Blog Discussions

I decided to make use of some of the other features that FeedBurner provides me. I use them to publish my RSS feed but I realize that not everyone likes to read sites through RSS. So I’ve added an email subscription box on the right hand side of the site so that if you want to know when I write new content but don’t want to be bothered to actually visit the site you can add your email address and it’ll send you an email. I’m fairly certain that FeedBurner will not sell your email address but I’ve added my own email address as a subscription so I’ll know myself how trustworthy their service is (plus it’s good to eat your own dogfood). So give the email subscription a try if it suits your needs, otherwise you can continue to visit or read the content through your RSS reader.

Tomorrow I’m going to be setting up a corporate blog at work. My goal is to use it as a tool for inter-group communication. We don’t have a good way of distributing knowledge to a lot of people at once and my impression is that a blog would fill that need. I’m of course going to be using Wordpress to set it up; it’s idiotproof, offers the user management features that I need and I hope to be able to introduce RSS and the advantages of syndication to other people in my group and in the company. I’m not sure they’ll take to it like I have (I plan on using Thunderbird for RSS syndication of this internal blog).

One of the first things I did at this job was set up a wiki; two years later I’m setting up a blog. It’ll be an interesting experience I think and it’s something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while: partially to boost the “soft” skills that will be required of me but also to show initiative. When you’re pushing for something you have to provide as few reasons as possible for people to doubt you and as many reasons as possible for people to believe in you. Irreplaceable without domination. That’s my motto these days.to

I subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s feed.  Or at least I thought I did.  He’s an interesting writer and I like to read what he writes about. In my feed reader this morning there was post on his feed but when you read it you realize that it’s something else entirely:

This is an incredibly small blog that’s intended to: redirect you to Guy’s new feed, show Guy (and others) the reason why they don’t want to just let their Feedburner feeds get deleted, and gently inform Feedburner, Bloglines and others of a little problem that needs to be fixed.

For those of you who are are seeing this message in your feed reader and wondering why I’m not sounding like Guy Kawasaki, here’s the deal. You are subscribed to an outdated Feedburner feed that Guy allowed to lapse. You should unsubscribe to this feed and subscribe to his current feed, which is located at this URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm

Message to Guy… See? This is what I’m talking about. By allowing your Feedburner feed to get deleted, you’ve opened your subscribers up to having somebody else (like me) to come along, create a feed by the same name in Feedburner, and capture the eyeballs of your subscribers.

Message to Feedburner… Ahem. Perhaps you want to think about the process by which feeds are deleted? Some kind of waiting period (a month, 6 months?) before somebody else can create a feed with the same name? Perhaps some kind of permission-granting thingy?

Message to Bloglines… Ahem. The reason I can do this is because of your tendency not to clear out the cache of “subscribable” feeds very often. I pounded Guy’s blog URL into your “Add” gizmo and got a huge list of feeds, including 2 obsolete Feedburner feeds. I found the “hijackable” feeds by going to the feed URLs in turn, and finding a couple that have been deleted from Feedburner.

If I was an unscrupulous type guy, I could put up a site that: looks just like Guy’s site but spoofs his unsuspecting subscribers into clicking on things by hijacking his credibility, or direct his subscribers to his competitors or do any of the things that people do with domain names that expire…

Yep, here’s the issue — this is just like dropping domain names. ‘Cause that’s what’s happening, a feed URL is being dropped in such a way that somebody could easily write a script to, um, snap up those domains.That’s it. Remember, Guy’s real feed has moved to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm

Onward,

Mike — www.haven.com

I was looking at some of my stats this evening and noticed that my post about “Alumni in high places” has not seen any traffic since a couple of weeks ago. I went to the GoogleTalk blog post and noticed that my post is no longer in the list of sites linking to that post. Now I was a little bit critical about the Google Desktop Search in my post but I don’t really understand why the entire link would be removed. I’ve been more critical in other posts (that’s why I don’t expect to see a link from Jeff Ltd. anytime soon). I’m not sure what the point is of censoring pingbacks like this. Even so I’m not going to lose any sleep over this; I just thought it was worth mentioning.

This site had a minor outage this morning.  It seems that between 7 and 8 AM the site was completely unavailable.  When I brought this site back online I switched to a hosted solution with Dreamhost.  It’s laughably inexpensive per month and they provide some great utilities to manage your domain.  A lot of popular server software is available as a one-click install.
Anyway this morning I noticed the site was down so I used the panel to ask for support.  They were able to verify that the site was down and within 15 minutes it was up again.  It’s pretty great service if you ask me (I don’t care if you do or not).  This site is hardly critical but it is nice to have it online on a regular basis.

