Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Last term the Union had a vote for the Review in which you could vote for whether you felt the review was accurately portraying what you wanted your union to do. But it’s BS, most people didn’t really know what they were voting for nor did they read the review so everyone voted yes.

Out of 2,575 votes cast I was one of only 181 people to vote against the review. I should have made more noise if I had really got what was going on early enough. I may have to email the executive team and have a moan about it.

Read an interesting article on CNet’s Release 1.0 today which I thought I would mention:
http://www.release1-0.com/freshproduce/…000

It’s about the growth of web applications on the internet and talks about a product called Online Office which all you need is a browser to use. I think the growth of web applications is going to be pretty significant in the coming years and I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that web apps replacing local apps could be Web 2.0.

Well my inbox is back up to 10 but anyway. Worfolk Online has had a few changes and updates made to the site. Made Up Stuff was missing from the database so that was added, loads of RSS feeds were added and the news on the homepage was added.

Also a whole new feature, if you select important sites on the all sites pages, the links will not directly link you to the site anymore but instead to a page containing the details of the site contained in the Worfolk Online database. At the moment this is title, URL and a description of the site (usually). Also a screenshot of the site (which have been done for almost every site marked as important which most of them are) and traffic details as the amount of monthly uniques and page views are stored for each site that generates enough traffic to make it worth recording so that the stats can be estimated.

I spent quite a bit of time this afternoon filling in descriptions and screenshots for the sites that didn’t have them. I think all but two of the sites marked as important now have descriptions and a number close behind that for screenshots too. Also the date the site was launched will be added eventually as well.

It’s incredible, I have my inbox under 10. My general rule was that if it reached 100 then I needed a clear out but over Chrismukka I decided to really get on top of my emails and stop keeping emails that I should deal with but in actual fact never were so I might as well just delete or archive them and I managed to get it down to a dozen or so. Now I have achieved the holy grail, I have it under 10! Well actually I guess the holy grail would be to have an empty inbox but then that’s never going to happen as there is always going to be some stuff I need in there.

I only have two unread emails too which is good for me. I normally have around 25%-30% unread but you have to realise that when I have an unread email, I have read it. I read all my emails as they come in or just know what most of them are about anyway, I just mark emails as unread as ones that I need to deal with in the near future. Not that I don’t need to deal with my others but a lot of those are their for info whereas anything that needs a response or for me to update a website or something I keep as unread to highlight them.

BTW I just did a count and I made 42 posts in December. That’s back to the Nerd Fed glory days level. August 2004 I hit 45 posts although I don’t know if all of those were mine.

Yes, it’s finally happened. Britney Planet has finally overtaken Branch Planet in the number of news stories posted. It actually overtook the site yesterday.

It was inevitably going to happen I guess, there is just way more Britney Spears news than Michelle Branch news. Not that Branch Planet hasn’t put up a good fight, after all, it started in July 2004 and Britney Planet only started two months later in September 2004 so considering it’s now 2006 it’s taken its time in catching up.

I feel like writing an insightful article. Of course my downfall there is that I would be required to have insight for that to work. Still, I’m infused about blogs at the moment. Not that I’m just getting into it, I’ve been blogging for years but I’m seeing a whole new potential to them recently.

The amount of traffic generated by the major celebrity news blogs is amazing and indeed the amount of traffic my little blogs have picked up in a month is also pretty impressive. The whole blogging movement has set something up that’s designed for success. Update pings, trackbacks, regular updates, it’s created a crazy system where any crazy person can not only start a website but even have people read it.

Given that it’s such a strong system I’ve tried to capitalise on that with the Blog Steak network and trying to get xmeltrut.com sites to fire off update pings like blogs and continuing the theme of blogs can go far I’ve also set up Britney Blog. It’s a simple news blog but of course far more specifically targeted than say Music Steak which while a wide audience works better for a blog than a regular site is still very hard ground to break.

I also came across the themes section of WordPress.net which is brilliant. It has thumbnails and a working demo of each theme and there are like hundreds in there so it’s well worth checking out if you’re using WordPress.

My VPS has finally caught up on stats processing and it has done the new sites too. I’ve revived View Stats although I haven’t finished the portable script, just added my new domains to the manual bit so I can quickly flick around my own Awstats.

I got checking the new sites, they aren’t doing too bad…

DVD Steak: 120 uniques this month
Hollywood Steak: 92 uniques this month
Movie Steak: 86 uniques this month
Music Steak: 105 unqiues this month
Made Up Stuff: 29 uniques this month (newer than the rest)

The difficultly with blogs is how to put ads on them, it means messing with the templates really. I’m thinking about having a go with Google AdSense’s link units but I would like to a drop rather than a box as I think they will get more clicks but as they have a set background (I presume) it won’t match the fade on the blogs. It’s always worth a try though I guess.

Ok, so I got the CSS issue fixed and I’ve also been looking into some of the anti-spam methods. First of all I added a new regex filter which will block any changes containing certain words. Secondly I added an extention named Bad Behavior which checks to see if the user is a real user or a bot and blocks access accordingly.

So Buffy Wiki is currently down because of MediaWiki, I may just revert to the old version if I can’t solve it, what else can I do? I’m trying to get my phpBB installs upgraded too but there has been a massive amount of changes to the styles which is just another huge issue.

I could use an FTP client on my desktop so I’m toying with the idea of buying AceFTP 3 as it’s a great FTP client.

I’m in the process of upgrading my MediaWiki installs. It really makes you appreciate how simple it is to upgrade phpBB. I don’t think I have ever come across a script which is as quick and easy to upgrade as phpBB is. It’s great just upload the new files from your changed files download which has a package for everyone, then run the updator and delete the install directory. Then you’re done.

MediaWiki is way more complex. To upgrade it at the moment I have to do a fresh install of the script then connect it to the database and update the schema, then upgrade the encoding used in the database and even in the official documentation it didn’t work for them.

I really need a push on getting all my scripts up to date I think. I’m not sure what to do about WordPress though, I’m not a fan of version 2. There are a number of other scripts I need to get upgraded as well and I’ll be checking my list to see what I need to do when I have my wikis sorted.