Fink About It

In case you don’t know what a favicon is:

A favicon is a little 16×16 pixel graphic next to the address of your website. For my blog, it looks like this:

These icons can be real nice and label your site, so anybody will recognize it. There are a few sites out there that don’t use Gravatars in their blog, but Favatars that will display your favicon next to your comment. In the next steps you will learn how to create and display a favicon on your WordPress blog. And additionally I will show how you display it in your backend, since your favicon will not be displayed there by default. Read on

German is certainly not an easy language. Many people even claim that it is one of the most difficult languages in the world¹. But what is the point of comparing it to other living languages which, for English speakers even worse, only consist of glottal stops? And what is it exactly that makes German so hard to learn? Bastian Sick, who is the author of the Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod book series and who works as a journalist for the Spiegel magazine, is a major contributor to the insight that German obviously is a demanding language and challenging to learn and use for non-native speakers; had already understood impressively well in the 19^th century. This is going to be a critical essay about the intricacies of the German language and how they are depicted in Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language². In the following, I am going to outline the great writer’s perspective on the German language and I will also continue to evaluate on it from today’s point of view. Read on

1. That’s certainly not true given the almost unpronounceable guttural phonemes of Mongolian languages enriched with an over boarding grammar structure, for example. [↩]
2. If not marked separately, all subsequent quotations can be found in: Mark Twain, The Awful German Language, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 1963. [↩]

As you know, I like games. Therefore I inform myself about the latest and upcoming games. Now, where do I do that? For one, I have subscribed to an (offline) game magazine. And for another thing, I watch trailers online at websites like G4TV¹, Gamestar and I used to drop by at Gametrailers.com. What they all have in common, is annoying me with their in-between-video-advertisements.

When you want to watch a video, you watch it and it’s all fine. But as you want to watch a second video on the very same website, you have a 97 per cent chance to encounter an advertisement, before you can watch what you actually wanted to see. And there is no way of skipping the stupid ad!! The frame of the video² penetrates the whole website and overrules all other codes thereon. As a result, the background blacks out, giving you no chance of clicking anything except for the close button on your browser window. Read on

1. which is quite informative although it has a strong focus on console games [↩]
2. mostly done per flash [↩]

When you have a blog you are supposed to write something, right? When you have enough time on your hands to think about what you want to write and how to accomplish it, mostly you don’t have a problem to do so. But it’s your obligation to blog regularly, if you want to establish a core readership. Then it is really hard to not blog about something wrong, just to fill your blog. Here are three things you should not blog about.

I’m not home, so break in, everybody!

Most personal blogs make the mistake to get too personal. They post information about where they live or when they are on holiday. Without asking they publish pictures of their neighbors or friends. The dangers are obvious, when you look at the consequences: Sites get indexed so fast that even if you take off a picture or a post about anybody, people will be able to find it elsewhere¹. And even if you don’t give your address on your blog, people can look up your address by typing in your domain at whois services². So now they have your address – tell them when you’re gone and your new flat screen will be going on a long holiday, too. Read on

1. e.g. the “cached” button in Google [↩]
2. e.g. try and search for any domain here. You will see their actual address. [↩]

They come in the night, while you are sleeping. They take away the most precious in your blog: Your content. It’s the content thieves who are not finking about the work you’ve had to do in blogging so far.

Oh, My God! What The Fink Happened?

Recently I’ve been a victim to content theft. Most of my posts were taken and republished on another blog, along with the pictures in them that were simply hotlinked. So not only wasn’t my content uniquely attributed to me anymore, but the thief also rewarded me by stealing my bandwith.

The Problem

Apparently, a lot of people out there think that everything that you find in the net is free to use and to share. If you’re one of them, which I hope not, then you are a moron and should get a smacked bottom by whoever is sitting next to you. Everything that has been put in the net by someone, is protected by copyright. I know that YouTube and all other videoportals don’t exactly help making that point clear, since videos are pushed on the darn thing faster than the admins can check on them and say: “Don’t do it! This is not yours. Did you ask for permission?” Most common for image theft is Googles image search. There is no indication which pictures are free to use and which are not. And it is also lacking a warning¹. Read on

1. The information about copyright is so hard to find, I even had too google the page. [↩]