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  • PayPal Comes Through!

    A few months ago I finally had a donation via this site. My one and only. Needless to say, I was chuffed and even emailed the donater personally to thank them.

    I heard nothing back until a few weeks later when PayPal informed me that the donater disputed the money and was requesting it back. They seemed to think it was for goods that I hadn’t delivered so I explained it was a donation and that my site name appears prominently during this process. They quickly backed my cause and rejected the dispute. However, their credit card company thought otherwise and withdrew the money.

    But, hats off to PayPal, they persevered and disputed this “chargeback”. And won.

    It is PayPal’s standard practice to dispute wrongful chargebacks. One of the benefits of using PayPal is that our team of chargeback specialists will gather the necessary information from you and work with the credit card company until the chargeback is resolved.

    We appreciate your prompt response to our request for information about this transaction.

    The money is now heading back towards me. Not that I longer feel that it was voluntarily donated out of good will, which is a shame.

    But why would you donate a sum of money and then do whatever you can do to claw it back? Well, I suspect I know the answer. My Simple PayPal Donate WordPress plugin is quite popular and in all the code examples I use my details. I suspect someone has implemented it with my details by mistake and this person was attempting to donate elsewhere. None-the-less, it would have been my details (including site address) that would have appeared during this process.

  • Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything

    ..as the writer Gregg Easterbrook once said.

    I’ve been less than impressed with the governments recent decision on how to tackle illegal filesharing (and for those that missed it, they’re insisting that ISPs remove customers internet access if their IP is traced and they’re found to share files. So, no possible issues there then!), but now it’s been revealed that the statistics that they are using to back it all up are dubious, to say the least.

    Or as someone else once declared, “facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”

    Why let little things such as facts and hard evidence get in the way when you have something to prove?

  • Switching blog content on and off

    A while ago I realised that I had a need to be able to turn off particular content on and off, as required, on particular posts and pages. In this case, it was to switch off comments and/or advertisements (they default as being switched on). For example, you may have an “About Me” page on which you may not want people to be able to leave comments.

    The solution was quite simple and makes use of the custom fields feature.

    First of all, find the code that you need to find switchable within your theme page and add the following before it…

    <?php $nocomment=get_post_meta($post->ID,"nocomment",false); ?>
<?php if ($nocomment[0]!="Yes") : ?>

    And immediately after it…

    <?php endif; ?>

    What this does is look for a custom field named “nocomment”. If it exists and doesn’t contain “Yes” then it will execute the code in question. Obviously, you can change the field name as you require – make sure you change the reference in the above code as well.

    I have another, titled “noad”, which I then use for turning off advertisements on particularly pages.

  • Die IE6, die

    Internet Explorer 6

    Microsoft doesn’t want Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to die and, indeed, they’ve announced that they will continue to support it until 2014.

    IE6 was launched in 2001 yet remains popular. Most of these users, I suspect, are businesses – we use it at my place of work. Except, there’s a growing back lash against the use of this version of the browser.

    So, what’s wrong with it?

    Well, security for a start, which has moved on a lot since 2001. For me, however, it’s the problem with web development. It isn’t compliant with the appropriate standards and developers often have to introduce “tweaks” to sites to get them to specifically work with IE6. Microsoft had been pretty lax with these standards (probably because they could be – what was the alternative at this point?) and only really started making a nod to improvements with this release. It wasn’t until IE7 that serious consideration was made.

    Then there are other issues – it doesn’t support transparency with PNG images, for instance. All of this means that whilst most modern browsers will just work if your site code is written properly, swathes of effort often then have to be put in to get it to work with IE6. Here’s a useful, but jokey, comparison.

    But, hell no, Microsoft is going to keep supporting it, rather than withdrawing support and pushing IE8 out in preference. Odd, as they were keen to try and get rid of XP after Vista came out. That was until it became really popular again, thanks to Netbooks. Surely this isn’t a commercial issue is it? Microsoft appear happy to force users to upgrade if there’s money in it, but with free software such as IE, they’d much rather be seen doing “the right thing” for business.

    However, playing devil’s advocate, I should point out that IE6 was the last version of Internet Explorer that was compatible with any Windows OS before XP. Therefore, if you’re hanging onto Windows 98 with your finger nails, you’re stuck with 6 as your IE choice. Having said, that, as I think that most of this is due to business, I suspect this isn’t their reason. I know at my place of work that certain essential online applications won’t run on newer browsers – and god help them think about buying anything newer 😉

    There’s a growing band of developers who are adding code of their site to detect and reject those using IE6. This is one way to go if you don’t want to develop a site specifically for this browser. The other is to swallow your pride and change it.  Personally, I’ve not got around to checking this site with IE6 – there is a vast list of browsers I need to give priority to first. In time, though, I will and I’m sure, like a fool, I’ll fix any problems.

  • When a walk in the park becomes uncomfortable

    I have 2 daughters – one is a little over 3 months old and the other is 11 years old. Quite a difference in age but I’m sure you’d find nothing weird or wrong with that.

    So, we’ll often go out. Just for a walk or we’ll go to a nearby park. My old daughter loves to push her baby sister in the pram. Sometimes I’ll just be with her (my wife taking a chance to have a rest) or both myself and my wife will be.

    Yesterday, we went to a nearby park. It was quite busy so my wife and I walked behind my older daughter, pushing the pram (otherwise we would have been taking up an unfair amount of path way). However, the visit was made very uncomfortable by the staring, pointing and whispering. Yes, many, many people we passed assumed my older daughter was the mother of our younger daughter (not realising that myself and my wife were with them). At one point one woman, quite loudly, proclaimed, “what is the world coming to?” Quite. What is the world coming to when people are so quick to judge and jump to massive conclusions.

    It gets even worse if my wife isn’t with me, as they think my daughter and I are the parents. I’m just waiting for somebody to say something to our face.

    I blame the likes of the Daily Mail for poisoning the minds of people into being so damn cynical about the world we live in. Where every situation must have a negative twist and the world is going to hell in a handcart.

    Thanks to everyone for making something like a walk in a park an uncomfortable experience. But here’s a suggestion for next time – when you see something that you don’t like, think about what the other possibilities are before you get yourself angry and bothered. Play your own devils advocate. The chances are, your second thought might be the more accurate one.