- He was a saviour sent to earth to live as a mortal
- Sinners could be reborn through him and achieve immortal life
- He died for our sins
- Rose from the dead the following Sunday
- Born of a virgin on December 25^th in a manger or possibly a cave.
- 3 shepherds were present
- Become known as light of the world

Can you guess who it is yet?

- 12 Disciples with whom he shared a last meal before dying
- Flesh and blood symbolically consumed by followers
- He was worshipped on Sundays
- Often depicted with a Halo around his head
- His followers exchanged gifts on the 25^th of December
- HQ – Vatican Hill, Rome

Which one?

Both, actually.

No one knows which was given this story first; Christ or Mithra, but we know both Mithraism and Christianity began around the same time (1^st – 4^th Century AD).

Mithraism certainly had its HQ on Vatican Hill in Rome, now the home of the Roman Catholic Church.

Both were desperate to grow and expand in Rome and it’s not unfeasible for Christian leaders to have encompassed the Mithraic story to appeal to its rivals’ followers who are largely believed to have been traders and soldiers.

The benefit of having merchants and soldiers as followers is obvious and both religions no doubt desired them. In the most powerful city in the world two rival religions were fighting for followers, evidently Christianity won out. Let’s take a look at how that might have happened.

Many people find it hard to look at religion as an entity instead of a set of beliefs so forget we’re dealing with religions for a second and instead consider companies selling similar products.

Business A sees that Business B has all the best customers (followers) and realises its product isn’t appealing to the right people.

Business A adapts it’s product to match Business B and as such appeals to the same customers.

Business A applies the same process in other countries and becomes a Multi-national company.

Business B has nothing original to offer. Under pressure from Business A’s excellent marketing and management Business B goes bankrupt.

Early Christianity did this with multiple smaller religions and if you look for it, you’ll find the evidence. I’m not condemning Christianity for this, far from it, but it is fascinating to study.

That’s it for now, I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of religion based blogging and am curious to see the feedback I get.

Yahoo have rejected a $44.6 (£22.4Bn) bid from Microsoft but are continuing talks with Google. Yahoo believe the $23Bn bid from Microsoft undervalues the company but there is no reason to believe Microsoft and indeed Bill Gates will not come back with a larger offer.

It’s well known Microsoft is struggling in the online marketplace with MSN Search taking just 8.5% market share in searches and a takeover of Yahoo may just eat into Google’s domination.

This is a developing story and I hope to keep up to date as best I can, unlike other blogs I work alone. If anyone viewing this article has new information I encourage you to post it via replies. This is a major story for those involved in the online world and your input would be greatly appreciated.

Camden town market is currently ablaze with over 100 fire fighters and 10 fire engines tackling the blaze. The fire service was alerted at 7.20pm this evening and has been attempting to keep it under control since.

Latest reports from the Fire brigade suggest the fire is intense and yet to be controlled which makes it even more miraculous that no one has been reported injured or killed so far. Additionally no one is thought to have been trapped at this time.

Live video feeds suggest the flames have died down but as time goes on we’re seeing more buildings catching fire.

Information will continue to filter through but to keep an eye on the story you can check the BBC news website.

Camden is a favorite tourist attraction for visitors to North London and the loss of the world famous market will hit hard for local retailers that survive the flames. Some 300,000 visitors frequent the area every weekend.

I’ll try and keep the story updated as it develops.

10.15 pm GMT:

The fire continues to burn out of control some 3 hours later, a particular problem is the fear of bottled gas stored in the area (garages, shops, storage areas etc.). Several eye witnesses have reported the sound of an explosion but it has not been confirmed.

10.25 pm GMT:

Reporters at the scene believe the fire is still out of control and is now moving down Camden High Street.

10.45pm GMT:

The fire remains out of control but real details are scarce.

UPDATE

I sold this theme via Sitepoint for $250. I have received several inquiries and I thought I’d announce it publicly for others who are interested:

This theme was sold with full rights, however the videopress features may be used in other themes. I am free for private work to design a theme with similar capabilities but please note: I will be releasing a theme with similar capabilities that will be on sale for a lower price. This will not include full rights but with just a small edit of the CSS you will be able to make it unique to your site!

The standard rate is $250

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After many hours of playing around with Wordpress I came up with Videopress, a highly customised theme that sits on top of the Wordpress back-end and offers up videos to visitors.

I think I must have spent some 40+ hours on this over the last month and while it’s not quite perfect it’s pretty close and I’ll be updating it as time goes on.

This is how the theme comes as default:

Slight modifications can display this:

Category View

This theme can be customised dramatically with just a little bit of know how, alternatively I can be hired to do it for a minimal charge ($15 per hour).

