BenMeadowcroft.com

My brother was reformatting the hard disk of his computer the other day, why he felt the need to take the casing off the computer while he was doing it I’ve no idea, here are some photos.

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Looking through the user agent logs of my website I came across an interesting entry for a crawler calledSlySearch/1.0 this is the crawler for an anti-plagiarism application. This application indexes the text of various web pages. To use the application a paper is submitted, the application then analyses the web pages in its index to determine if any uncited copying has occurred. Having a look on their website it was quite interesting to read about the techniques they use to identify and determine the extent of the plagiarism. Plagiarism Warning! Due to this it can be seen that copying any of the reports I have made available on this site is now more likely to be discovered and appropriately dealt with. The moral is clear don’t copy (or “adapt”) work you find on the Net and claim it as your own, in addition to be a copyright violation, the chances of being caught have increased (at least if you are copying from this site).

At the bottom of this page I’ve replaced my current favourite CD’s with my current favourite blogs, I’ve recently started reading In Spite of Years of Silence, why is it one of my favourites? I’m not really sure, the writing style does seem to engage me, it is a fairly personal weblog (compared to the ones I normally read), anyway I just like it.

I’ve just shelled out for a new digital camera, I’ve got a holiday to Madrid coming up soon and wanted a better camera on which to take the pictures. I’ve been playing around with it all morning, using my TV as a view finder has been fun 🙂 As with my barcelona trip a few months ago, I’ll put the pictures up on this site after I return. One difference though is that I will not be putting the pictures through a dodgy scanner this time so I should be able to improve the quality.

The web standards project has been retooling for a while now, and following their original advice I’ve provided my own web page dealing with the standards compliance issue. There are the standard links to the popular CSS friendly browsers, as well as a few braille and aural user agents. One of the benefits of looking around for browsers to add to the list has been the discovery of new browsers that I hadn’t heard of before, or had forgotten about. The list is by no means comprehensive though, and if any one knows of a browser for the Amiga that supports CSS2 (to some degree) then let me know.

Thanks to that great application known as the internet I’ve been able to learn something recently (in between all the revising I’ve been doing). The difference between acronym and the abbreviation tag are somewhat vague in the HTML specification, however you can check out the interesting discussion I had on this subject and learn all about it, Acronym vs Abbr. (I’m still rolling out the changes I am making as a result of this discussion.)

Raising the awareness of the rights of smileys. Read the horrifying truth.
? Ever wondered what it’s all about really, when you get right down to the basics? Didn’t think so, carry on then.

Thought I might as well put a pointer into this site before someone beats me to it. It’s a link to a few fairly basic CSS templates which I quite liked. I haven’t tested these in any browser other than Opera 6, so I don’t know what they look like on other browsers. As always you can check out my own stylesheet stuff in the webdev area of my site.

I’ve become quite interested in how my site ranks in Google for certain search terms. The most popular term used to find my site is css templates. I’m quite pleased with where I am on google with that search term (number 3 last time I checked).