Just to let you know of a few small tweaks I have made over today.

CheckR v1.2.1 was released today to fix a bug which made it crash when it tried to check mail more than once at the same time. So if you are using CheckR please go and download the latest version.

Also today I have updated my web design portfolio. It is now in the form of a cool flash magazine. This coincides with the update of this website design which was made earlier today. Why not go and check it out via my portfolio page.

So this is my new site design. As most of you know I practice my web design skills on my site quite a bit which is why the site is ever changing. This is now v9 of the site. I hope you enjoy the new look. As always comments/suggestions are more than welcome. Oh and here is a wee secret for you. This entire site was made using GIMP 2.0. No Photoshop at all! Enjoy.

The other day I wrote an article on my ProgTuts site entitled “PHP Optimization Tips“. Yesterday it became a wee bit controversial with a few people commenting that they didn’t like the article. This was due to someone submitting the article on stumbleupon. So I thought “well at least this will get me some traffic”. Well. It did. I’ll let the picture explain.

We went from an average of 10 visits with a high of 65 visits on Monday to more than 2500 visits yesterday. So I’m pleased we at least got noticed. Although there were a few people commenting obviously a whole load of people read the article that didn’t comment so it might not have been quite as controversial as I thought. Maybe I should write more articles like this in the future.

If you follow me on twitter you will already know I bought a new car last week. Its a Honda Civic 1.4i SL. Its been a great wee car so far. I’ve done 120 miles over the weekend and I’m quite enjoying driving it.

As usual I plan to add add a whole load of toys and mods to the car. I promise I’m not a boy racer… really. I have already put an air filter, new stereo and footwell neons in. So hopefully this car will last a bit longer than my last one… and the breaks won’t fail… and the suspension won’t break… and it won’t rust… and so on.

I have just released the latest version of my small tray email checking app CheckR. There are many new improvements which include GUI changes, speed increases and better support for custom popup skins. To see a full list of changes you can head over to the CheckR page.

As always any comments/suggestions are more than welcome. Enjoy.

Edit: I just realised this is my 200th post! Yay!

The other day I found out that Windows had released the Live Mesh Tech Preview. Live Mesh is a file synchronization program that syncs your files across multiple PC’s and your online Live Desktop which has 5GB of space. It will eventually have support for Mobiles and even Macs. Another feature thats bundled in is a remote desktop feature that allows access to connected devices via Internet Explorer. I can see how this might come in handy on the odd occasion as well.

All you need to get Live Mesh is a Windows Live ID. I’m trying it out at the moment but first impressions seem quite positive. I’m aware there are many alternatives to Live Mesh so I’m keen to see what other people think. Have you tried Live Mesh? If so what do you think of it?

If, like me, you run uTorrent on a server/pc at home and would like to control uTorrent from anywhere in the world then you need to get yourself the uTorrent Web UI. If, once you have installed this, it doesn’t work for some reason or you would like a nice small app that sits in your tray and lets you control your remote uTorrent from your desktop, then you need to get uTorrentGUI.

I have been writing this app for the last 2 weeks now. It started off as a personal project but it has got to the stage where I deem it “shareable”. So I hope some people might get some use out of it. For more information see the uTorrentGUI page.

As always and comments/suggestions are always welcome. Just post them as a comment below.

Wordpress v2.6 was released the other day. Although it is not as big a release as v2.5 it does have some nice new features which include:

• Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
• Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
• Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
• Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
• Word count: Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions: so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• And more…

So if you haven’t done so already why not download Wordpress v2.6.

I’ve been so inspired recently by sites like NETTUTS and PSDTUTS that have such high quality tutorials in their respective fields that I decided people could really do with a site that provides high quality tutorials for a range of programming languages. Thats where ProgTuts comes in.

ProgTuts will aim to cover a range of languages including:

• AJAX
• ASP.NET
• C
• C#
• C++
• CSS
• HTML
• Java
• Javascript
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• SQL

We are currently looking for tutorial suggestions and contributers for ProgTuts. So please check out the site and if you feel up to it why not submit your amazing tutorial.

I really hope this site will take off and gather a strong community base. Any comments/suggestions are always welcome. And remember to subscribe to the RSS Feed. Enjoy.

One day I was thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if my background would change to a random image every so often”. My first thought was to write a small app to do this so as part of my initial research I went for a Google, and what I found was actually stunning. John’s Background Switcher written by John Conners is a great app with a tonne of features. It can do a lot more than just change your background. I wont go into them all here but I’ll leave you the joy of discovering them.

John’s Background Switcher is highly recommended. Check it out.
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