I posted last year about a plugin for Wordpress that allowed me to integrate my Creative Commons license with the blog.  Well with me upgrading to Wordpress 2.0 (and then 2.0.1) after having lost most of my entries, it was time for me to redisplay this license information on the site because I think it’s extremely important to have an open copyright system.

I decided to use this new plugin called the Creative Commons Configurator.  It made it remarkably easy to integrate.  I just had to choose my license, copy the RDF into the plugin’s options page and then choose where I wanted to have it displayed.  I choose three places: in the header so that bots can read it when spidering this site, in my RSS feed and also on a single post page so that when you’re viewing one post you can see what the rights are.

This is the license that I choose to go with.  It’s the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Canada license.  It’s great that they have regionally-targeted licenses now.  The work of the Creative Commons group is one that I heartily endorse.  If I didn’t then I wouldn’t be licensing my work in this way.

You may (or may not) have noticed that my archives have really been flushed out over the last few weeks.  We lost all of the past entries here and when I came back online here I had to start from scratch again.  I was disconcerted at first but then I remembered that Google had been visiting my site (noted here) and I had set my meta robots tag to index and follow links.  I did a search for my site (old blog location) and noticed that there were quite a few results (over 1300) and that many of them were cached by Google (the same cache that was recently declared legal).  All I had to do then was iterate through the results, visit the cached version of each result and copy the entry into this new installation.  It took a lot of work and a lot of time but I think I managed to get about 95% of the entries back again which I’m pretty impressed with.  There are still quite a few broken links in those old posts because they refer to other posts in the old blog location so I’ll have to go back and update them at some point but at least the base content is there.  I’m currently in the process of importing my old Livejournal entries so that I’ll have all of my blog entries in one place.  With Wordpress 2.0 I can backup the blog at any time so I’m going to start doing that just in case something catastrophic goes wrong.  Sometimes it’s nice to have search engines crawling what you put online.  I also could have used The Wayback Machine but it doesn’t seem to have much from my site.  That’s not surprising considering how insignificant this site in the grand scheme of things.

I just finished upgrading this blog to Wordpress 2.0.1 which was released last night.  114 bugs fixed in this release!  From a cursory search a few days ago, I noticed that there have been some general and specific complaints about Wordpress 2.0 so hopefully those will be resolved now.  It’s nice to see such a dedicated group of developers trying to improve an already-great product.

I noticed on Technorati that I’ve been splogged today. This site (my first use of nofollow!) seems to have reproduced my entry from last night about having wireless Internet along with cordless phone use.  Stupid sploggers.

I installed Wordpress 2.0 today.  Boy is it ever slick!  The admin interface I was kind of familiar with since I had setup an account on wordpress.com.  I also installed k2 which is optimized for Wordpress 2.0.  The WYSIWYG post creation screen is very nice though.  Wordpress has really evolved since I first installed it almost 2 years ago.  It’s becoming a mature publishing platform.

Well in th’ evolution o’ this site it seems that there is inevitably some wafflin’ back and forth with various layours. I’m now tryin’ out K2 which is th’ sequel t’ Kubrick which ye may recall were bein’ one o’ th’ layouts I tried out last year (or maybe this year – I don’t remember now). And hoist the mainsail! The sharks will eat well tonight! I like th’ support fer various plugins that come with th’ layout so I’m goin’ t’ stick with this fer th’ time bein’. And swab the deck! Aarrr! The top header is a little bland but I’m goin’ t’ look into changin’ that. Keep watchin’ th’ evolution o’ th’ influx.

Here I was thinking that no one was commenting and in fact I had some comments in the moderation queue. Hooray for comments and readers!

We you may have noticed that this space was dark for the last little while. I had to reinstall this machine which meant that I lost most of the entries that I had accumulated since last May. I have everything since February 17th of this year so all is not lost. It’s just going to be a long road to recovery.

Things have been really great in the last little while. I’ll post some more in a bit.

Sorry for the unavailability of this site over the last few days but there was a power outage on Friday evening that seemed to corrupt my CMOS checksum on this machine. I only got around to fixing the problem last night and thus we are back up and running once again. With any luck I’ll have more time to post but it seems I’ve been saying that too often recently and not really delivering on the promise. No guarantees but I will try!

