It’s long overdue! I have been so busy with designing other people’s sites that I just haven’t had the time to dedicate to working on my own. With a new year approaching rapidly, I finally have got my act together and am working on a redesign here. Oddly, redesigning my own site is more difficult than designing for others - partially because the choices are wide open: no list of client requirements can be more of a hindrance; and partially because I want the site to be completely fantastic and not something I’ll want to re-do again in a few months’ time. Plus, if I wait until I’m perfectly happy with the site, I’ll never get anywhere, so I’ll be aiming to have this up before Christmas. I’ve selected a lovely font from village, chosen some fresh new colours and am working on page layouts and content right now. More on the redesign soon!

On Saturday, a co-worker’s cousin (who I have met a couple of times) was reading the Jerusalem Post website and noticed my photo with the caption “ask me out” on the homepage sidebar: Recognising this as the photo I use for work and thinking that I was married, she clicked on the ad. It took her through to a Jewish dating site member profile: This profile was using four of my photos - (my work photo from here and here), me and my husband at the NetGuide New Zealand awards, a photo I use as my display picture on a number of sites and one of me on holiday in 1999. One mystery to me is where the NetGuide Awards photo and holiday photo are even stored online at all! I contacted the site (which is based in Canada) on Saturday requesting the images be removed but heard back nothing. Not only did “Maya” use my photos without my permission (it may even have been a made up profile by the site itself), they were also using me to advertise their site on at least one popular website - The Jerusalem Post. Tuesday morning I spoke with a Canadian lawyer specialising in internet issues who advised me to email both the dating site and the Jerusalem Post requesting again that they be removed within 48 hours and to inform me of their removal or to start legal proceedings and to make this embarrassing situation very public - which I did so. Yesterday I received this rather odd email back from the dating site: – do not edit – Hello Rachel, Thanks for your email. As per your request, your photos have been removed. However, profiles with pictures do generate more activity. Regards, The Jmatch team. Copy and paste job anyone? Finally, this morning before the 10:30am NZT deadline the Jerusalem Post removed my photo! Disappointingly, I never heard anything back from them. I write this in the hope that this sort of thing won’t happen again to any of you and as a word of caution that photographs on dating websites may not be what they seem! And if anyone can find where the photo of me and my husband is online, or the one of me on holiday in Australia in 1999 is, that would be fantastic. The person finding the photos must be pretty clever and not just using a simple Google search. It’s bugging me that I can’t even find them!

Earlier this year I discovered a handy site called TagCrowd which can turn any text into tag clouds. With the election campaigns formally underway here in New Zealand, here’s what the two main leaders have been talking about: Helen Clark’s Opening Speech begin tag cloud : generated by TagCrowd.com Feel free to modify as long as you keep this notice. This code and its rendered image are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ For commercial use licensing, visit http://tagcrowd.com/licensing.html --> billion building cent challenge commitment country crisis current economic economy education financial forward future government growth happen include infrastructure innovation international investment job labour leadership market nation nine people per plan projects public rail savings school services skills support tax term times today trade training vision work world year zealand created at TagCrowd.com John Key’s Opening Speech begin tag cloud : generated by TagCrowd.com Feel free to modify as long as you keep this notice. This code and its rendered image are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ For commercial use licensing, visit http://tagcrowd.com/licensing.html --> affordable business campaigning change children clark commitments confidence country cuts deficit deliver economic economy education election ensure families financial fresh future getting government helen invest kiwis kiwisaver labour management money national needs number people plan productivity red reducing sick spending struggling student sure tax times today week work years zealand created at TagCrowd.com

Do you need a Wordpress plugin but can’t find something out there which does the job? Let us know - we’ll consider your requests or look for existing solutions for you!

With Wordpress now having built-in tag support, I’ve updated the plugin to show a list of your tags in columns that I originally created to work with Ultimate Tag Warrior. The plugin will list Wordpress tags in columns and in vertical groups. Installation Download the plugin and rename from cre8d_tags_in_columns.txt to cre8d_tags_in_columns.php Upload the plugin to your plugins directory and activate the plugin Access the listing by including echo cre8d_tag_columns(); somewhere in your template. This will give, by default, 3 columns and tags grouped vertically in 5s. If you wanted 2 columns and groups of ten, use: echo cre8d_tag_columns(2,10); and so forth. Add to your stylesheet the following: .list-column { float: left; width: 160px; margin: 0 5px; } .list-column ul { margin-left: 0; padding-left: 0; } .list-column ul li { list-style-type: none; } .spacer { margin-bottom: 20px; } Optionally tweak the width of .list-column to suit your blog’s layout. You may like to change the vertical spacing (.spacer) between groups too.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with two highly respected and accomplished journalists Tim Watkin and Eleanor Black in bringing to life their dream for Pundit. Described as New Zealand’s first online current affairs and culture magazine, the site offers in-depth analysis of events in New Zealand and abroad, commentary from the most insightful political writers, polls, blogs, aggregated news, and a selective view of New Zealand’s cultural life. It is modeled on successful online publications such as Slate, Salon and The Huffington Post. The site was built using Drupal.

Congratulations to Stephen, who codes for us here at cre8d design, for advancing to the final round of Google’s Code Jam programming competition! He came 8th in the Asia/Pacific round and will next compete in California in November.

We had a lot of fun putting together a new funky design for UAE Kitten - a personal blog since 2002 by a girl from United Arab Emirates. As you click through different parts of the site, the layout changes slightly. It’s been really interesting reading her blog and seeing the world through her photos and thoughts. Oh and her blog always makes me hungry with heaps of photos of yummy food! Part of the project involved moving everything from Greymatter over to Wordpress and writing some custom scripts to import in all her photo albums and recipes, which were all static HTML pages.

Update: Our ISP Slingshot is caching private Gmail, Trademe, Facebook and Digg pages!!! I - and others on Slingshot - can see other people’s account info! We have had caching issues with them before, but never on private pages and this is RIDICULOUS! We rang Slingshot this afternoon and they admitted the problem!!! Click to enlarge screenshots (blurred partially to protect privacy of other people’s accounts): Three different Gmail accounts: Three different Facebook accounts: Trademe account: Posted earlier: This afternoon I tried logging into Gmail as I usually do to check my email and discovered that I was logged into someone else’s account! I got a real shock and tried a few more times, the same thing happened again. I then tried using a different browser (IE7 instead of Firefox 2) and this time when I logged in I saw a different person’s Gmail account! In both cases I get a pop-up window appearing saying the following: You have been signed out of this account. This may have happened automatically because another user signed in from the same browser. To continue using this account, you will need to sign in again. This is done to protect your account and to ensure the privacy of your information. What was interesting is that the email accounts all look to be those of other New Zealanders as there are TradeMe emails in both (New Zealand’s version of Ebay). As of now I still can’t access my Gmail account and am seriously concerned about what is going on.

We’ve created an Olympics Medal Table plugin for Wordpress which is updated faster than any other source online that we can find. If you don’t have Wordpress, there’s some javascript code you can paste into your site as well. Enjoy!