY-MM-DD.

Changes:

• Fixed bug with incorrect date format in custom pages
• Added Swedish Translation by Tobias Bergius

Update 1:

• Thierry Lanfranchi sent me a French translation of the plugin. Thank you for that! Download the new package to get it!

Update 2:

• Kuba Zwolinski sent me a Polish translation of the plugin. Thanks!

More Information and Download

I’m glad to announce a new version of the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress. This version fixes various issues and introduces some new features:

• Custom location of the sitemap file:
  Now you can specify a custom location for your sitemap file and place it in your root directory for example. This will allow you to add other URLs which are not in or beneath the Blog directory and didn’t get recognized by Google so far.
• Filter-Hook for other plugins:
  This plugin has an own WordPress filter, which can be used by other plugins to add their generated pages to the sitemap. Check the source code comments for more details.
• Fixed error with other extensions:
  The script should now also work with extensions like wp-mail. If there is a reason the plugin might not work due to not included files, it disables itself.
• Fixed bug with missing trailing slash:
  The Home URL has now always a trailing slash at the end.

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Hi there,

here is another WordPress Plugin for you! I’m sure you know del.icio.us, an online service where you can manage and share your bookmarks with other people. With this plugin you can add a "Bookmark this page on del.icio.us" link to your posts or sidebar. This will allow your visitors to add your page directly into their del.icio.us profile and makes your blog more popular!

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Hi there!

Thanks for the great support and popularity of my Google Sitemap Generator to all the users and Bloggers who linked to me, especially to Michael Nguyen from socialpatterns.com who had the idea at first of all.

Since Monday, 6 June 2005 over 3500 people visited my Blog and downloaded the current version about 2800 times.

Special thanks go to the contributors who told me about fixes and supplied code templates:
Rodney Shupe for SQL improvements, James and John for the Google-Ping code template, Brad and Christian Aust for bug reports and Hirosama for translating the plugin into Japanese and made translations possible at all.

Today I released a new version of the script, which introduces the ability to include external files which are not part of WordPress and also tell Google automatically about changes via Google Ping. A small new feature is the ability to define a minimum post priority which will override the calculated value (if activated). The work was done on Monday, 13 June but I decided to wait for two days beta testing and language pack creation before making it public.

If you still find any bugs or errors, please don’t hesitate to inform me via mail or comment.

I will move the plugin in the next few days to dev.wp-plugins.org to enable versioning and SVN access. A One-Click-Installer for wp-plugins.net was also planned, but the needed plugin "WordPress Plugin Manager" was temporary discontinued. Stay tuned for upcoming releases with new features.

More Information and Download

Update: (2005-06-16)
César Gómez Martín sent me a Spanish translation file.

Second Update: (2005-06-20)
Stefano Aglietti sent me an Italian translation file. Thanks for the good work!

Third Update: (2005-06-23)
Kirin Lin sent me a Traditional Chinese translation file! Many thanks for this! Download the full package with language files to get it

I had a little bit time this morning so I improved my Google Sitemaps Generator…

Features:

• WordPress Plugin Support (just copy it in your plugin directory and activate it)
• Administration UI (Customize setting like change frequency, page priorities and automatic priority calculation from your WordPress Admin Center)
• Includes Homepage, Posts, Static Pages, Categories and Archives
• Creates a static xml file called sitemap.xml in your blog directory
• Gets automatic rebuilt if you edit/write/publish a post
• Calculates post priority depending on the number of comments

Note: This new version is still beta and I’m still at testing. You can try it out and report any errors/mistakes/suggest to my email. If you can, test it under an other copy/backup of you blog… It’s still beta and may have bugs!!

Installation:
Download the zip Archive and extract the sitemap.php and in your wp-content/plugins directory. Then look in your admin page under Plugins and activate it. Now you can click on Options -> Sitemap and configure your settings. Update or write a post to start the first sitemap generation.

Note: I’m not a WordPress expert and this is my first plugin. I read The Plugin API and Writing a Plugin at the WordPress pages. If you are more familiar with WordPress plugins and see something strange/not recommended please tell me! Also the registered actions (add_action) which start sitemap generation may be redundant.

Update: I included a Manual Rebuild button in the options page so you don’t need to edit a post to start the generation at the first time. Beta Testers are welcome

Google announced yesterday a new tool for webmasters. The Google Sitemaps! You can submit you sitemap to Google and allow them to find all your pages without crawling every link. You can read more about this cool feature at searchenginewatch.com.

I created a small php file which will do the generation of the sitemap in a Google compliant format for you. At the moment, only posts, home page and static pages are supported. If you have better knowledge of WordPress than me, feel free to modify the script and include category pages etc.

Every URL in the sitemap may have a priority which represents the page priority on your website. My script calculates the it on the number of comments. This should be ok for most blogs, maybe i will add the post date to priority generation later.

Installation is easy! Just download the sitemap.php and place it in your blog directory. Then tell Google Sitemaps the URL and all should be fine

If you want you can alter the default configuration for various settings like the change frequenty of posts etc. Just have a look at the top of the php file.

I’ve tested it on this site ( WP1.5.1.1 ) and with a XML Schema validator. If you find an error or if it doesn’t work on your site, please drop me a mail or write a comment and I will have a look at your site.

UPDATE:
I included support for archive pages. Just download the new version 1.1 again.
Archive pages will have a predefined priority which can be customized.

UPDATE 2:
It get’s allmost complete
Added support for categorie pages. They will also habe a predefined priority which can be customized.
Download the current version at the links above.

Suggestions / Todo
- Autogenerate priority of categories (maybe by postcount?)
- Use correct lastMod in categories and archives (find last post)

UPDATE 3:
Check the beta of the new version at Google Sitemap Generator v2 (BETA) which comes as a WordPress Plugin and a grahpical administration page!

Custom Webhandlers are an excellent method to create ASP.Net pages which don’t need all the Page and WebControl stuff. Maybe you already created a .aspx file which should only return XML or an image.

If you develop with Visual Studio, it creates automatically an .aspx and .cs file for you and you have to delete all content except the Page Directive from the .aspx file or call Response.End() at Page_Load. This is not very cool and results in useless work.
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Microsoft released the new Microsoft Component Installer Software Development Kit which is a SDK to perform various required installations for your .Net application.

The installer includes:

• Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.8
• Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0c
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0c for Managed Code
• Microsoft .NET Framework Version 1.1 Language Pack
• Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1
• Microsoft ASP.NET Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1
• Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0
• Microsoft Windows Installer 3.1

If you run it before your application setup, you can be sure all required components will be installed.

You can also specify an application or URL which will be executed when the installer finished. If you set the the "uionlyifneeded" parameter, the installer won’t be shown to the user if all required components are already installed.