Frutiger Serif

Linotype announces a new serif companion to one of the world’s most popular sans typefaces.

Wall vinyl

My friend Kristian, a talented artist and soon to become a fantastic teacher, turned 30 a couple of weeks ago. After hunting for an age trying to find a good birthday present for such a milestone, I finally discovered Domestic’s website and knew that one of their vinyl pieces would be perfect. Not too expensive, either, though the postage adds a slight pang and doesn’t appear to be particularly swift (as my order still hasn’t arrived yet).

Another gift I’d highly recommend – at least, If your intended recipient is a chocolate addict like me – is just about anything from l’Artisan du Chocolat. In particular, their liquid salted caramels are incredible; they do remind me of a certain South Park song, though!

Sports Shooter Contest Winners

Some truly stunning images from SportsShooter.com. I’d recommend browsing through the previous winners links at the bottom of the page, the quality is astounding throughout.

(via Rob Galbraith)

UK Photographers’ Rights

There have been a several articles in the UK press lately highlighting the increasing difficulty photographers face amidst the fearful climate that’s been instilled in the general public by bogeymen such as paedophiles and terrorists. Stop-and-searches have become frequent, photographers are harassed, told to delete images and sometimes assaulted, it’s all quite worrying.

Thankfully, Linda Macpherson (LL.B, Dip.L.P., LL.M), a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, has created a superb short guide explaining the legal rights of English and Welsh citizens when taking photographs. It’s designed to be portable, so can be printed double-sided on a piece of A4 and carried in your wallet or camera bag, and gives an informative overview that covers restrictions, private property, national security and other issues:

UK Photographers’ Rights

Gentium – a typeface for the nations

Gentium is an freely available typeface, released under the SIL Open Font License, with multiple weights and an extensive character set. The family was recent expanded to include Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic, which are based on the original Gentium design but with additional weights. The ‘Book’ family is slightly heavier for printing at smaller sizes. Both families come with a complete regular, bold, italic and bold italic sets.

Wayne Levin

Beautiful work by Wayne Levin

WordPress security

So Twitter ate my homework blogging for the past six months. At least, that’s what I’m going to use as an excuse for not posting for ages. Sorry! I’m going to tentatively start writing again, and hopefully keep things going better this time. Anyway, here goes…

WordPress has received a lot of flak for its security of late. Matt Mullenweg, its creator, wrote about one alleged vulnerability recently and made several good basic security points: keep your software up to date (including plugins), use strong passwords, and keep your eyes open for anything suspicious. These practices should be common sense, but unfortunately many people don’t follow them, resulting in hacked blogs and WordPress taking unfair blame. WordPress have put a lot of work into making their software and installed plugins easily updateable, so hopefully hacked sites will become less frequent as people upgrade to v2.5.

For those that do care about their blog’s security and want to lock things down past the default configuration, the WordPress Security Whitepaper is worth a read. Note that it is quite technical, so if things like .htaccess and using SQL make your eyes glaze over then you’d be better just sticking to Matt’s straightforward advice. However, it does cover and mitigate a few particular points of interest: stop database injection into tables with default names (e.g. wp_users) by renaming the tables, changing the admin username to make brute-forcing passwords more difficult, restricting access by IP to the wp-admin directory and other *.php files, and using HTTPS to prevent sniffing of your passwords over the wire (e.g. while blogging from an open Wi-Fi access point). Most of it is above and beyond what is necessary for the average user, but if you’re running a high profile site and can forgo a little potential flexibility, you can really tighten things up.

Update: Also well worth a look: The WordPress Codex’s excellent section on hardening WordPress and Speck Boy’s list of his top ten security & protection plugins.

FF Meta Serif

FF Meta Serif, the eagerly anticipated serif complement to FF Meta, is finally ready. Check out the sample specimens over at FontFont, it’s a beautiful collection.

(Thanks to Yves for the tip-off.)

PostSecret

PostSecret: an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.