With Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barak Obama, I’m sure depending which presidential candidate the support, people will either be putting him on a pedestal that is higher than he deserves or smearing his good name.  I’ve always admired Powell and would remind others that is truly one of America’s greatest heroes.

Per a Fox news reply, HERE IS A LIST OF GENERAL POWELL’S MILITARY DECORATIONS:

Defense Distinguished Service Medal (with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters) Distinguished Service Medal, Army (with Oak Leaf Cluster) Defense Superior Service Medal Legion of Merit (with Oak Leaf Cluster) Soldier’s Medal Bronze Star Purple Heart Air Medal Joint Service Commendation Medal Army Commendation Medal (with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters) Presidential Medal of Freedom (order of precedence, if worn) Presidential Citizens Medal (order of precedence, if worn) Bronze service star National Defense Service Medal (with 1 Bronze Service Star) Silver service star Vietnam Service Medal (with 1 Silver Service Star) Army Service Ribbon Army Overseas Service Ribbon (with numeral 3)

My favorite quote from Colin Powell:

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters.  Excellence is not an exception; it is a prevailing attitude.

I’ve never even been to New York City. Still you have to like these New York Heros…

• The NYC Subway Hero that risked his own life to save the life of a 19 year-old man.
• The two heroes that caught a three year-old child that was falling to his death.

Like that Idea has been an online associate for Amazon.com for some time. When Bryan, Karen, or their son like a particular product and recommend it for your family…we talk about it here. Because we like the product so much, we often provide a link to it which gives you an easy option to buy a similar product that we have liked so much. Now it’s time for something slightly different!

We are starting something new as associates with Amazon…it’s called aStore. Basically, aStore allows us to have a store at Amazon for those visiting our Website. From Amazon you get the same service and support for your purchases as you always have. At the same time, we can now offer a store that is Amazon plus our own Like that Idea style added to the mix.

Check out our new Like that Idea store at Amazon. We hope it is an idea that you’ll like!

I thought for sure we would get a strong showing of visitors here at Like that Idea when we posted in our blog Positive Proof Spammers are Evil. While our numbers jumped up a bit, the number of visitors still remained rather low.

In a day or two I plan to cross-post the same article at another one of my sites, CMS Report. I’ll be curious to see if the numbers of visitors will be different or not. If there are significant differences in the number of visitors between the two sites for the same post, we’ll have to take a deeper look to answering the question for why there is a difference.

My bet is there will be some significant differences in the number of visitors CMS Report receives for the same article that was posted here a week earlier. Until it happens, I’ll keep it quiet why I expect those differences.? Stay tuned!

We use Akismet to filter out the spam that’s posted in the form of comments here at likethatidea.com. The photo below was taken by me a few months ago and I assure you that no altering of the photo was done. I’ll let you be the judge whether the spam comments are really evil or not.

Besides using Akismet for our Wordpress sites, we also use it for our Drupal sites. Akismet seems to work well for both content management systems.? Click here if you digg it!

The local newspaper for Sioux Falls, SD contains an article about an online service called Feed Rinse. The service “can rinse your feeds by keyword, author, tag, etc, or filter profanity and more.” According to the article, the service is making national headlines on their Feed Rinse product. I’ve never used the service, so I can’t really give it thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Some excerpts from the Argus Leader:

Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick said of FeedRinse: “A very nice feature that we don’t have to hack and work around to make happen anymore.”

The Associated Press dispatched a favorable review this week. Technology writer Brian Bergstein said, “I can see where the site could be a little simpler to use, but for the most part, it was clean, easy to figure out and worked as advertised.”

That review appeared on dozens of prominent Web sites, including washingtonpost.com and ABC.com.

Ok so it may be a great product, but I think many reading the newspaper still do not quite get what a Web Feed is exactly. The following is a little bit of my explanation on what a Web feed is all about.

You’ve probably seen this symbol on the left posted on Web pages. That symbol is considered a “community mark” for letting everyone know that the Web site offers a Web feed (though I like to call them News Feeds). You may also see other symbols that contain either RSS or XML. These too are symbols to show that a Web Feed is available. If you click the icon your browser will be forwarded to a page with a lot of programming code that may not make a lot of sense to you. This source code contains the RSS Web Feed for Like that Idea’s?own headlines.

If you have a Web feed capable browser or application…the data can be read in a way that makes sense to you. The Mozilla Firefox browser and the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft have the ability to read these Web feeds. My favorite application to read news feeds is the same I use to read my e-mail, Mozilla Thunderbird.

The problem is that Web feeds can give you hundreds?of headlines which at times are difficult to sort though. The Feed Rinse service tries to help solve this by trying to give you only the Web feeds you likely only want to read. I can think of other ways to solve this problem than using the Feed Rinse service, but those without the technical background likely would benefit from such a service.

By the way, Rinse Feed is a product of a Sioux Falls company called Electric Pulp. The first I heard of Electric Pulp was a number of years ago when they first sponsored the annual Sioux Falls JazzFest. Over the years, they have built a pretty impressive portfolio of Web sites that they have developed for a number of regional organizations and businesses. I only mention their company because I’m a huge Blues and Jazz fan. Any company that helps sponsor a free music festival such as JazzFest deserves some?credit and attention in my opinion.

Based on an original story posted at our sister site, CMS Report.

For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We’ve been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet’s filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.

Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org:

After several days of work and tests at phpMiX.org, I’m proud to announce the immediate availability of about 2000 lines of code compiled into Akismet module v1.0.0 for Drupal 4.7.

You are encouraged to visit the Akismet site to learn more about it. In just a few words, when new content is submitted to your site, the akismet module sends a real time request to Akismet where hundreds of tests are applied to get a thumbs up or thumbs down kind of response. It may finally that tell us if the content is spam or not. If it isn’t, the content is published, if it is, then it is placed on the moderation queue. Moderators may opt-in to receive e-mail notifications for all content, just content needing approval or nothing at all. The module is fully customizable, almost everything is optional. It also keeps track of a counter that you can use to show your visitors how many spam has been caught by Akismet in your site.

Also announced, was a module for the phpBB forum software. You can visit either Akismet or phpBB for more information. If you check out phpBB, you’ll likely get a kick when you see that they are calling the mod the “Akismet Spam Butcher”. Hopefully both Drupal and phpBB users will find the Akismet modules as useful as Wordpress users have found the plugin for Wordpress to be at their sites.

There is one caveat to using the Akismet modules though. You’ll need a WordPress.com API key that is available, as far as I know, only by opening an account at Wordpress.com . I’m not really sure why the API key is only available at Wordpress.com and not Akismet’s own site, but that’s what they’ve chosen to do. For non-Wordpress users, Wordpress.org is the site you can download the actual open source software and Wordpress.com is a service that provides users a free Wordpress blogging account.

Reposted from our sister site, CMSReport.com.