HTML Code Template For Commenting on Blogs

Repost from the old site.

Many people comment on blogs, either using Blogger‘s built-in commenter or the commenters on Movable Type or Typepad (two blogging platforms that compete with Blogger).

However, when most people make links in either of these commenting systems, they mess it up and end up making a huge hyperlink that scrolls across the page and is not clickable (Movable Type and Typepad‘s commenters may have ways to make a clickable hyperlink – I am not sure).

Another problem when using commenting systems is that many people do not seem to know how to differentiate quoted comments with your own comments. The best way is to put the quoted comments in italics and leave your own non-italicized. You can also bold either your comments or the other person’s comments.

When you don’t differentiate between quoted comments and your own comments, there is confusion about who wrote what.

So, as Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Well, one thing you could do is what I do, and that is to set up a template for commenting on blogs. I will next show you some HTML code to put in your template.

Even better yet, you really don’t even need to know any HTML to make and use this template. Of course, although Blogger does not require any knowledge of HTML, any HTML knowledge you can acquire will always help you to use Blogger better. There are plenty of basic HTML books out there. I strongly recommend the HTML 4 For Dummies book as a great starter book for any beginner.

How to make your template:

First of all, to make your template, use a plain text file. I do not recommend using Word or any other mainstream word processor, nor should you use your email program or newsreader. On Windows platforms, Notepad automatically uses plain text for all of its files. There are other plain text editors out there, like Notepad++ (one of my favorite applications). The Mac has a correlate of Notepad called Text Edit.

On Windows, find Notepad by going to Search – Files and Folders and typing in Notepad. When you find it, right click and choose Make Shortcut. A message will come up saying, “Windows cannot make a shortcut here. Do you want one on the desktop instead?” Choose Yes. Now go to your desktop and note that you have a shortcut to Notepad there. Leave it there.

Now, double-click Notepad to create a new file. It will open a new blank file with the title “Untitled“. Now go to File – Save As and a Save As screen will come up probably asking you to save the file on your desktop, but it may ask you to save somewhere else, like My Documents. Wherever it asks you to save, make a note of where it is saving the file so you can find it again.

Under File Name it will say *.txt. Save as Type will be Text Documents (*.txt). Encoding will say ANSI. Leave Save as Type and Encoding as they are unless you really know what you are doing. Now, under File Name, go to the beginning of the *.txt string and delete the *, leaving the .txt. Now start typing a name for your file.

Let’s call it HTML for Blog Comments (but you can call it anything you want). Make sure to leave the .txt at the end of the file name. When you finish typing the file name, click Save. You can now go look on your desktop if you want and you should see a saved file sitting there called HTML for Blog Comments.

Now go back to the opened Notepad file that is open in your taskbar and click on it to open it up. Notice that the title has changed from Untitled to HTML for Blog Comments.

Now we are going to start typing. Type the following characters in your Notepad file:

<i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i>

To make it easy for yourself, just type a few of them and then select those with your mouse, hit Control-C to copy them, and then hit Control-V to paste them next to the ones you have already typed. This way you can have as many or as few as you like. I have 22 pairs of <i>'s in my template. The i in brackets is an HTML italic tag. The <i> is the opening tag and the </i> is the closing tag.

Now, next time you are making some comments on someone’s blog and you want to quote the other person, go to this Comments Template and mouse select – Control-C copy the italic tags in your template:

<i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i>

Go ahead and grab them all. Now go to the comments box and Control-V paste the italic tags into the comments box. Now put your mouse cursor before the tags and start typing. Hit enter a few times to give yourself some space to type. This way the italic tags will always be a couple of lines below your typing so you do not get confused.

When you want to quote another person’s text, go find the other person’s text you want to quote, select it with your mouse and Control-C to copy it. Now go to the comments and very carefully put the mouse cursor in between the <i> opening italic tag and the </i> closing italic tag. Hit Control-V to paste the text you want to quote in between the opening and closing tags.

There should now be an <i> in front of the quoted text and a </i> at the end of the quoted text. Now hit enter a couple of times to give yourself some space to respond to the quoted text. Repeat as many times as you want depending on how many snippets of text you want to quote and comment on.

Use the preview button on the commenting system to make sure the quoted text is in italics.

If you don’t like italics and would rather use bold, or want both italics and bold for some reason, then add some bold tags to your template. If you want to put some bold tags in your template, just type a few of these bold tags <b> </b>, then copy-paste them as described above until you have as many as you need. Your bold tags in your template would look something like this:

<b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b>

If you want to mark some text in bold, just copy and paste the text in between the opening <b> and closing </b> bold tags. Once again, preview it in the commenting system to make sure the text actually got bolded.

