One of the most panicking idea about the new Linden Labs guidelines is that thousands of bloggers may now have to remove infringing contents from their blog. But if you own a Wordpress self-hosted blog (maybe even a Wordpress.Com blog), NO NOT PANIC! Ubernyms is a very slick way of mass rewriting your blog without sweat.

Legal things better left to lawyers as far as I’m concerned, this article is NOT about HOW to make your blog compliant to the new policy. IANAL and I have no idea yet of all the legal implications. This article will focus on the technical aspect of installing Ubernyms and not on the legal aspects. For that you will have to read Linden Lab’s policies throughly, personally I don’t even know how it will affect bloggers. LL ain’t very good at communicating important decisions like that anyways, but that is another subject completely.

NOTE: Ubernyms may not be compatible with all Wordpress plugins. I heard it conflicted with other plugins. I CANNOT offer support for any aspect of it, as I do not develop Ubernyms. Consider this a primer to the matter, no more.

STEP 1 : Installing Ubernyms

This is the most tricky part, since the installation can be different on one host or another. So I cannot explain all of it, but will try to give it a shot.

Basically installation consists of:

1. Download Ubernyms for the right version of Wordpress
2. Put that .ZIP file into your /wp-content/plugins directory and unzip it on the server OR unzip the file locally and put the folder and all of it’s content in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory through FTP
3. Activate the plugin in your Plugins section of your Wordpress blog administration panel
4. INSTALL SignpostMarv Ubernym patch that fixes a bug with the HTML characters and UTF-8/accented characters. Go there and download the ubernyms-2.7.php.txt file and rename it to ubernyms.php. Then upload it via FTP in the Ubernyms plugin directory, and overwrite the old one.

STEP 2 : Configuring Ubernyms

Once installed, Ubernyms is delicious cake. And you must eat it.

1. Go into the Plugins section, and click on Ubernyms Configuration
2. Leave the upper configuration as is, it is usually defaulting a decent configuration
3. What is of utter interest for this case is the Replace Text option. Take a free slot under “Add new acronyms” and select Replace Text.
4. Enter a term in the Text field, and the replacement term in Definition

For example, let’s say that you want to replace the acronym “SL” for “SL ™”, you would have to put “SL” in the Text field and “SL ™” in the Description field (you should use the HTML code for the trademark sign in this case). SignpostMarv issued a patch fixing a problem with this, thanks to him for the leet patchage!

This plugin can replace any expression in your entire blog in a second, not only for replacements, you can link to internal or external URLs, replace acronyms by full length expressions, and so on. It’s the blogger’s best friend, you can take my word on that.

Hope this will calm down some lovely people I know that got very stressed up with their blog infringing on Linden Labs trademarks, thinking it would be required to correct every article posted by hand. This plugin removes much of the job. It still needs to be proven if it is really necessary. <3

Here are a few JIRA issues I have been checking out since last week, some of them linked to the latest Release Candidate.

MISC-975 Notable sim script perf decrease (FIX PENDING)

SVC-1760 Complex hollow on megaprims broken (Thanks Lillie Yifu)

VWR-2085 Linux viewer has CTRL-ALT-F1 borked under Linux. Quite useful for machinima. (Thank you Opensource Obscure!)

VWR-4471 “Copy selected” with “Rotate Copy” behaves incorrectly (Thank you cuddlefish!)

VWR-5538 Getting sculpty data from HTML-on-a-prim has odd results (Thank you Seifert Surface!)

VWR-4192 To add more options for hand positions in the animation upload menu. Cuddlefish seemed to say there was limitations but hey it’s worth the check. (Thanks Ana)
I’m still checking SVC-1764 but it’s fixed pending, and of course our beloved MISC-208 is still unassigned. We all know it’s a complex issue but hey, we can dream. *sights*

One of the greatest restrictions for content creation and cross interoperability within the SecondLife client has been the total inability to display HTML within the SecondLife viewer. Well it seems the Lindens have been working hard at it, because I think their last Release Candidate notice does not sound like an April Fool’s (we are far too early for that anyways).

Read the release note:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/06/parcel-media-changes-in-1191-release-candidate/

Okay it is not HTML on a prim yet, but sounds promising. It cannot yet display Flash content because it lacks support for Firefox extensions, which it is based on, but I guess it’s better than nada. Hopefully we should see more development in that sense soon.

Someone on Twitter suggested the PicLens Firefox extension. I just had to share this one because I think it’s an awesome gadget.

PicLens is an ordinary Firefox extension that allows immersive browsing of pictures posted on Flickr and of some other image search and hosting services.

Quoted from the PicLens website:

“PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing and viewing images on the web will never be the same again.”

Indeed. Browsing images now feels natural, and it goes much faster than standard viewing when browsing batches of images. I’m quite addicted to it so you may just want to try it, just in case you like it too.

• Be warned, I tested this on a recent and powerful machine, not on older hardware.
• It’s avaliable for Explorer and even a reduced functionnality Safari version
• You can search for images directly
• “Fly through 1000s of images in a split second”

PicLens Website:

http://www.piclens.com/site/firefox/win/