You can check the theme out first hand

Copies of this theme are available via paypal at the price of just $70 (+ installation $80)

Everyone loves a cheat sheet so I’ve gathered as many as I can for your viewing pleasure.

A cheat sheet is a quick reference to commonly used functions, tags etc. that can be used and lets face it we’re not all blessed with a photographic memory.

I have a few of these on my wall at the moment and I can’t tell you how much time they’ve helped me save.

Get your cheat on!

Front End Web Development

• Javascript Cheat Sheet
• CSS Cheat Sheet
• XHTML Cheat Sheet (PDF)

Back End Development

• PHP Cheat Sheet
• Ruby On Rails Cheat Sheet
• ASP / VBScript Cheat Sheet
• MySQL Cheat Sheet
• Firebird SQL Cheat Sheet
• XML Syntax Cheat Sheet (PDF)
• XML Schema - Structures Cheat Sheet (PDF)
• XML Schema - Data Types Cheet Sheet (PDF)
• Web Application Cheat Sheet

Blog Cheat Sheets

• Wordpress Plugins & Theme Cheat Sheet
• Drupal Cheat Sheet
• Movable Type Cheat Sheet
  

Useful For SEO and Promotion

• Mod Rewrite Cheat Sheet
• Useful .htaccess for site in development
• Google Cheat Sheet
  

Do you have any suggestions or comments? Feedback is welcome in the comments below!

I’ve only just got into Reaper, the latest project from Kevin Smith. The gist is Sam (Bret Harrison) finds out on his 21st birthday that his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born. As he comes of age the devil sends him out to work as a bounty hunter for souls that escaped from Hell.

Enough talk, see for yourself:

I’ve never been a huge fan of Kevin Smith’s work, Clerks / Clerks II rated mediocre to me and Jay and Silent Bob never ticked many boxes, but Reaper is a step above.It’s on Tuesday at 9/8pm central on CW in the US and E4 in the UK.Official Website

MovieForumz Hacked?

In the last few hours Movie Forumz closed to perform ‘important updates’ and when it came back all video forums had been deleted.

The reason given was a suspicious looking cease and desist letter from the MPA and a message from the Admin.

An hour or so later it became clear that what we all suspected was true, the site had been hacked and everything is expected to get back to normal in the next few hours.

Will the culprit be traced? IP address’s can be found easily and with over 180,000 registered members i’m sure at least one will track the guy down.

The message for those concerned is this: It was a hack, don’t panic, everything will be back to normal ASAP

Well no sooner than I had written this the theme was sold, but here it is anyway for those of you interested in my work.

I called it Light3 because it’s a 3 column fast loading light layout (my creativity knows no bounds!). As usual I am available for custom designs should you feel your site needs a facelift, you can contact me for a quote or leave a comment and I’ll get back to you asap.

I’m sure you’ve seen the front page of this site ( click here if not ) so you’ve seen how we display images along with our posts. This theme was originally designed by Darren Hoyt so firstly I’d like to recognise his efforts and show you how a stripped down version can be created.

Let’s say we want to build the same module that displays the latest post from our ‘General’ category.

First things first we need to create the PHP that will call for the information we need:

These two lines call query the database for the latest post in category 1 (in our case that’s General). The second line starts the loop that will run until all data asked for have been displayed.

This line ends the loop:

We could build in a small error message, but it won’t be needed in this case as we can be sure we’ll always have a post in this category.

Building the Module

The PHP calls you’ll need are below along with a brief explanation;

This chunk of code calls for the story image to be displayed next to the text and makes it a link to the post. For now all you need to know is the path to the image needs to be changed to the location you’ll be using.

Calling the Post Title

This line creates a link to the post and uses post title as the text;

Display the Excerpt (either automatic or one defined while posting)

Finally a ‘Read More’ link to take the visitor to the story

This is the full code with a small bit of CSS to get you started

Getting it to Work

When we called the story image we included the following code:

Create a custom field called Images and specify your image filename in ‘Value’

Post and Enjoy!

In my attempt to master CSS, or at least refresh my memory I have been browsing the net looking for some decent articles. One of many I found to be extremley good is ’CSS Specificity: Things You Should Know’ posted over at Smashing Magazine.

CSS Specificity is probably the hardest aspect of CSS to understand but put as simply as possible it’s the reason your CSS doesn’t apply to the elements you think it should. I won’t go into it too much, there is no need to re-write something when it’s just a click away.

It’s a long article but well worth checking out and applying to your work. In the long run it’ll save you time looking for bugs and keeping your code clean and efficient!