Now that we have italics and bold tags in our template, it is time to move on to hyperlinks. Yes, links. If you look at comments on blogs, you will notice that comments with links are often not properly written, and tend instead to scroll across the page wildly. Furthermore, they are usually just text representations of the link addresses, something like:

http://www.answers.com/9/11%20conspiracy%20claims%20regarding%20Jews%20or%20Israel

As you can see, that is not clickable at all, although it is a hyperlink. If you copy it and paste it into your address bar of your browser, your browser will take you to the webpage. If you put it into many word processing programs or many email programs, those programs will automatically make a link out of it.

But Blogger will not do it, neither in its compose editor when making posts nor in its commenter. If you want it to show you up, you need to make it into a hyperlink. You will need to write this code in your template:

<a href=""></a>

Now save that line to your comment template. When you want to make a hyperlink in comments on a blog, cut and paste that line above:

<a href=""></a>

into the commenter. Now go and find your hyperlink. Select it with your mouse and copy it. Go back to the commenter and look closely at the code above. Carefully place your mouse button between the two quote marks: “” so your cursor has one quote mark on either side of it. Now paste the url in between the quote marks.

It doesn’t matter at all how long it is either. It won’t scroll. That code can handle huge url’s and it will not lengthen the resulting hyperlink at all. Now you need to call your link something. Look closely at the code now, with the url pasted into it. Look for this space where the two brackets are pointing at each other:

<a href=""></a>

Extracting the brackets from the code, I refer to these two:

><

Position your cursor in between the two brackets that point at each other and start typing something. You can call it my link, or link, or click here, or anything you want. This is what will show up clickable in blue on the web page. When that text is clicked, it will take the person to the web page:

<a href="Paste url here">Type Name for Link Here</a>

Now, if you are feeling really brave, you can try it on your own. Go to a blog somewhere and practice. In fact, you can even practice with this blog post here in the comments section. Use the preview section to look at how your HTML template code came out. That way you can try to correct any errors before you post your blog comments. One more thing: you are starting to learn a bit of the magic art of HTML!

Looking for a Windows XP Upgrade Disk

I am looking to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. If any of my readers have a Windows XP upgrade disk they want to give to me or even sell to me, let me know. We can talk about via email, phone or however.

A Rather Subjective Analysis of European Minority Languages

One way to see how well European minority languages is if you run a popular website that gets a lot of hits from all over Europe. I run one here on my old site, which is in the top 1200 blogs on the Internet (This blog is also in the top 1200).

If you have a good weblog (a weblog allows a webmaster to monitor all of the visitors from your site), and I do, you can see what languages people are using on their browsers. When browsers come to the site, they are marked with language tracking. I am not sure if that is a language preference for webpages or if it is the language that the browser itself is written in.

Minority lanugages are languages that are not the main spoken language of the country or languages that only have a small speaker base. In this piece, we will be dealing with Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Luxemburgish. Those I am quite sure are offered as language versions of the major browsers.

Luxemburgish: Luxemburgish is the official language of Luxemburg, however, there are worries about it due to the small speaker base of only around 500,000. Further, there is a problem in that not enough new and technological words are coming into the language. Most browsers from Luxemburg are using the Luxemburgish language, so the language seems to be in pretty good shape.

Catalan: Catalan is the most popular of the remaining five. However, considering how many readers I get from the Catalan region, very few Catalans are using Catalan browsers. Most are using Spanish language browsers. So the situation of Catalan does not look so good.

Irish: I am amazed that there are any Irish browsers at all, but now and then, we do get one from Ireland. Needless to say, nearly all browsers from Ireland are using English. Still, everyone knows that Irish is in bad shape. Considering there are Irish browsers at all, I think Irish is in better shape than we think it is.

Galician: I was quite shocked to find a few Galician browsers out there coming out of Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. This language is probably in better shape than people think it is. Most Galician browsers use Spanish.

Welsh: Considering that most reports indicate that Welsh is doing pretty well, I was surprised that one almost never sees a Welsh browser. Almost all browsers coming out of Wales use English. I wonder if Welsh is in as good a shape as people say it is considering the dearth of Welsh browsers.

Basque: I have yet to see a Basque browser! If browsers are indeed offered in Basque (uncertain) this is very bad news. I get quite a bit of traffic out of the Basque country, and 100% of the time, Basque users are using Spanish as their browser language. Things don’t look good for the Basque language.