I’ve received strange spam before but I think this one takes the cake in terms of bizarreness factors and nicheness.

To: Mr. matt.clements We Supply Sodium Fluoride Formulae: NaF Molecular weight: 42UN. No: 83015 H.S. CODE: 2826.1100 Properties: White powder, soluble in water, slightly soluble in alcohol, poisonous goods; can be used as manufacturing of enamel, vermin destroyer, rat poison; as insecticide, preservatives for wood and food, antiseptic in alcohol distillation. Quality Standard Index NameMass Percent NaF Content≧98.0% Moisture≦0.5％ S04≦0.1% Water Insolubles≦0.7% PH≦0.1％ Sodium Carbonates≦0.5% Si02≦0.5% Packaging and transportation: Goods will be packed into two layers polyethylene knitting bags with its single net weight to be 25 kgs. per bag. Pay attention to the handling of the package bag for preventing the damages. Shenzhen Quantum Trade Co., Ltd. Rm. 437, Zhenhua Mansion, No. 25, Huafa North Rd., Futian Zone 518031, Shenzhen, PR China Tel: 86-755-83284339/83344724 Fax: 86-755-83284435 Mobile: 86-13500068242 e-mail

My guess is that they got my email address from the IEEE. Stupid harvesters!

For some reason I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam recently touting the wonders of backgammon. Now I’m all for advertising lesser games of chance but the one thing I do mind is that their spelling of backgammon is all over the map. I’ve seen backgamon, backgammonn, backgammon – it’s ridiculous. I wonder if discussing backgammon on this post if I’ll receive even more comment spam.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Googlebot has returned to visiting my humble site. Welcome! Considering how much more traffic I’ve received via Yahoo! and MSN (their bots are constantly hitting this site) I was wondering if Googlebot was just being shy but lo and behold it has returned. Hopefully it’s more of an extended stay.

I am a kottke.org micropatron

In reference to this previous post.

This is meant in the classical music, appreciation for art’s sake kind of way. The political connotation is far less pleasant and I like to think that this is a good cause.

Doing kottke.org as a full-time job (kottke.org)

Jason has decided to focus on kottke.org on a full-time basis. He’s looking for micropatrons to contribute whatever they can to enable him to do this. If I find some spare change I might consider contributing because Jason’s writing and posts are always entertaining (and his links are great too). It’ll be very interesting to see how this experiment unfolds. If it means more frequent posts then I’m all for it.

You may have noticed a fresh new look on this blog starting today. I decided to try out a new theme (not that Kubrick was getting old but I wanted to see what else was out there). This theme is called Benevolence and it’s by the talented designer Theron Parlin. I like it – the grass reminds me that spring is around the corner.

Soon I’m going to have to upgrade to the final release of Wordpress 1.5. I’ve been running the beta versions for quite a while but it would be nice to have the final release and that would wrap up any recent bug fixes.

Yesterday you may have noticed that the server was inaccessible (unless you were using theinflux.dyndns.org – this should always be up-to-date). I’m switching my Internet access at home from Bell Sympatico to Primus. Primus is a lot cheaper and although it was a hassle getting the modem deilvered I think it will be better in the long run. We’ll see once I actually start using their DSL service. I need to cancel my Bell service and then call and activate my Primus service. Hopefully I can get all of this done before my next bill comes in for Sympatico on the 20th.

So if you see this site down over the next few days you’ll know why that is.

Well the good folks at the Debian project have fixed the problem I was discussing last week. It turns out it was a problem in the Apache 2 packages and now that they’ve been updated the problems I was seeing earlier have disappeared. Hooray for that. I have my aggregator back again!

I’m having some PHP troubles on this machine today. I have the Debian packages for PHP and Apache2 installed and I think there’s a version conflict. PHP was held back and Apache 2 was upgraded and as a result a bunch of my PHP sites on this server aren’t working properly (for example my photo gallery). Hopefully the problem is resolved tomorrow when I upgrade again.

Consider it done!

Real posts later hopefully.

Sorry about having so many updated posts but I’ve gone back and added some Technorati tags to past posts. Things should settle down to normal soon enough.

