Software can be misleading.

I was trying to work out what version of Flash Player I had. According to my program menu, it was version 8. According to the “About Flash Player Help” it was version 8.

But I had a problem that usually only occurs to people with Flash Player 9. I was using Macromedia Captivate to record screen flows, producing Flash .swf files. I embedded them into PowerPoint using the Breeze Presenter plug-in, but they weren’t playing on my work PC, which was theoretically running Flash 9. It worked perfectly on my old home laptop though.

Then I found an Adobe forum post . And the last reply had a great link to Adobe’s  Flash Detecter to tell you which version of Flash Player you really have. And lo and behold, it really was version 9.

Even after downloading the DLL mentioned in the top post, things didn’t work until I restarted my machine. And finally the swfs started playing.

Just goes to show you can’t always trust the help screens.

My mobile phone is around a year and a half old now. It was a gift, bought in Singapore, so it had a few settings that didn’t suit Australia.

The guys at work have just got new trendy phones, and have been experimenting with all the bells and whistles: camera picture resolution, connecting to the web, redirects and more.

I had walked into a Vodaphone store the other day and casually asked if my phone could connect to the web. The assistant gave me a scrap of paper with a number to ring, which I promptly lost.

So tonight I went to Google, searched for “nokia australia web settings” and found the Nokia Asia Pacific page. I followed the prompts, and presto, it sent me three SMSs with the settings required. I just had to save the SMSs. Then I followed my phone menu, and actually connected to the Vodaphone Live page!

Amazing. It actually worked first time.

Now to learn how to upload photos from my phone to Flickr. Andrew’s already done it. Apparently the Nokia N-series phones have a one-click upload to Flickr. But mine is an old 6670. So I had to download the Nokia LifeBlog software to my PC, and then install the application using Nokia’s PC Suite.

The next step in the SEOizing of my blog was to allow people to add the posts to the various social bookmark and tagging sites.

I started by searching for Del.icio.us plug-ins, and actually installed Arne’s version, but it didn’t really do what I wanted.

Then I found David Breyers beautiful code, which I added directly to my index.php of my theme, uploaded the images to the wp-content file, and bingo, cute little icons to make it easy for people to add the post to their favourites. Warning: if you do cut and paste the code from the page, be careful what format the quotes take: I had to manually change curly quotes into straight quotes to make it all work properly. Some strange setting on my PC again.

It’s definitely the week for updating my blog.

I was using basic menu formatting for my menu pages and posts, but they were getting too long, so it was time to collapse them into a pull-down menu.

Preferring a CSS solution rather than compulsory Javascript, I tried copying the code from A List Apart. I’ve happily used the menu code before on Womens Health and Fitness.

It hasn’t worked perfectly here - the hovers on the primary menu don’t seem to always work - sometimes you have to hover again slowly to stop the drop downs from disappearing. And I haven’t used a background for now, so it doesn’t overlay over the posts properly, but I’ll fix it next week. Enough time on menus for now.

I’ve just installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in for WordPress after hours of checking out blogs and WordPress instructions on the best ways of handling Technorati tags. There are a lot of plug-ins on the WordPress Codex for Technorati, and the hard part is always working out which is best.

One reason was that it was recommended by Business Blog Consulting as one of their top WordPress plug-ins.

Another cross-fingers-and-hope-that-it-works thingummy for the sake of SEO.

Update: A day after installing the plug-in, and updating the options in my WordPress admin to display “Filed under Tags:”, I did a search in Technorati to see if I was picked up. I was worried that I didn’t seem to be displaying a link back to Technorati, but couldn’t find anything obvious in recent support questions. Searching in Technorati using a search for “seo” with the pull-down “in tags” actually found me!

So this was a pretty basic install: download the zip, upload to plug-ins directory, activate the plug-in, update the settings, add tags when posting or updating posts, and bobs-your-uncle.

Big thanks to Chris in New Zealand.

Yet another update: Instead of the default formatting of tags, I decided I wanted them at the top of the post, using my chosen CSS. After a little investigation, it required editing my theme’s index.php to manually add the tag display code UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost, wrapped in a div and updated the CSS file, as per the UltimateTagWarrior help. ÂÂ