I can’t speak of other small languages in Europe because in general, browsers are not offered in those languages.

This was an interesting little experiment though.

Thoughts on “File Sharing” and the Tangled Issue of Copyright and Patent

AJ asks: What’s your opinion on the morality of sites like The Pirate Bay, and the various torrent sites, torrent clients, and file sharing and P2P in general? Do you consider downloading an mp3 for free the same as stealing? Metallica does. Do you agree with Metallica when they took on Napster?

Yes, it stealing. The phrase “sharing” is outrageous. How bout I come break into your house and share some of your property, eh?

My brother is a musician, and he hates this crap.

But it’s the industry’s fault. They have so overpriced CD’s and movie tickets that no one wants to go to the movies or buy a CD. Forget concerts. Plus the scum keep phasing out tech and introducing it again.

I owned 8-tracks, cassettes, albums and now CD’s. Theoretically, one could have bought the same work 4 different times as each old tech was phased out. It’s all a joke to get us to pay up to four times for the same work of art!

Keep in mind that every time the bastards upgraded the media, the upgraded the devices to play the media. The jerks made me shell out for an 8-track player, a cassette player, a record player and now a CD player. No doubt they have further upgrades in mind down the road!

However, there is a sell it or give it away problem here. Are the various TV shows for sale? What about shows that will never run again and yet are not being offered for sale. Ok, look, we ought to have a right to “steal” that stuff.

There is a principle in copyright law that says, “Sell it or give it away.” You simply may not produce a work of art or any patented invention and then put it in your drawer and not let the public use it. For copyright, you may not release something and then pull distribution. People have a right to your art. If you don’t want to sell your art, then give it away.

The same applies or ought to apply to software. Sell it or give it away. The very notion that abandonware exists is outrageous. I can’t tell you how many IT scum have defended the notion of abandonware to me.

Capitalists in general are loathsome ratfucks anyway, but I must say that some of the filthiest, most evil capitalists I have ever met worked in the software industry. We can thank these maggots for totally unenforceable “software licenses” (Ever read one of those outrageous things?), software that miraculously comes out without an install disk, the total failure of the notion of customer service, forced upgrades, refusal to work with competitor’s products, and a pile of stinking horseshit as high as the stratosphere.

It is because of the antics of the likes of Bill Gates et al that software went free and open source – consumers were so outraged by the industry’s crap that they killed the industry by producing their own free product. Some day the software industry will be a tiny shadow of its former self, and that will be a great day indeed. Bill Gates needs to have a stake driven through his heart in cemetery at midnight, but hold your cross in front of you to blind him so he doesn’t fight back.

You also may not patent an invention and then refuse to release it to the public. If you don’t sell it, you must give it away. No hoarding of the public commons.

The music industry is about as maggoty as the software scum, but musicians themselves are good people who surely deserve the fruits of their labors.

E-Commerce is a World of Shit

Repost from the old site.

I really feel that e-commerce has shot itself in the foot. I would much rather buy about any product at a brick and mortar store any day of the week. My experiences with e-commerce have typically been horrible.

I just got a spyware infection from a site that sells fake spyware apps to consumers. Why are these sites even legal?

First they try to load Trojans (in this case, one called Zlob) on your site, then they install malware on your computer without even asking for it, then it runs and “finds” all this fake spyware on your system that doesn’t even exist, then tries to make you buy the program to fix the nonexistent spyware problems.

Then they make it impossible to remove it from your system, and I’m a computer expert. Now I have a pop-up all the time in my tray and no way to get rid of it.

The program was uninstalled via Add Remove Programs and I deleted some Registry entries and went through and found more crap afterwards, and deleted it from Registry and Programs. Despite all my deleting, I still have rogue processes going that I can’t even find or kill or anything.

It also outrageously installs a fake program giving you a fake Windows Kernel Fault screen that requires a computer reboot. Someone tell why this shit is not illegal?

The program is called AntiSpyCheck and you get it from AntiSpyCheck.com. I did not download this program on purpose. Instead, I clicked on a video codec and it installed installed itself without even asking. AntiSpyCheck is a rogue antispy program. These programs run on your computer and tell you that you have all sorts of spyware infections that you do not even have.

Then they try to get you to buy the rogue antispyware program. If you do buy it, then you just wasted money on a fake program. In addition, many of these sites are phishing sites that are designed to steal your credit card information. As if that were not bad enough, the fake antispyware itself is often a criminal program that installs a Trojan and tries to steal any valuable data on your computer.