I’ve decided to join the fray in using Technorati Tags in my posts. You’ll find tags at the bottom of each post linking me to the rest of the blogging world through Technorati. We’ll see how effective it is but judging from my traffic over the weekend it could prove useful. My post last week on Paan received a lot of hits (and some interesting comments) based on its being the #2 post for the Toronto tag at one point. Anyway, we’ll give it a try – the more people who participate the better the program will be. There are already a bunch of plugins available to manage the tags on your blog and thanks to Chris Lott I’m using the TechnoTags plugin for Wordpress.

Via Lawrence Lessig’s blog I discovered the invention of WP-CC, a plugin for Wordpress that lets you easily manage your Creative Commons license. I have previously discussed the inclusion of such a license in this space. You can see the license at the bottom of every page. This makes it very easy to modify my license if I ever need to do that. It also eliminates the need to copy and paste the license meta information each time I upgrade Wordpress to another beta version. Thanks to Firas!

There’s only so much secrecy available to you when you’re on the Internet. You can’t always control how people find out about your site (forums, searches, etc.) but you can control who you give your URLs to. You take a risk offending any new readers.

I knew that subscribing to my own Wiki’s RSS feed would come in handy. I subscribe to the Recent Changes page on the Wiki just in case something like what I’m about to describe happens.

Some spammer created a page called RecentVisitors on my Wiki. That page (which is now deleted) is created on installations of PHPWiki (which I used to use; I’ve since switched to MediaWiki). It’s meant to be like a guestbook however the nature of the Wiki leaves it very open to abuse.

So this spammer created this page. He then added “Jacob from [some spammer’s site]” to the page. The page isn’t linked to or from any other page; I would have had to have known that it existed to find it. However since I subscribe to the RSS feed, it tells me every single change to the Wiki. I knew within the hour what had occurred and quickly deleted the page.

The whole point of these spams (spem?) is to increase the page rank of the linked site. Since more and more search engines are indexing blogs, comment spam is not going to go away. Though this is the first encounter I’ve had with Wiki spam, I’m sure it won’t be the last. If it becomes more of a problem then I’m going to have to investigate ways to lock that down. As much as I like Wiki’s (and it’s a lot), I can’t afford to have my own Wiki turn into a cesspool of spam links.

I think I need to revamp my categories here. I think they’re too broad and/or vague. Of course with new categories it means that I need to go through the 400-odd posts that I’ve written here and re-categorize them. But if the end reuslt is a cleaner set of archives then I’ll for investing the time.

Last week I was bombarded with comment spam in this space. This isn’t the first time this has happened (as evidenced by these previous posts) but this time it was pretty severe – over 360 comments were in the moderation queue. Fortunately I have enough protective elements on this blog that none of them made it onto the site itself but I still had to delete 360 comments and mark them as spam so that my spam filters are smarter in the future. It didn’t take that long but it was kind of annoying. I suppose it could be worse – deleting live comments or having several times the number of comments to delete. I guess that’s one of the good things about being the 3,121,966th blog by traffic according to Alexa – I’m flying under most spammers’ radar.

I haven’t had much comment spam recently mainly due to the robust safeguards I’ve installed on this server. This morning though there were a few and they were interesting in their content. All linked to gambling sites but to try and get through the filters they use choice language. Here are some of the award winners:

• He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.


• Modern science disclaims any intention of understanding the hidden nature of things; its philosophy condemns any such endeavour as vague, misleading and altogether unscientific….But I refuse to heed this warning. I agree that the process of understanding leads beyond – indeed far beyond – what a strict empiricism regards as the domain of legitimate knowledge; but I reject such an empiricism. If consistently applied, it would discredit any knowledge whatever and it can be upheld only by allowing it to remain inconsistent. It is permitted this inconsistency because its ruthless mutilation of human experience lends it such a high reputation for scientific severity, that its prestige overrides the defensiveness of its own foundations. Our acknowledgement of understanding as a valid form of knowing will go a long way towards liberating our minds from this violent and inefficient despotism.


• One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.


• False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.


• From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.

I guess that the comment spam scripts have access to Bartlett’s Famous Quotations.

This morning I upgraded this to be running the latest nightly build of Wordpress, 1.3-alpha-5. It took a little bit of work to get things working with the themes and configuration files/plugins but we should be good to go (again). I haven’t noticed many major changes between the previous version I was using (alpha-3) and this one. Mostly they are minor user interface-type changes.

That said, Wordpress still rocks and is going to rock even more in the future.

