A flawed analysis of trends in the number of blogs, and the increase in the number of spam blogs, has lead people to think that the number of non-spam blogs is falling. In fact the growth trends remain strong. Continue reading
Is capitalism obsolete?
We now live in an economy which is very different from that in which capitalism, in its modern form, emerged and it is doubtful how relevant efficiency in production is the the key sectors of the knowledge economy. Continue reading
WordPress theme: Dent
This is a simple theme based on earth colours. Continue reading
WordPress theme: Esthwaite
My first completely original WordPress themes. You can preview it by using the theme browser (you may have to reload the page to get the theme to change). Continue reading
Ignore terrorism
I have lived in two cities (London and Colombo) which have been heavily targeted by terrorists. Bombs twice went off somewhere I was going to. I have once been close enough to see serious injuries. I have always regarded it as a duty to to simply carry on with life as normal, and I still regard this is the best way to deal with terrorism.
Terrorism is a means by which small groups with limited resources can cause serious disruption and gain wide publicity. As their aim is to disrupt our lives, we can best defeat them by not allowing our lives to be disrupted. Continue reading
WordPress plugin: Frameable
This plugin is designed to make individual pages of a site frameable. This can be used to enable cut and paste quoting of individual posts or cut and paste (X)HTML only syndication of a blog or blog category. Continue reading
Simple Sparklines WordPress plugin, version 0.2
I have updated my Simple Sparklines WordPress plugin. My thanks to David Chait and Mark Wubben for anwsering my questions on the WordPress support forum. The hardwork was done for me by James Byers’ Sparkline PHP Graphing Library. Continue reading
Thanks
I have mentioned my other sites and the various changes but some thanks and acknowledgements are needed.
All three of my sites are running on WordPress. Although known as blog software (and that it what it is in the default configuration) it is very versatile and makes a great CMS for many sites. The support forums are very invaluable. The most useful for me of the many plugins I have tried have been The_excerpt Reloaded (which allowed my to show excerpts to the length I wanted) and WP-Cache (which made my sites noticably faster loading). Continue reading
WordPress plugin: Simple Sparklines
This is a very simple WordPress plugin that allows the creation of simple sparklines (small graphs that fit in the flow of text). It uses James Byers’ Sparkline PHP Graphing Library.
The aim of this plugin is simplicity, it therefore does not use the full range of features of the PHP sparkline library, let alone the full potential of sparklines per se. However it is very easy to use. For example this graph [spark] [type line] [size 20,30] [series 66,64,62,60,56,54,52,50,40,30,20,10,0][dot 7,50,5,green][/spark] illustrates the kinked demand curve faced by a firm in a oligopolistic market. The EBITDA of telecoms company Thus over the last five years is shown by [spark] [type bar] [size 20, 4] [series -24.6,3.1,27.1,43.6,39.1][/spark]. Continue reading
New website
After a very busy week that left me hardly any time for writing, I have split the investment definitions pages off from my investment research site.
Hopefully this will improve usability and make the site more visible in search engines – although the risk is that they may take time to catch up on the change.
Google still has not got page rank flowing through my site five weeks after I changed the URL structure. Yahoo and MSN seem to have been faster at this, but on the other hand Yahoo took much longer to index my whole site in the first place and MSN has still only indexed about 10% of it.