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Source: GPUpdate.net

Less than a week before qualifying at the Hungaroring the world of motorsport witnessed a tragic accident when 18 year old Formula 2 driver Henry Surtees was struck on the head by a lose wheel from another car and later died in hospital. 6 days later, during the second round of qualifying at the Hungaroring Felipe Massa was struck on the head by a heave spring that broke free from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn BGP1. Thankfully, Felipe Massa survived the accident which saw him plunge head on in to a tire wall at high speed.

Many questions have been asked about the safety of open wheel and open cockpit racing and what can be done to improve it. I think it’s pretty much a fact that the current high standards saved Felipe Massa’s life potentially his racing career. Considering the freak nature of both accidents I think it will be a tough challenge to improve standards to such a level that a driver could walk away unharmed from such an accident. I personally believe a lack of yellow flags at the corner should be reviewed, considering there were 4 seconds between Rubens and Felipe (a fair distance in F1) and the debri was not hard to see on the TV footage. Still, it’s all to easy to look back and point fingers, changes are already being made with improvements to helmet design being amongst them.

The race proved to be as suprising as Alonso’s pole position in qualifying with Lewis Hamilton taking his first win of the season and first win as world champion! A botched pitstop put Alonso out of the race after he was released from the pits with an insecure wheel which eventually broke free. The Renault team have been banned from competing in Valencia as a result on the grounds of releasing an unsafe car from the pits and failing to notify the driver of the situation. Unfortunately it is clear Renault are being made an example of to show the world that something is being done to prevent dangerous debri on circuit. Is it fair? Not really as we’ve seen plenty of loose wheels in F1 before and rarely has such a strong penalty been handed out as a result. Even more unfortunate is the fact the spanish home crowd at Valencia have been robbed of the main attraction, Fernando Alonso. I expect there will be all sorts of protests at Valencia, we already know how much spain love Alonso after the events that transpired while he was at McLaren.

Amongst everything else that’s happening in F1 at the moment lets not forget that Jenson Button is still leading the championship! Let’s hope Brawn GP can overcome the recent problems they’ve faced and finished ahead of Red Bull.

Jenson Button, Brawn GP.

Don’t miss the race tomorrow.

M.

This one uses some jQuery in some places and is generally more complete than the previous version. I still have a few more enhancements to finish off so it’s still a work in progress as before. Please feel free to leave some comments on this post if you spot any strange happenings around the website, just remember to mention what browser you are using

Bye for now,

Mark.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Also…. PLUSHIES! I want one!

I don’t know what it was when I saw one for the first time, but I just felt compelled to make my own! They don’t have a huge amount of practical use, but it was a good exercise making it. I wen’t all out on mine with jQuery and alpha channel PNGs and it was really fun just seeing how fancy I could make it without worrying too much about compatability and accessability. I’ll probably continue to refine and tweak it with time being the perfectionist I am, but the whole thing took me no longer than a whole days worth of work, spread over a few evenings.

Please feel free to leave any comments about my online business card on this post.

Mark.

The thing that really makes a CMS in this modern day is the plugins & add-ons available to enhance and customise it to your own specific needs. I’ve already started to get carried away with the vast amount of add-ons available for WordPress, but here are my current top 5.

1. Akismet

   Within a week of making my blog available to the Internet I’m getting spam comments! This plugin (which as far as I know comes with WordPress as standard now?) helps fight back against spam! It’s a must have for any WordPress bloggers, if I’m getting spam on a blog this new with so few visitors I can’t imagine what it would be like on a popular blog. If you intend to open comments up without moderation this plugin will do you a big favor. FYI, you’ll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith

   I love FeedBurner. Before I started using it feeds just felt like a novelty to me… I know, I know, I was wrong! One of the first things I wanted to do when I got up and running with WordPress was setup the RSS feeds with FeedBurner. FeedBurner FeedSmith is the plugin that Google actually recommend and with good reason. Activate it, enter your FeedBurner feed URLs in to the configuration page and your done. No changes to your WordPress theme needed, it redirects your ‘old’ feed URL to the FeedBurner URL so you can even use this to implement FeedBurner feeds on an already established blog. Magic!

3. Configurable Tag Cloud

   So tagging is the next big thing on the Internet. Everyone is doing it and if your using WordPress I bet you are too! I was quite disappointed with the stock tag cloud widget for WordPress. I was hoping I would atleast be able to configure ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ colour for it, but I found all I could change was the title… bummer. So straight away I hit the WordPress plugins library and found Configurable Tag Cloud (CTC) straight away. It gave me exactly what I wanted straight away, colours! You can also set the maximum number of tags to display, smallest & largest font size, whether to display categories in the cloud, whether to display the post count next to tags and have I said enough? In my opinion this is another must have considering the complete lack of configurability of the stock widget.

4. Sociable

   This little gem allows you to put those little 16×16 icons at the bottom of your wordpress posts to allow users to share & bookmark your posts at their favorite social bookmarking websites. There are 99 different social bookmark sites you can choose from and you can also fine tune where they appear including in your RSS feeds! It’s pretty much ‘plug & play’ in the sense you can install it and use it with minimal configuration. Alternatively, you can also get your hands dirty and customise it with replacement icons and your own CSS. Just a quick note though, there’s a bug in 3.1.1 which means you can’t change the order of the icons, go for version 3.0.6. bug fixed in newest version.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

   Some of you may dispute the importance of an XML sitemap, some of you may swear by them for search engine optimisation. This plugin will generate one for your wordpress blog every time you make a new post, if it’s that easy you might as well have one right? It’s highly customisable and even has options to notify major search engines everytime the sitemap (and ofcourse your blog) is updated.

Those are my top 5 WordPress plugins for now. I’ll probably come up with a completely different top 5 in a few months time as I am continually discovering new plugins and find more and more things I can do with WordPress. If you know of any alternatives to the plugins I’ve mentioned that you think are better please feel free to drop me a comment