Sometime ago I reviewed Adobe Reader against Foxit. Many people often direct PC users to Foxit when they find older versions of Adobe to be slow and bloated. My conclusion was that Adobe Reader is a lot better now and it’s many benefits outway the little speed improvement you get with Foxit.

You’d have thought Adobe would have been happy with this but, instead, argued with my comparison methods – even though they were generally favourable towards them.

However, they remained strangely quiet, even when I specifically questioned them on this, about not providing the facility, for many home users who just need the more basic feature set, a leaner, stripped down version of Adobe Readers. Others had done just this, and I concluded that people should try Adobe Reader Lite.

Now, this was never affiliated with Adobe – someone had taken the standard Adobe Reader and removed the lesser used features. This produced a much quicker, leaner version that could compete even more favourably with the competition.

That was 14 months ago. So, imagine my surprise to find that Adobe Reader Lite appears to be no longer available to download. My usual source is from Major Geeks, but the link simply shows a blank page. Searching Major Geeks still shows the software in their index, but clicking their links results in the same blank screen.

The programmer used to post his code on a forum and its there that we can see what has happened. The links in his forum posts have been removed and the following text added to the bottom…

Reason for edit: We’ve been directed by a 3rd party to remove the links, as these redists violate the Adobe EULA and copyright – redist is forbidden. Post edited, links removed.

And indeed, the discussion has been closed with a post that explains the situation further.

It’s not Adobe that’s directly doing this but I suspect they’re behind the request. I’d like to think that they’ve felt the need because they now provide an equivalent. But they don’t.

But then, from a company that argues with reviews which are in their favour, odd behaviour appears to be natural to them.

My Simple Social Bookmarks has just been updated – and it’s a biggie!

Version 1.4 now gives you…

• Updated default icons
• Added AddToAny, Ping.fm, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader and email to the list of providers. By default these will be turned off so as to not to suddenly appear on existing installs and cause problems!
• Further improvement to blog title issues
• Removed URL shortening on all services with the exception of Twitter, as it was not required and may have even have caused some issues (such as some services not being able to get hold of thumbnails and general page content).
• NOFOLLOW and TARGET parameters added

However, the 2 big changes are that it now uses my Simple URL Shortener plugin to provide, erm, URL shortening and that short URLs are now cached.

As always, head to the dedicated page to download a copy or leave comments.

By default, get_the_title and the_title will return the title of the current post. It’s stored in the database in plain text, however, when returned using the aforementioned functions if appears to be encoded. This means that characters such as ampersands and apostrophes will be converted to equivalents that are more HTML friendly.

Unfortunately, passing, say, this title to Twitter, via the URL, causes problems. First you have to URL encode and the mixture of the HTML encoding and the URL encoding produces a mess that Twitter simply doesn’t cope with very well.

However, the standard HTML decoding in PHP didn’t seem to work 100% with, for example, apostrophes not being decoded. After much head scratching and some frustration I found that this was due to the parameters that I was using.

The following line will correctly decode the post title to plain text…

html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8');

To then encode is to be passed via URL, then simply use this…

urlencode(html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8'));

It seems obvious now