Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I didn’t get to bed until like 3 this morning. I was just on IM and writing some articles for my websites and next thing I noticed it was 1:30. By the time I got into bed it was 2:10 and then I watched an episode of The X-Files. Yet I found it easier to get up this morning than I would do normally.

My VPS seems to have caught up with all the stats processing but apparently that doesn’t mean it has updated all the Awstats and it probably won’t be doing that any time soon as it’s in backup mode and I have a bad feeling that it has been there for a long while.

I also returned to the Avril forums I set up on Worfolk Hosting and found I needed to enable Awstats on their so looks like I haven’t got any stats for the moment though they should start building up soon.

My VPS has been so overloaded recently that stats basically couldn’t run (WHM skips them when it needs resources for other stuff). However now that I’ve upgraded the VPS and possibly more importantly, gone in and killed any process hogging my CPU time, they are catching up.

I found a stats bit of WHM that I hadn’t seen before which tells you which accounts are behind. When I checked it earlier it was pretty much every account I had on the system. Now it’s down to 8. I’m hoping when it’s sorted I might get my “update awstats” link in the browser which seems to have been missing, at least since the upgrade.

Sizing up a new site to launch, Erotica Forums. I really want a new community site as I sometimes run out of communities to visit when I’m just sitting around and Keyword Discovery came up with some searches so I’m testing the waters, see if anything picks up on it. I also need a vBulletin fund raiser ;).

I had a flick over Literotica yesterday and there is some really good stuff on there. I want a real sense of community, though, like Buffy Talk has as the fan fiction that comes out of there is awesome and plentiful.

Yep, I’ve got going again. I’ve started watching LoTR: The Fellowship of the Ring again. Not with any kind of commentary which I haven’t checked out yet, not have I done so with the extras, I’m just watching the movies again lol. Can’t wait until I can fully test it out with 5.1 at home. I could do that now I guess but I can’t be bothered moving ally my speakers and it’s a little late to have my sound system at full volume.

Like, wow! I just logged on to Audio Senate to find it sitting pretty at 1,188 members! That’s a lot! I know a lot of them are probably bots but there are users posting so it’s not a totally dead forum like it used to be and even if they are, who cares, it looks great for the membership count :P.

I will talk more about this on a news post on xmeltrut.com news but the network-wide updates roll out has pretty much been completed. On the down site though I already have a new functions list and database class to go out with the next rollout :P. I mentioned the database class before and when I reached Branch Planet I found some new functions too.

I’m rolling out the network wide update for xmeltut.com and have the majority of sites done but I was doing the new, and therefore easier, onces first. I still have another 10 to do and I can see some of them being rather tricky. I know some of them already have needed sizable re-writes or adapatations to the code.

So far I have made the changes I wanted to bring everything up to spec but when I came to Palmetto Pointe Fans I found an updated database class I had been looking for earlier and concluded didn’t exist. So I’ve been rolling out a version of the database class that is missing one of the functions of the latest one. Not one ever used by any of the sites I don’t think but that has already been lined up for the next network wide update.

That could happen pretty soon though if I go ahead and impement TrackBacks which I decided to leave out of this update as I want to get everything more in line and up to date first.

Things are rumbling. Carmen Electra Planet and Hilary Duff Planet are the choosen test subjects for the updates happening to xmeltrut.com.

First off, Carmen Electra Planet has been set up as the demo site with a proper database class, full list of functions (some new ones were added) and an updated RSS feed to show the entire first paragraph (though CEP is new and was doing this already) and if there is more to the story there is a link saying [+] More at the end too so users know there is more to be read.

Also, Hilary Duff Planet, being one of the sites with video news updates has a new RSS feed for the VNUs which includes Yahoo’s Media RSS standards and it has been submitted to Yahoo video search so hopefully that will get crawled. It’s linking to the asx playlist at the moment though so I’m hoping that is ok.

As for the TrackBacks, they remain in question. I am tempted to implement this set of updates before I proceed any further, just to get everything into line.

I’m thinking about implementing some chances network wide to xmeltrut.com. It’s never actually been done before, the systematic updating of every xmeltrut.com website so it will be interesting to see how it goes and more importantly, I want to get all of the changes I want to make done at once.

The reason behind it is that I got thinking about adding TrackBacks to the news stories, as it’s a lot easier and cooler than comments ;). I also thought of a neat way to add related stories which I have pondered (not quite considered but pondered at least) for a while now. It’s just things getting cluttered which I am worried about. The news story pages are pretty empty though and I can add them to the xmeltrut.com news posting pages by hiding the functions then having a “more” button next to the post news button which dynamically reveals more options.

The only problem I would have would be that I would need to put like “Related (2) TrackBacks (0)” below every news story which would take up a lot of space, especially on the news archives page as many of the stories are only a paragraph long which is why so many are on each page.

The other problem is protection against spam which is very hard but in order to try and counter it I would have to build some kind of time delay, ie, you can only TrackBack from the same IP once every minute or five minutes or something and also have a system to email me of every TrackBack which is manageable considering there will be every few, probably none at first other than maybe be pinging from site to site which would be useful when I have stories relating between celebs.

While I am there though I also want to bring everything else into line – update the functions library and database class and also the most recent RSS feed file that includes showing the entire first paragraph of the story rather than the first 100 characters. I initially didn’t do this as that is often all the story which eliminates people’s need to come to the site which I don’t want as there is no ads in the RSS (yet anyway) but I feel it is worth it as there may be more to the story and as I build up RSS readers I can start introducing adverts there too.

I’m also toying with the idea of putting a second RSS feed in there for the video news updates (at least the sites that have them) that include the Media RSS specification so that I can get it syndicated in Yahoo Video search. All the changes should be drag and drop for the new sites though, it’s only the first half a dozen old sites that I should have problems with as the code is really old in there. The last dozen sites or so work off almost identical code bases and the RSS files now take all the site information from the database so they are actually identical files that only differ because of the Site ID variable supplied in another file. Rapid deployment is what it is all about these days :).

I hate Windows Media Audio. DRM sucks. Not because I don’t want to pay for music, but because it limits what you can do with it. I’m happy to pay for my music but once I do, don’t tell me what I can and can’t do with it! Just to stupidly small files though I am using WMA on my MP3 player as it gets them significantly smaller than MP3.

I still need to convert some of my albums from MP3 to WMA though. Offspring’s Greatest Hits, Pumpkins – Rotten Apples, Staind – Chapter V and my Nirvana stuff are still in MP3. As with many posts, this is more a reference for myself than you ;).