So Marcy and I are getting more and more settled into our new lives here in Toronto. Almost all of the boxes that we moved have been unpacked and the remainder are being stored in the spare bedroom (man it’s great to have one of those). We’ve already picked out our paint for the entire apartment and are looking forward to decorating together. It will make a huge difference. We’re also looking at new leather furniture for the living room as it seems that all of the furniture stores in the area are having these crazy promotional deals (buy 3 pieces, get a big-screen tv). We’re thinking of going with a 4-piece black leather-split set from Leon’s because we think it’s the best value for the dollar and gives us plenty of space to sit in the new living room. We’ll probably give our existing couch (after the addition of a new slip cover). We won’t need a third couch after buying this new furniture.

Work has been extremely exciting so far so that’s definitely a positive sign. There are many differences between this job and my previous one but I won’t mention anything here. The job is very interesting, the people are great and things are really moving quickly sales-wise. We have an offsite meeting tomorrow. I’m not sure exactly what that entails but it sounds interesting!

Marcy and I are going to have to purchase a car quite soon. Her car is having some troubles and it’s not worth risking her driving an hour per day and getting stuck on the 401. Today we commuted together and after work we’re going to look at some used cars in this area. We’re looking at a 2000-2002 Honda Accord and fortunately for us there are plenty to choose from in the area.

Yesterday we went to clothes shopping and I bought a whole whack of new things to wear. Pants, shirts, shoes, even a belt! It’s very exciting. The new shoes I love – they’re slip-on leathers that looks nice and feel great. I’m wearing them today.

I have lots of photos to upload this week so stay tuned to the gallery! Now that I have consistent Internet access at home (and I can connect to the server from work), there should be more frequent updates in this space.

We’re back online here at the new homestead. It’s such a relief to have Internet access again. Stay tuned for more posts!

A short postscript on my previous post: what this means implicitly is that this server will be offline until we get Internet access again. I hope it won’t be more than 10 days. I’ll post in the meantime on my other blog. I got an email from Livejournal this morning saying that my paid account was expiring soon. I’ll have to renew.

Well seeing as I’m not sure if this server will be online after the weekend, I should update on the status of this blog.

September has been a fantastic month for traffic. I’ve had more than 3700 unique visitors, up from 300 in August. Most of the traffic is because of the Ken Jennings-related posts that I made earlier this month linking to Jason’s site.

I recently had a shout-out on Dana Blankenhorn’s blog because I have him on my links list on the side of this page. He talked about my Last Casino post. I should let him know that I am indeed planning on pitching my reality show idea to the networks and look for me next fall!

My Map24 post from last week made it to Scoble’s linkblog on Friday though I’m not sure how many people saw it due to the volume of links that are on that site. It was still neat to be seen on there.

I’ve also seen a decent amount of traffic from pinging a couple of Accordion Guy’s posts. His recent PSA is probably more true than I’d like to admit.

Finally, James kindly linked to my post about First Daughter, concurring with me that Mr. Cranky does give some scathing reviews. He continues to talk about Total Recall which I must admit I enjoy from time-to-time despite its implausibility. There are some definitive Arnold lines in there and it’s too good to pass up on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Remember how on Friday I mused about the possibility of having Kubrick as a theme for Wordpress? Well it’s been done. I installed it last night and have it working with the latest Wordpress code. I haven’t had a chance to integrate the threaded comments yet. Hopefully I’ll find some time for that tonight.

I just upgraded to the latest nightly build of Wordpress (though they’re not really “builds” so much as they’re a packaging of the PHP source files). I hadn’t updated in a while (since this day) and there were a few changes that I could see. The main problem right now is that when I upgrade I need to backup my current setup, move the new files and then replace certain files so that the site looks and behaves similarly. That can be challenging but I think I have all of the kinks worked out. One of the neat things that I see is the “Presentation” manager which lets you have different themes for your installation. I’m hoping that eventually Kubrick (which I love) will be a theme (or even the default theme).

I’ve talked about comment spam before and about once a week I get a bunch of comments that need moderating. It’s a trivial task and so far I haven’t had any false positives or false negatives. The moderation capabilities of Wordpress are truly great. I have to laugh at this comment spam though:

I have always looked for a possibility to find information as quick as I can. Now there is the internet. And I really appreciate people like you who take their chance in such an excellent way to give an impression on certain topics. Thanks for having me here.

[Link to some random casino site]

It makes me feel good that the spammers find me such a great resource “on certain topics”.