All of these Zlob programs seem to be originating from Russian Organized Crime, in this case, often in the Ukraine. Even if you don’t buy the evil program, they often have an annoying pop-up that never ends until you buy the program. One is tempted to purchase the evil program just to make the pop-up go away. In no case should you purchase such a program!

Overview.

Then I shelled out for some complete garbage spyware software called Spy Hunter. Spy Hunter charges your credit card after six months to renew your subscription, but it sends you an email warning you first and lets you opt out. Why is that even legal? There was no choice about whether or not to allow them to slam your credit card every 6 months.

Update: I fixed the AntiSpyCheck infection via this site. You run MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware program and it gets rid of it perfectly. The trial run is free, but if you want realtime protection, you need to shell out. The product is excellent and I may just buy it.

Typically, these Internet shit e-commerce joints have no humans at the other end. There’s a tech support email, but who knows if they answer it. The general rule in e-commerce is no customer service whatsoever. There’s typically no phone # to call and no human to talk to. Often you can resolve things with emails, but not always. It’s still a pain in the butt.

The fuck customer service thing is the latest wonderful trend in US capitalism. It’s all about cutting costs. It’s even spreading to credit cards.

Credit cards used to have decent customer service, but my last card was with “Juniper” which it turns out is actually owned by the British Barclays Bank.

There’s no brick and mortar joint to pay your card,as the bank is in the UK! They deviously (Why is this legal?) allowed me to run my card over the limit and then started pounding me with monthly overlimit fees. I could not afford to pay down the over-limit draft.

Banks will now outrageously allow you to overdraw on your account at the ATM with very few warnings. Instead of a loan, which it is, you are immediately hammered with an overlimit fee as you overdraft. Why is this shit even legal? Then you have to put it all back in before the beginning of the month or they will close your account! Now you will have a big black mark on your credit rating.

Now, just tonight I tried to buy SpyHunter. Of course there’s no humans on the other end, and they don’t even have a physical presence. First of all, it did not let me look over the purchase before I bought it, so my autofill program filled in my name and last name with my address and I was not able to change that.

The thing would not even let me download the program. It kept asking me for a username and password. It gave me two different ones in the email and I tried both of them. Both failed over and over.

Earlier, I purchased a product called Stuffit for $30 so I could unzip files. I had a previous version on there, so this new one never would install because it said I had to remove the old one first. Although I uninstalled through the traditional way, it still claimed the old program was still there! I searched the whole computer for anything related to the old program and never could get all of it off. So my $30 program never got installed.

I could call the company, but customer service with even huge software companies is so horrible I have not even bothered.

I have a cam with a software program that requires a code to make it work. The code has been lost, so I can’t install my cam software. I guess I could call Intel, but I bet their support is garbage too. Another problem is that a lot of these programs get abandoned (abandonware), so they might not even be able to give you a code even if they wanted to.

There is a product I like to purchase called Tamer. It kills the acid in coffee. None of the phone numbers ever work. You buy the product online and the first thing it tells you is that there has been a database error. So you assume that the sale did not go through. But that really means you bought it!

I’ve had them mail the product to me a few times, and every time, it seems like something screws up. It gets shipped back to them, but they don’t notify me that the product came back. They only tell me that when I email them and bitch (No way to talk to the company on the phone, remember?).

Software is probably the only product in the world like this. It’s the only product that refuses to work with competing products. It’s the only product that installs itself and makes it so you can’t get rid of it. It’s the only product whereby you could have a perfect working copy of it sitting around but you can’t make it work because you can’t punch in some “make it work code”.

It’s the only product that tries to force you to buy their product. With most everything else, you still have a choice. You can buy product A, B, C or D. Name one other product you are more or less forced to buy like Windows or Word. Name one other product where the old product doesn’t work anymore and you have to keep on shelling out for new versions all the time.

Software has been all about fuck the consumer from day one, unless you are a big corporate customer, in which case I guess you get some service. As a natural monopoly like water, power, phone or cable, software probably needs to be regulated by the state like any other natural monopoly.

It is the disgust and rage of computer users with the world of shit that software and its evil twin, e-commerce, have wrought, that has brought about open source and free products like Firefox, Open Office, Linux, etc. With these products, the model has no reason to fuck the consumer at all, so it just doesn’t happen.

