Rihards Unplugged

Some of you, especially those that browse a lot will have by now probably noticed that more and more webpages have started switching from flv based videos over to divx based videos. It’s quite easy to notice it as well, for one, you need to install a special plugin to view these videos, and also you get to see a big divx logo first.

At first I didn’t like this at all (I don’t like most things that require a plugin to be usable), but after getting the plugin and watching some videos, especially those on Stage6 site, I must say that I’m very pleased with this new web video format. Now divx itself is quite old of course, but it is new to the web, and beats flash video and sound quality any time of the day.

Here’s an example, and don’t be alarmed if it asks you to install the divx plugin, it should be perfectly safe to do so. It’s the Theatrical Starcraft 2 trailer.

And I thought that I had really good HTML skills. This guy basically makes pictures using pure HTML code in the form of tables.

Some people really have too much time on their hands. But that is really nothing new either. Still quite amazing at one can do with a little bit of patience and some basic HTML skills. And of course creativity. Though I suppose that could be computer generated as well.

An update for all the budding bloggers out there who use wordpress as their blogging platform. Stasys from staska.net has posted a list of top 30 wordpress plugins, and generally I couldn’t agree more with the list. Some of those plugins are really must haves for every wordpress user.

This blog uses nine of the top 30 plugins, and I’ll be adding a few more from the list over the next days as well. So if you’re thinking about starting a blog, or already have, be sure to head over to staska.net and have a look at the list.

Had some extra free time today so decided to work some more on improving(hopefully it’s improving) the blog. Most noticeable changes are probably those on the front page. The way that the categories are now setup in a “tag cloud”, I always thought that the old way of showing them one per line took up too much space, and looked very boring as well. So I changed it to a “tag cloud”, which basically is a list of all categories thrown together in one pot. The bigger the text is, the more entries in that category there are.

Secondly I removed the top google adsense ads, and I’m thinking about some new placements for the ads anyway, seeing that they basically being in maybe six clicks per month anyway, and that just isn’t worth of having them here in the first place. Will probably decide on this over the next few days, was maybe thinking about having one of those 460×80 blocks after the first blog post. Any suggestions?

Thirdly, you can now subscribe to receive email notifications of any comments that have been posted in any of the entries that you have subscribed for. So if you want to find out about any follow up replies, just tick the small check box under the text area, and you’ll receive an email as soon as a comment is posted after yours.