Round Images using CSS
On your site, you may have the need for round images or images that are circles instead of squares. Without having to run the image through a script to make it round, you can use CSS3. This method is supported in nearly every browser now, but I will include prefixes so it will be even more compatible.
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
/* Styles will be placed here */
</style>
</head>
<body>
<img src="square.png" class="round" alt="Square Image" width="250" height="250" />
</body>
</html>
With our basic HTML and sample image (not included), we can now add the style inside the head tags or our external style sheet. We are identify the images with the img tag name with the class of round. Make sure you set the class for your images that you want to be round.
Methods to Fight Comment Spam
With the increase in spam over the last few years, preventing comment spam is getting even more difficult. Bots are running JavaScript, learning what fields to populate and more. But, if you implement enough features, you can fight back and be almost spam free.
Method 1: Moderate Comments
For every comment you receive, you read through it before it gets posted to your site or blog. Most blogging systems have a moderation page where you have to manually approve each comment, but people end up disabling this or allowing only users to post comments. Bots can create fake user accounts and spam from those and just disabling moderation will lead to even more spam. When a spam bot notices that a site they spammed previously showed their comment, they are going to add that site to a list to spam in the future because it works.
XFCE Desktop Icon Text
If you are using XFCE, you probably have the issue of the desktop icons text or labels being hard to read. This can easily be fixed by modifying the xfce gtkrc files. I only tested this on Linux Mint 15 XFCE, but it should work in all xfce environments.
Our New File
We have to create a new style file for XFCE. This is easily done by creating a normal text file (use Gedit, vim, or any editor). This file then has to be included into the current theme, which is easy.
Gravatar Avatars and Profiles
It’s great when various websites work together, so you don’t need multiple accounts and can be easily identified between said sites. Well, part of this is already going on, and has been going on for a while. A large amount of websites, including all WordPress sites use an avatar system and site called Gravatar. Even this site implements Gravatar. Not only does Gravatar help you identify the same people on various blogs in the same realm (or all over), Gravatar is extremely easy to implement and can prevent some security issues of having users upload images to your server if you are new to upload security.
YouTube Data API Recent Uploads
I spend far too much time on YouTube, but not for the reasons you may think. I love working with the YouTube API and modifying YouTube to make it better (unofficially). Because of my love for this, I am going to explain how you can get started on using the YouTube Data API Version 3. This tutorial will outline setting up your Developer Keys and performing some basic requests such as getting recent Channel Uploads, and then finally parsing the data returned.