escaloop allows you to build a list of up to 20 RSS feeds — feeds like your latest del.icio.us bookmarks, your recent Twitter activity, your new blog posts, your newly uploaded Flickr images, just to name a few — which it will then sort, clean up and tastefully arrange in a concise, neat and pretty list on your own site.

By the way: escaloop is not considered “beta”, but things might still break, what with it being a personal side project. Enjoy!

Supported services:

• del.icio.us
• Flickr
• Google
• Google Reader
• LastFM
• Livejournal
• Magnolia
• Pownce
• StumbleUpon
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vox

There are no user accounts. When you first set up your escaloop badge, you’ll get a so-called “escaloop ID”, which can be used to change or adjust your badge’s configuration later on.

Nothing is more annoying than creating that extra style sheet and pieces of code to make your site “viewable” in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. If you still happen to use IE6 you will see a small notice on the top of this page inviting you to visit savethedevelopers.org and upgrade your browser.

The Campaign
Say no to IE 6! Our current campaign focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web while (hopefully) creating a less stressful and complicated environment for web developers by hastening the retirement of an outdated browser.

I do hope you will give this a try if you’re still surfing with IE6 and it’s in no way meant to be offending, merely a friendly advice. Besides making the job easier on designers and programmers you will also benefit from the following:

• Increased security (phishing filter, family filter etc. )
• Better and faster page rendering (page loading time)
• Better 3rd party plugin support
• Generally a much improved browser experience

Feel free to share your thoughts on this one, I would especially like to hear from all of you (former) IE6 users…

Just a quick post to let you all know that Mozilla has released a security update for Firefox earlier today. The latest version 2.0.0.13 fixes several critical security vulnerabilities. More information can be found on their website.

Thunderbird is also affected, but an update has not yet been released.

The latest release can be downloaded here.

Juan Pablo Lopez Yacubian has discovered two vulnerabilities in Safari, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct spoofing attacks or potentially compromise a user’s system.

1) An error when downloading e.g. a .ZIP file with an overly long filename can be exploited to cause a memory corruption.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

2) An error in the handling of windows can be exploited to display arbitrary content while showing the URL of a trusted web site in the address bar.

The vulnerabilities are confirmed in version 3.1 for Windows. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution:

Do not browse untrusted web sites.

Source: Secunia

Following my recent upgrade to WordPress 2.5 (RC1) on my other blog/website I could not get my favourite statistic plugins working. The first, WP Slimstat, is no longer under development and is not compatible with WP 2.3 and above. The latter, Popularity Contest, is supposed to work with the latest WP versions but triggered a fatal error during install (at least for me).

At first glance it would appear I’d have to look somewhere else for alternatives. On the other hand I could dive into the code and try figuring things out myself. I decided on the last option.

Fix - Alex King’s Popularity Contest (v.1.3b3)

Fixing the installation error was far easier than anticipated. This is what you need to do if you experience any difficulties or plan on upgrading:

• If you have an older version deactivate the plugin.
• Download the latest release (link above).
• Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace

  require('../../wp-blog-header.php');

  with

  require('../wp-blog-header.php');

• Upload the edited file to your plugins folder (sub directory popularity-contest)
• Reactivate the plugin

I tried posting a comment mentioning the problem, but it went into comment heaven. The issue will most likely be solved with the next release (but I couldn’t wait…).

Update: In case you are doing a fresh install you might also need to create the DB tables manually. More about how to do this here.

Update - Camu’s WP Slimstat (v.0.92)

To avoid repeating myself please see my post “How to view and collect visitor statistics” for a proper solution. This tiny update should keep WP Slimstat working until the WordPress team decides on more DB changes. With any luck this might take awhile…

The “IP to Country database” update is not necessary, and will only apply for new log entries. However, to keep the data more or less correct it is probably a wise decision to have the database more up to date.

Feel free to let me know if you have any difficulties running these updates, or know of other plugins you’d liked “fixed”.