I’ve decided to use a plugin for Wordpress that allows for Threaded Comments (capitals are required). It was fairly easy to integrate with the Kubrick theme that I’ve installed on here.

If I have some time tonight I’m going to try and have the Kubrick comment form with the Threaded Comments feature because I like the look of that comment form over the plugin’s version.

So what does this allow for? Basically you can now respond to individual comments and have a threaded conversation as opposed to having just a flat conversation where the comments jump from one thread to another. If I ever get more commenters then this might make a difference. For now it’s just more convenient and nicer-looking to me.

I’ve decided to include a bunch of links that I frequently visit to the sidebar of this blog. Mostly it’s a subset of my feed list on Bloglines but at least it’ll give visitors to this site an idea of what I like to read. So go explore these linked sites! They’re well worth your while.

I decided to upgrade my Wordpress installation to 1.3-alpha-2 (or the latest nightly build). I don’t see much harm in running this code – the worst that could happen is that it loses data and since I’ve been keeping backups lately it should be ok. I had a little difficulty getting everything working properly with my Kubrick layout but I think we’re back up and running successfully now. I like the new options and capabilities of Wordpress 1.3 and I look forward to seeing it roll out in final release soon!

Last night I had my first experience with comment spam in this space. I checked my mail around 11 o’clock and found that I had 34 new comments here. Now at first I was surprised because the most comments I think I’ve ever received on any post was 10 and I didn’t think that what I wrote yesterday was that interesting. I then looked at what the comments were and they were all spam. Advertising online casinos or business grants or government grants. Fortunately I’m using Wordpress so all but two of the comments were waiting for my moderation and didn’t appear on the site. I quickly bulk deleted the comments and updated my moderation expression list to catch the two stragglers next time.

I think I made the right choice with Wordpress. As Matt details in this post, the comment features alone make it worthwhile. I’m looking forward to the 1.3 release because it looks to push the envelope even further and reduce the presence of comment spam on my site to a negligible amount (hopefully). I’ve seen MovableType sites complain endlessly about the presence of these spam comments, even if they have MT Blacklist installed. It’s really too bad that people find it worthwhile to create scripts that spam like this. I guess for some, money rules all.

I’ve decided to license the content here under a Creative Commons license. I’ve been thinking of doing this for quite a while now. I started reading my (autographed!) copy of Lawrence Lessig’s book, The Future Of Ideas this week and it has spurned me to formally define how I want my content to be protected. Basically this is what you’re allowed to do:

You are free:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work


• to make derivative works

Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must give the original author credit. Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

• For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.


• Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Consider me a part of the commons though it’s dubious how creative I can be.

I think one of the next steps that I’m going to make is creating a proper “favicon” for this site. Currently I have the MediaWiki “W” as the icon and that was mainly because MediaWiki was complaining (i.e. giving a lot of 404 errors) about not being able to find the icon file. However a big black “W” doesn’t really represent me in any way. I don’t really have any ideas of yet as to what I would want to have as my icon. I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

I was reading Matt’s blog this morning and noticed that he linked to a new template for Wordpress. Intrigued, I checked it out and liked the look. I was becoming disenchanted with the old design (a vast change from my enthusiasm two months ago). I downloaded the zip file, carefully read the instructions and went about integrating this new design, named Kubrick, into this blog. Since I don’t have the blog installed on the document root there were some changes that needed to be made to eliminate the 404 errors but I think I have everything fixed now.

I suppose the next step will be to customize the look to fit what I have in my creative head. I like how Michael included the Photoshop file because if I were so inclined, it would be rather easy to change the look completely. Also the modularity of the template jives well with my programming background.

One thing that this template makes glaringly obvious though is the time required to create a page. If you look at the bottom it tells you how long it takes to process. The main page takes about 24 seconds right now and that is an absolutely dreadful time. Compared to Matt’s page (0.3 seconds for the main page) or Michael’s page (6 seconds), my server is terrible. This I already knew but it will serve as a constant reminder until I get a new machine (soon I’m hoping). Oh man how nice it would be to be able to serve a webpage in under one second.

