Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

I came up to my room a little after midnight planning to go to bed but I sat down at my computers to close down what I was doing, maybe take a quick look at Dmoz. So from planning to go to bed then so I could get up at some decent time tomorrow to get some revision done, how did I end up still up now?

There is obviously some kind of conspiraxy against me. I’ve been doing stuff on Dmoz, I got reading the forums there too, and the Orton Chat forums, also I posted the new video news updates and fixed the Linux server problems. Hopefully now I can actually get some sleep.

Ok, so my WordPress blogs went down. I tried restarting MySQL and my whole server but that didn’t work. I’d had the problem before and on flicking around on WHM I noticed my /tmp folder was at 100% and it clicked that the problem was that my tmp folder was full and WordPress needs some space in it to work.

So I tried to access it via FileZilla, that won’t give me access to my server. So I thought I would have a wack with regular SSH and went in a deleted all the files in my tmp folder. This worked fine but it should have deleted the mysql.sock file which is required to connect. It’s not listed in there anymore but I seem to be connecting to MySQL fine on WordPress and my other sites so I’m confused there.

I took a peak at the Celeb Linkage stats today and was pleasantly surprised to see it had already knocked up 145 uniques for January. Considering I only launched the site in December I think it’s doing quite nicely.

Most of the traffic appears to be coming from search engines, and it’s real traffic, none of this Google Images crap that most of my sites get. This is weird as the idea behind the posts with images was that they would pull in that kind of traffic ;).

My hope is that my blogs such as Movie Steak and DVD Steak are also doing well although Celeb Linkage is on a different server and so will be reaping some decent benefits from all the links from my VPS’s IP although I guess that only counts as one. Only time will tell, I don’t have stats for them yet as my VPS is so overloaded it hasn’t had a chance to run them yet. I’m trying to keep server load to get rid of the stats backlog at the moment as I have been doing for a few days now.

Now that I am back at bod with my nice plain walls I have got back into the video news updates for some of my fansites. I’ve recorded new ones for the four sites that I do them for and should have them uploaded by tomorrow.

One thing about being a developer whether you work for a multi-national corporation like Microsoft or whether you run websites in your spare time, there will be one fact that remains true across it all – you’ll be really lazy and hate having to do repetitive tasks.

That’s why people come up with all these little applications and scripts to make things faster. Such as my script to transfer all my posts from pLog into WordPress. I could have transfered them manually and it probably wouldn’t have taken that much longer but it’s more fun to write a script.

One I have just finished on is to generate the linkage for my new blogs. Stuff like Movie Steak in between every second post there is linkage to stuff on all the other blogs, that was the idea behind the network. But until now I had to go round each site and get athe stories and URLs. Now with the script I have you just click on what blog you want to post to and it will go through all the RSS feeds and get the latest stories from the other blogs.

It’s not perfect – it will use duplicate stories and could potentially include linkage as a story and also I normally add the word review to reviews from the movies and music blogs which it doesn’t do but then I can always add that in my hand as it outputs to a textarea so I can modify the output before copy and pasting it.

The only other issue I have had is that the output of the RSS feed causes problems with the ‘s. They are output differently by WordPress and although it claims to be UTF-8 I have set my XML parser to that encoding and it produces some wierd results.