Earlier this week, I received a report that something fishy was going on with one of my websites. The report indicated that some sort of spam had infiltrated the site, informing users about great deals on pharmaceuticals. Needless to say, since we had not recently gone into the business of selling drugs (legal or otherwise), this was a bit suspicious.

I headed to the page that was included in the report and checked it out in about 20 different ways. I opened it in each of the five browsers I have installed; I viewed the regular source of the page; I viewed the generated source (after the JavaScript has run and modified the source) of the page and couldn’t find anything about the pharmaceuticals reported in the message.

Have you ever wanted to customize the administrative area within a WordPress installation? Maybe you want to change some of the terms used within the menus (such as changing the word “Posts” to “Articles” or something). Maybe you want to change the color scheme. Maybe you want to add some custom help text or a new box to the Dashboard.

The other day on Friendfeed, I noticed Matt Mastracci posted a link to an article explaining how and why additional keys were added to and removed from Mac (and PC) keyboards. It is an interesting read, but I found something even more interesting to me in the comments at the end of the article.

One commenter posted a handful of keyboard shortcuts you can use in Windows. Before reading the comment, I always thought that the “Windows” key on my keyboards did nothing more than open and close the “Start” menu (as did the author of the article, it seems). The commenter, however, pointed out that it also can be used to perform some pretty handy actions in Windows (I have only tested them on Windows 7, so I can’t comment as to how far back they are compatible with Windows or whether or not they are compatible with Linux in any way).

Following are the shortcuts he pointed out:

About a week ago, Virgin Mobile USA announced a new unlimited cellular broadband package. For $40/month (no contract), you can use one of their mobile broadband devices to connect to the Internet and use as much bandwidth as you desire.

Since I am still stuck with satellite broadband service at home, I decided to try it out. I’ve been looking into mobile broadband packages for quite a while, but the thought of signing a new two-year contract, paying almost as much as I’m paying now (the satellite package I have is $79.95/month – most mobile broadband packages are around $60/month) and being limited to around 2 gigabytes of downloads each month (my current plan allows 17 gigs on a revolving 30-day basis) really didn’t appeal to me.

This new plan from Virgin, though, had me intrigued. No contracts, apparently no bandwidth limits (I have seen no official word from Virgin as to whether there will be “reasonable use” limits imposed at any point, but, right now, it doesn’t look like it) and a price point half of what I am paying now all really appealed to me.

Have you ever had the need to create a custom template for a specific page on your WordPress-controlled website? Maybe you have created a page on your site that needs to include a customized sidebar, or maybe you want to create a custom archive page for specific categories of blog posts? Whatever the reason, it’s something I am constantly doing within my WordPress websites.

So, how is it done? Well, there are actually quite a few different ways to develop a custom page template for WordPress.

If you’re anything like me, you have traditionally used javascript alert boxes to try to identify and diagnose bugs in your javascript code. There are two major issues with this process, though.

1. It’s extremely inconvenient for your users if you’re trying to debug a live application.
2. It can be a real problem if you end up in some sort of long/infinite loop and end up outputting multiple alert boxes.

There is a better way, though, and it basically works in Internet Explorer (version 8), Firefox (with the Firebug extension installed), Chrome, Safari and Opera. This is nothing new, by any strecth of the imagination, but it still seems to be a bit of a well-kept secret for a lot of developers.

As you may or may not know, Boxee (a cross-platform media center application) went into public beta a while back. Today, they released an all-new version of the beta. This new version apparently includes access to four different movie libraries (as well as all of the other features that were already part of the app).

If you haven’t checked out Boxee yet, I highly recommend you do so. While it is beta, and does have its issues, it is an awesome piece of software.

For those of you that haven’t heard, Twitter has released an official bookmarklet to allow you to tweet about just about anything you find online. While I appreciate the fact that Twitter is moving forward with tools to make it easier for its users to share information through its service (the official Twitter iPhone app, the official Twitter “Tweet” button for websites and blogs, etc.), I wish they’d put a little more work into this new bookmarklet.

Personally, I am so accustomed to using the Friendfeed bookmarklet (it’s really basically the only bookmarklet I use on a regular basis), I am disappointed that the Twitter bookmarklet doesn’t function the same way.

With all of this talk lately about CSS3 and how amazing the Web will be once it gains wide browser support, it got me thinking about how well CSS2 is supported. Sadly, there are still a lot of really cool features that were introduced in the CSS2 spec that we can’t use yet, thanks to the overwhelming market share held by Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

In this article, I’ll take a quick look at some under-used CSS2 features and examine whether or not they are supported in IE7.

I honestly have no idea when this was announced, but Twitter will start disabling its “Basic Auth” on Aug. 16, 2010 (the system will be completely unavailable by Aug. 31). For Twitter users, this doesn’t really mean anything. However, for Web developers that use various interfaces and plug-ins to share information on Twitter, this is big.

The majority of API libraries and classes that were (and, as of this writing, still are) listed in the official Twitter API documentation will stop working. This change, as far as I can tell, will effect the way tweets are sent and the way tweets are received. Therefore, whether you’re trying to post tweets from an external source, or you’re simply trying to list your latest tweets, if the interface uses the old system of Basic Auth, it’s going to stop working on Aug. 31.