I’m in the habit of trackbacking myself when it’s appropriate. If I link to a past post on this site then I’ll also trackback it so that if someone were to view the original post alone, they’d know that there was also discussion in the future relevant to that post. Beginning this morning with this post, my internal trackbacks weren’t working. The software said that they were working but I wasn’t seeing any actual trackbacks. I tried pinging my site using an external tool and that worked fine and my trackbacks out of this domain worked fine too. So what was the problem? Well as I alluded to in my update post this morning, the DNS servers for Rogers haven’t recognized the change in IP address for www.theinflux.com. So the trackbacks that I was sending out to this site were getting lost because the server can’t find the IP address that was previously associated here. While I wait for the DNS server to update I’ve added a map to my hosts file so that internal trackbacks stay internal to this network. No external queries should be required.

I’m not sure why but I feel like someone who pries when I look at my webserver stats in real-time. I find it fascinating how people browse around the material on this server. I also like analyzing the day’s stats (prepared by awstats) when I wake up. It’s interesting to me how the stats change day-to-day. There aren’t many people who reach this site via a search engine but that’s primarily because I’m constructed my robots.txt file to restrict most of the content (except for this blog). It’s mostly direct links from my other blog or via trackbacks that I’ve put on other blogs around the Internet.

I know I’m not the only one who does this either. Mel wrote a fine piece about web stats yesterday. It seems that Typepad provides a much more thorough analysis of visitors than awstats does however so she can get a much better view into the people reading her material.

Last week I posted about Ken Jennings, Jeopardy player extraordinaire. In that post I linked to this amusing post on Jason Kottke’s site. I also did a trackback on the post and thus was listed at the side under the other trackbacks. I received a lot of referral traffic from Jason which is not surprising since he is one of the more widely-read blogs on the Internet. Also, as Hello, Typepad says, he is Mr. Google since his post about Ken Jennings is the #1 hit when you search for him on Google.

The traffic did level off somewhat until Jason posted an update on his last 100 posts. More referral traffic was directed my way as a result of people reading Jason’s original post about Ken Jennings. To get a sense of the popularity of his blog, I’ve received over 550 hits from people clicking directly from his post. Since I’m just an obscure blogger, I can imagine that the actual number of people reading that post (and not clicking on my link) is far higher.

I would imagine that the traffic will die down as Ken Jennings is forgotten until the show starts up again in September. For me, I’m just happy that my server has withstodd the traffic, as it’s not exactly the most reliable of machines.

Edit: Augie has a nice summary of why Ken Jennings is such a strong contestant.

This blog hasn’t been in existence for too long but I’ve had a few (very few) comments so far and over the weekend I had a comment on this post.

It’s not the comment so much as the identity of the commentor that intrigues me. I’m wondering how they found this space. I haven’t advertised this blog anywhere and even though I can’t possibly imagine that it’ll be possible to keep this space private, I’m still interested in hearing how my cover was so-called “blown” so-called “this” so-called “quickly“.

Tomorrow is the one-month anniversary of this space of mine and so far I’ve managed to write almost 20,000 words and have more than 80 posts. To me that’s impressive. I’m extremely happy with the Wordpress software and I hope to continue to diversify between this blog and my other one. It never hurts to write more and if people want to read what you write then that’s pure gravy on your chicken-fried steak.

As you may or may not know, I also maintain a blog on Livejournal (I’m chang8ling). Obviously I also have this blog, running Wordpress, which I’m quite happy with. Recently I’ve had a lot more posts here than on Livejournal mainly because I like the relative anonymity of this space and the features that I can’t do with a Livejournal blog, namely TrackBack. I have a feeling that more people will be reading this blog than the other one (well more people not on Livejournal that is) simply because I can easily let others know that I’m referencing what they write through a TrackBack.

So if you’re a reader of both sites (unlikely as of right now), I apologize if you see material twice. I don’t want to abandon my Livejournal account but I also want to build up a healthy archive of posts on this site too. I’m going to try and find a way to make the two blogs distinct but for now they will appear quite similar.

I’ve modified the look of this space this afternoon and I really like it. I’ve modified the layout found on Cowpimp Productions which seems to be based on the layout of Simple Bits. At first I wanted a wider body but the tiled image that makes up the background is of a certain size so I’ll have to modify it myself if I want something wider (I probably still do). This was my first try at modifying CSS files and I think it went really well. I’m nowhere near as proficient as the people at CSS Zen Garden (which is really amazing) but if I spent enough time I’m sure I’d get to be quite good.

Hi and welcome to my new blog. This is running Wordpress which seems to be incredibly easy to set up and maintain. I’ll be keeping my other blog located at Livejournal but I’m trying to consolidate all of my applications here now that I have my own domain name.