One nice feature of FireFox is the built in search bar. It is customizeable, you can write search plugins for every site imagineable. You are on a phpWebSite support site now, so chances are you'd like to search on it as well.

The good news is, that I've already done the work for you. All you need is to download and install it.

2005 was a very eventful year. Looking back, a couple of things happend that I didn't even think of earlier. I met people who are very important in my life, I created tools that are valueable to people, things went just fine.

I'd like to thank each and every visitor of this very site for his/her ongoing support and would like to review 2005 in this short article.

More and more people switch from regular static homepages to dynamic ones. The so called WCMS (web based content management systems) are very popular because of their ease of use and setup. One module you can see in about every WCMS, be it a stand-alone forum, a portal or even a blog, is a poll module.

I've analyzed 49 sites running the phpWebSite WCMS. I've taken a look at how the site owners use the polls, especially what kind of questions they are polling and how successful they are in doing so.

Building Websites with Mambo is already the third book I'm reviewing from Packt Publishing. Mambo is the CMS that has won three awards in 2005 alone: Best Open Source Solution twice and Best of Show once.

Should you decide to give Mambo a go you might be interesting in having a printed manual for it. Building Websites with Mambo could be just the thing for you.

A few days ago, Wayne from the phpWebSite support forums posted a question. Is there a way of previewing and trying all the different phpWebSite themes without downloading them first? A few hours later, there was.

I've implemented a very simple site using Wiki and the Anonymous Theme hack. The Wiki takes care of a history as well, so everyone can check out which new themes there are available for preview.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company -- better known as AT&T -- has a natural affinity to voice-transmissions. It comes to no surprise that a company with telephony-roots would encourage and sponsor the developement of a high-quality, artificial voice system.

Still, listening to the Natural Voices demos is quite amazing anyway. Except for minor glitches, Natural Voices intoniation is first class. What's even more amazing: I like the german speech better than the english one. It sounds even more natural to me.

A few days ago, I met with a couple of friends in Viennas' first district. It is probably one of the most expensive places for businesses and also very crowded. Successful advertisements would probably have a very high impact there.

But what about non-successful, even non-working advertisements? Would they be also boosted? Or would people simple pass by and ignore them?

Most hosting plans including MySQL also include phpMyAdmin as a front end. A lot of open source php applications depend upon MySQL as a database backend. Knowing more about phpMyAdmin could thus improve a webmasters experience.

Packt publishing was as nice as sending me a copy of their Mastering phpMyAdmin book for review. I hope you enjoy this review as much as I did reading it!

...and by bombing I don't mean bombing Iraq. No, the term Google Bombing actually refers to something else, spamming Google by doing lots of links with a given anchor text.

In a recent post of the Google Blog, the major player of the search engine market itself defends this practice. It's reflecting the current opinion on the Internet and thus needs to be respected, they write in an article to be remembered.

September, 11 in US probably wasn't just another day. People thought about the World Trade center, the two planes that crashed into it 2001 and the sadness that followed that event. There is a reason why searching for september 11th on Google doesn't lead to a calendar.

But what about Europe, especially Austria? I haven't noticed too much of worries here. US is far away, there's a big ocean between Europe and America. Some people even get adventurous and fly anyway. Like us. We did a helicopter ride and enjoyed it.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Patterson started a phpWebSite contest. The judges Sharon Renshaw and Shawn Murray were found rather quickly, people started working on their submissions. The goal was finding a new look for a new portal.

phpWebSite themes is the new project from the creators of phpwebsitemanual.com and will focus on phpWebSite themes. I'm already curious how it will turn out and wish all involved parties the best of luck!

Today at breakfast I had a surprise on my homepage. The Outlaw Group apparently payed me a visit! Instead of the usual Sharondippity-Theme, all I got was "OutLaw Group". Nothing more.

The good thing of course is a lot of saved bandwidth. Instead of the old 3.7K, the dispatcher was only 13 Bytes big. Then again, a static content management portal isn't exactly my idea of a good time.

This is a small testpoll to find out, wether the phpWebSite poll module can handle images in questions as well. The answer to this question is yes, it can handle them perfectly.

