• Weapons of Mass Destruction found…in Texas
• Coming soon? Mini-IPods for around $100
• Mini-IPod a good idea or bad?
• This is not a photo of a Mini-Ipod
• No, Virginia, there is no Mini-IPod
• Blog Madness 2003: Enter your best post & compete against other bloggers!
• ScriptyGoddess: Show/Hide comments in-line
• China's Resolution? No Hemorrhoid or Tampon ads during dinner!

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Peppermint Tina has officially begun the first "Kevin Donahue Art Gallery". Now if I could just figure out a way to get out to Hawaii, we could have a gallery signing and eat a bunch of Hawaiian goodies! Thanks, PT!

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I posted a (rather lengthy) breakdown of the coaching future of Steve Spurrier over at Fanblogs.com in an attempt to answer the question, "Where will Steve Spurrier coach?"

Kim & I emailed about it a little bit last night and Karen Angela let me invade her comments with a little football talk, as well. So much of my blogging attention has been focused here, that I'm in Fanblogs withdrawal.

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OK. It's December 30th. Do you know where you're Christmas lights are?

My neighborhood looks a little schizophrenic tonight because some people have their Christmas lights going full blast, some neighbors have them turned off (with the "beautiful" plastic nativity standing proudly in the yard), and some folks have all their lights down. Where do you stand?

Are your lights on/off/down? When do you take your Christmas lights down?

To get the ball rolling, my Christmas lights are up, but turned off. I plan to take them down on New Years Day (or this weekend if I have a hangover!)

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Kevin answers email:

Dear Kevin: Your new skin is not all that appealing to me. I like that you have options on your site though. I want to do that. How do I skin my website? Thanks, A.

Dear A: First, thank you for the wonderful reaffirmation that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as I love the new skin. I was tempted to tell you to suck it and go away forever, but seeing as how you like the other skin, I will not say that. Oops, I think I did. Oh well.

Presuming you're still reading, I can't believe that I never posted "how to skin your site" this before. The answer is simple: Follow Domisticat's instructions. They were offline for a while, but they are back online again. This is by far the best tutorial. If you are looking for MT-Specific help, Kristine has some pointers as well, but start at Domesticat and work your way to Kristine's site. Thank you for reading and hope to see you back soon. Kevin.

How to skin your site by Domesticat

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Jennifer was in the process of setting up a MoBlog for Sam and asked for suggestions on the best tools over at ScriptyGoddess.com. This triggered a little bell from way back when and I went hunting for the simple way to post to MT via email. That brought me back around to the MT-Plugins site where I re-discovered Charlie's POP2Blog plugin.

This plugin can be used for plain text posts, text with images, or multiple images. If you have a camera phone and don't want a whole new MoBlog (Mobile Blog), then this might be a simple way to integrate the two. If you just like to post from work, this might work for you, too!
The install could be tricky, depending on your server, as you may need to download and install of two other modules ( Aaron Straup Cope's Net::Blogger and Mark Overmeer's Mail::Box) to get it working properly. (Or at least I had to download those two.)

The only other "tip" I can suggest is that it might be helpful to send your email in plain text format, if you have such an option. That way none of the HTML formatting ends up being posted to your blog. There is no support for this plugin so backup everything first and let 'er rip.

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Looks like I'm a little late to the party, as these were previously posted by DWLT, but I'm loving the fact that ESPN has RSS feeds. Definitely a watershed moment!

ESPN.com news
ESPN.com NFL News
ESPN.com NBA News
ESPN.com NHL News
ESPN.com MLB News

So far I haven't been able to locate a college football feed, so let me know if you find it from ESPN.

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The Tweezer's Edge has released a template that produces a combined comments & trackbacks RSS feed, loosely based on Adam Kalsey's SimpleComments plugin (which I use on this blog). The resulting RSS feed validates, but TweezerMan reports that Radio Userland hiccups slightly on the XML. For those that are producing a comments feed and a trackback feed seperately, welcome to a better day.

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• Advice for a 2 year old: Play with it!
• 7-Eleven to ring in New Year with free coffee (12a-4a)

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After reading about the new Paypal scam involving spoofed websites, I decided there must be a way to double check websites without jumping through too many hoops. Turns out that the Microsoft website has some advice on identifying spoofed websites on the Microsoft Knowledge Base. (Now if they would only fix the problem!)

I took some of their suggestions and create a bookmarklet that will identify spoofed websites. The javascript was actually written by Microsoft, but putting it into an easy to use bookmarklet was my idea. The script will test the actual source URL against the current page url. If they are different, it may be a spoofed URL.

To use the bookmarklet, simply drag and drop the link to your favorites or links bar. To use it, just click the bookmarklet when you arrive on a suspicios site.

Spook Check Bookmarklet: Spoof Check

Spread the word to IE users on your blog - trackbacks welcome.

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I found the "Create Your Own Picasso" link over at Booboolina. This is my attempt at a masterpiece. Not very good. I did find that you can search by "artist" (and I'm using that term very loosely) or by title. Mine is called 'The Boy' and I was basically just messing around. When you browse the gallery, though, there are actually some pretty good ones. The site ought to be a great time killer at work this week!

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As if there aren't enough email scams to be wary of, Boing Boing has details on the latest PayPal scam that uses an IE URL spoof to seem 100% legit. Take a read if you're a PayPal user (includes screenshot).

My only advice for avoiding scams like this is to always double-check the site in question. In this case, visit PayPal.com and see if everything checks out. Be careful out there.

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Via Jennifer, I stumbled across an outstanding tutorial on creating a "Reviews" sideblog using MovableType and the MT-Amazon plugin (and a little code-fu, too!)

Martin has created one of the most detailed, easy-to-follow MovableType tutorials out there. Without this tutorial, this might be a four-hammer kind of project (meaning you better know what you're doing). But, with this as a roadmap, I really think this is something that everybody can enjoy. I really like the idea of creating the catagories to represent the "stars: for each review! I'm just sorry it took me so long to happen on this awesome guide!

PS - Looks like Christine knew about this way back when. Dang! I'm such a flake.

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David Raynes has come up with yet another great plugin for MovableType. The MT-Close plugin allows you to go through your entire blog and close the entries older than "x" day. So, if you don't want people to comment on last month's posts (for example), you would set MT-Close to "30" days and let it go through and close all your posts automatically.

I don't know if this is the 100% solution for me, per se, but it certainly would help to prevent comment spam on older posts. Like Shaan, I would like to see this project further expanded to allow category-specific options.

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I know. I hear ya. You're always funnier/smarter/more thoughtful on somone else's blog. Well, here's the perfect bookmarklet for you.

The Commentblogger bookmarklet allows you to copy what you have commented on other blogs and post it to yours. Pretty cool tool - MovableType only, for now.

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