Just because I struggle every time to find how to do that, here’s the procedure to delete an event without responding :

1. Click on events
2. Click on the event you want to get rid of
3. In the guest list you’ll see yourself as well as your invited friends. There’s a cross beside your name. Click on it to remove yourself

BAM ! DONE !

This is nothing new, but just in case you missed it, Yahoo! published a fairly detailed report about how to speed up your website response times : Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site.

Many of the tips are common sense, some are somehow unexpected, and some I didn’t know like the HTTP/1.1 header ETAG. Let’s see what that’s about.

If you need to simulate a load on an Apache server (or any web server actually), you can use Apache Bench, which is included in the standard Apache HTTPd distribution. This tool will launch connections to your webserver as instructed to simulate multiple users and will help you to tune your Apache settings.

You can find the synopsis at the Apache website. Most common options are :

• -n : number of requests to perform
• -c : number of concurrent requests

Other options allow you to control precisely the request to send, proxy settings, user authentication, cookies and much more.

ReviewMe aims at connecting advertisers and publishers (including bloggers) so that publishers will get paid to write reviews on their site about a product or a website.

As obvious as this is, it is designed so that bloggers will get money from the time they spend on their blogs and advertisers will get better quality advertisement. But if you are not interested by the financial aspect, you might still be interested in using ReviewMe to find the best blogs about the subjects you like.

I accessed my “Google Personnalized Homepage” today morning only to discover that the page logo now displays iGoogle instead of the classic and usual Google… I was wondering what it was, as the logo is not clickable with a link to an explanation as I hoped it would be …

Tan Tan Noodles’s wordpress reports plugin has just been updated as announced on the plugin’s homepage :

Bug Fixes: WordPress Reports (0.81) : tan tan noodles – msg free since 2005
A bug fix release for the WordPress Reports plugin is now available for download.

If you are using WordPress+Google Analytics+FeedBurner then this plugin is a must : it will let you get the main reports of both statistics tools directly from you WordPress admin interface.

WordPress is a great blogging platform, which will let you easily publish your blog. Now, considering the amount of time you’ll probably spend writing contents, you might want to get money from it (all work deserves money, right ? 😉 ).

I’ll show you how to do this easily, by using the advertisement program of Google : AdSense.

A little follow up on yesterday article about scripting Twitter with cURL: the solution was working, but somehow inconvenient. Not practical to have to go and fetch the user id every time you want to send a direct message !

This time, I scripted Twitter direct message with Perl and LWP (libwww-perl), for a much more convenient solution. I designed it to be used like a sort of universal paging service.

Twitter already provides an API but it is currently very limited. It will let you fairly easily change your status, but won’t let you send a direct message.

Comes in cURL. cURL is a very versatile command line utility which is designed to script web pages interactions. As a little demo, I’ll show you how to use it to easily overcome the shortcomings of Twitter’s API.

If you don’t know yet about Twitter, you might want to have a look at my previous article about it.
One of its neat features is the (previously written about) ability to send direct messages to your friends.

This feature will let you easily send free SMS from your computer to any of your friends.

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users » Slacker Manager
If you just want to send a note directly to someone, you can get them via the direct messages web interface.

Damn ! I’m a twitter user myself, but how could I have overlooked that “direct message” feature ? Now you can think of twitter as a unified messaging interface. If the personne you’re sending a message didn’t configure anything then the message will wait to be read on the website. If she configured IM and cell phone, then she’ll get it on the IM when online, on the cell phone when not. Pretty cool !

MindMeister is an online mind mapping tool. Even though it is in “private beta”, it seems very promising.[

Burning Questions • FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market

In this article, FeedBurner gave us quite a few insights about people’s habits regarding RSS feeds. Anyone having a blog or website can use this article to be more friendly to the readers, to boost RSS feed subscription, and to help growing the revenue you get from your website.

LinkedIn lets you connect to people you know. This connection is made by sending someone an email with a link to allow that connection. But how to let people connect to you, if they don’t know your email address ?

Twitter is a website where you can post things.
Just one more blog ? Not really …

WordPress is a great blogging software, which is both feature rich and simple to use. For most beginners, it will be enough to install it and start using it. For most advanced uses and to get more control, you’ll need to tweak with the templates.

Overview

A WordPress blog is composed of the following sections :

• header : this is the top of your page (usually a banner for your blog)
• footer : this is the bottom of your page (few links, statistics, …)
• page : this is where the main content goes (posts)
• sidebar : this is the sidebar (widgets, archives, recent posts, tags…)

Altering your template

Rather unsurprisingly, altering your template can be achieved by modifying the template files corresponding to the section you want to modify.
Those files are located in your theme directory (usually something like wordpress/wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME) and their name is the section name with an extension of “.php”. So if you want to change the sidebar, then you’ll go and edit sidebar.php.

I’ve written 2 sample applications to demonstrate how easy it is to use the API v2 of Google Maps.

I was honnestly surprised to see how easy it actually is… Have a look at the source of the pages and see for yourself 😉

del.icio.us is a website where you can store your bookmarks, tag them to easily find them afterwards, and it is social bookmarking in the sense that your bookmarks can be searched, and so are others’ bookmarks, building a kind of giant directory of humanly maintained links to the world wide web.

But you can go beyond saving your bookmarks and searching others’…

If you like Perl and you make dynamic websites with databases backends, Catalyst is definitely worth a look.

It is basically an MVC engine for websites. It lets you nicely separate your business logic, the display and the database backend.

It has extended plugins to deal with things like authentications, sessions, templates, RSS, and God knows what 🙂

It can integrate Apache, and harness mod_cgi’s power for high-performance web applications.

It is a little bit tricky to get it right at the beginning, but there are nice tutorials.