It’s sad that America idolizes a punk like Bill Gates. He’s been fucking over consumers from his first day on the job. He’s violated every contract he’s ever signed, and he’s stolen just about every bit of competing code he could find. He’s a liar, a thief, a traitor and a snake. In the real world, when people act like that, they are called sociopaths. They get their asses kicked, they get killed or they go to jail or prison, or all of the above.

In Corporate World, you act the same way that gets your ass kicked or gets you tossed in prison in the real world and you turn into the Businessman Hero of the World.

The point is that this shit Internet industry is to blame for all of this. They are the ones that have been screaming loud and clear from day one about “no regulation of the Internet” and “no taxing of the Internet”.

So the Internet is the Wild West with no sheriffs or posses that do anything. There’s rustlers, crooks and robbers everywhere, and you go the sheriff or the posse and they shrug their shoulders and say so what. They wanted an unregulated Internet and that’s what they got. Internet e-commerce – the most consumer-hostile industry around.

I like the brick and mortar world. In general, the workers help you and show you where things are. There’s usually someone to talk to. If something doesn’t work, you can always bring it back. The clerks and aisle help go out of their way to be as nice and friendly as possible.

It’s the mirror opposite of E-Commerce World.

There’s actually a lot more to this story about the Internet being a haven for every criminal, thief, liar, scammer, and fraudulent dog on Earth, but I’ll save it for another post.

Firefox 3.5 Review

I usually do not review software, but I am a computer buff, so I may as well. Firefox is the free browser made by the Mozilla Foundation based on the old Netscape browser.

It is now starting to seriously rival Microsoft’s Internet Exploder, especially in Northern and Eastern Europe. Finland and the Baltic states have gone over in a big way. Internet Exploiter is still huge in China and Korea, with over 95% penetration in both places. In China, there are many IE clones which are widely used, complicating matters further for Firefox.

I upgraded from 3.0.1x a while back, and the early 3.5 was really terrible, so I’ve been avoiding it ever since. Nevertheless, someone put it on the other computer I use, and I noticed the other day that it was quite nice. So I finally got up the nerve to put it on this one.

What a surprise! It’s not often that a browser upgrade really slaps you across the face with its sudden and dramatic improvement.

One annoyance about earlier Firefox was the extremely bad use of resources such that the browser quickly pigs out and is sucking a good GB or so of RAM and on this box, I’m then into virtual memory territory, which on Windows just sucks. Also many webpages, especially this WordPress, are slow as mud in the Colorado River. I always figured it was the sucky WordPress platform, but whatever’s causing it, the new 3.5 makes WordPress positively snappy.

The browser loads very quickly, even with 2 windows and 17 tabs open as I am wont to do. It’s still pretty piggy, but the browser seems to retain snappiness and stability even as it gorges on your RAM, which is nice. I’m waiting to see how it acts in VM territory, but nothing on Windows is stable in VM, so I’m not optimistic.

The earlier stability problems are completely gone now.

If you have not done so already, upgrade to 3.5 right now!

Firefox 3.5

The long-awaited Firefox 3.5 was released a few days ago, on June 30, 2009. I just “upgraded” yesterday. Big mistake. Many of my extensions didn’t work, and Firefox was seriously hogging the CPU on a regular basis. It was so bad, frankly, FF 3.5 was simply unusable.

My specs: Windows 2000
1 GB memory
1.66 MHZ AMD CPU
Fast graphics card with 128 MB memory

The system works quite well, and frankly, Windows 2000 uses resources much better than that Godawful system pig called Windows XP. Firefox also works much better on Windows 2000 than on XP. On XP, FF rapidly eats up the entire 1 GB of available memory. On Windows 2000, it takes a number of days to do that, possibly over a week.

Also I have found that Windows 2000 is more stable than XP. It is nearly impossible to bring this Win 2K box down. I think I have hard-rebooted it maybe once. Every rare while, you might want to reboot for system performance. You need to reboot XP quite a bit more often. Actually, most of my Win 2K reboots are done just to check for new applications, since a lot of apps only check for new stuff on a reboot.

True, Win 2K does not have System Restore, but I so horribly mangled my XP box with System Restore a while back, that I wonder what good it even is.

On Firefox, I reverted back to Firefox 3.0.10 within a day. You can get old FF versions here and here. I could not find Firefox 3.0.13 available anywhere. But those two sites only go up to 3.0.11.

How to revert to an older version of Firefox? Just go and get the old version manually and install it on top of the new one. You might have a problem with bookmarks though.