Please look inside the article to see it for yourself ;-)

Robots kept fascinating me for years. When I was very young, I got a toy-robot as a present. But I've been disappointed, it was nothing more than a tape player.

Still, I've been monitoring the progress robots -- and especially androids, human like robots -- made. And they never failed to amaze me. The current c't even wrote about an android that interviewed people who passed by. Quite amazing.

I've been asked to review a book. It's called Typo3 Enterprise Content Management, it's about Typo3 and it contains a lot of information.

In this article, I'm trying to find out the focus of the book, the target audience and try to write a bit about its content, too.

Diets are everywhere. Be it modern ones like the Atkins-Diet, where you change your body to burn more fat by eating more fat. Or the Hacker's diet, where you simply count everything exactly.

Other people simply try to eat less and do more sports. Or simply eat less calories.

If you'd ask me about my favourite piece of software, I'd answer Photoshop instantly. Naturally, I'm interested in the surroundings of Photoshop as well. Like Adobe, the Photoshop team or their building.

I've just happend to come across a nice little picture story on PhotoshopNews, which shows the Photoshop team as well as Adobes headquarter in St. Jos / California

phpNuke is a well-known portal solution and the base of a lot of other open source CMS projects. Think about postNuke, phpWebSite or Xoops. I did an interview with Francisco Burzi, the man behind the phpNuke project.

Mr. Burzi tells about his family, his job, the future of phpNuke and his thoughts on theoretical aspects of content management systems.

Thanks to Robert Kennedy for proof-reading!

Native english speakers could consider themselves lucky. They don't have a need for accents, don't know about umlauts, about the -symbol, about the chinese, arabic, korean alphabet, and so on. A few letters, a few numbers, a few special keys there you have your english keyboard. The Optimus keyboard is a design study that does more than that.

Instead of having the letters painted on the keyboard, the keys are little displays. I counted 132 keys, that makes 132 small displays. Obviously, this invention is not from an native english speaker.

The previous issue of the german magazine c't (2005, heft 15) had an interesting short one column article about an fascinating piece of software. It enables to share the graphics card of a second PC with the first one over the network, thus enlarging your real screen estate.

Too good to be true? No, it actually works. You can't expect wonders of course, but it's very nice.

I have just upgraded the local Wiki-Module to the current version 0.3.0. The module has been announced on phpWebSite Manual, but I couldn't find it on the appstate homepage yet.

The big new feature of this version is the Wiki Toolbox, as seen on the image.

kiesler.at experienced 9 hits from AltaVista today. Altavista, the big search engine that was popular before Google came up. Naturally I was a bit puzzled as the search query view of the current Visitors 1.2 beta didn't show any AltaVista hits.

The explaination is rather simple. The hits wheren't caused by search queries. No, they where triggered by a special AltaVista random image link.

For me, phpWebSites phpwsbb forum module has a lot of potential which is largely unused. One step in the right direction would be the display of

• Who replied last and
• how many replies have there been to a thread

in the phpwsbb last forum posts block. It would also be nice to have the latest post label (instead of the thread label) and the editor of the post (if there is one) instead of that of the owner. Well, I hacked phpwsbb again to do just that.

Common websites rely on external webmetric-analysis. How many people came on the site, what did they do, where did they go? The Visitors module took that idea and enhanced the statistics with data only a native application would be able to find out. Who was logged in and when? Which modules did he/she use?

But Visitors is quite a bit away from being a full-fledged datamining tool. While it is possible to see which path a visitor on a certain site took right now there is no generic history analysis as of now. I've described some concepts during the past semesters Data Warehousing 2 lecture.

Synergy has always been a very interesting topic to me. Synergy means: mixing up a couple of things so the result is bigger than the initial ingrediences. Henkel did that for a nice ad I stumbled across linkdump.

Henkel is owner of the well-known Loctite brand. What they did was a synergy of advertising and a reality-show: They glued up a monitor with their glue, put a web cam in front of it and transmit the resulting picture over the net. People worldwide are able to send a message to the screen.