blogging: February 2008 Archives
The Irish blog awards are on tomorrow night, so I'd like to take this chance to wish all the shortlisted nominees the best of luck.
Adrian Weckler's column this week doesn't mention facebook, but he does cover EULAs and the demise of HD DVDs. (I can't seem to find either article on the SBPost site)
Argos has opened in Carlow, so I'm going to see how bad the traffic is shortly. Hopefully the bypass will help take some of the traffic away from the town, as the commercial centres must be suffering. I'm currently in the market for DVD storage solutions and a new TV stand, so I'll be heading to a few of the shops around the town this afternoon to see what's available and at what price.
AJ has an interesting post about security. His focus is on what the search engines are indexing and highlights some common mistakes.
Tonight is the Oscars. I'd love to stay up and watch them live, but I've got to be awake for work in the morning! The Academy is offering some really cool posters again this year including one celebrating 80 years of best picture. It won't be shipping until after the ceremony (obviously)
While working on one of my quieter blogs I realised that Google Analytics wasn't installed BUT the Google Analytics web interface happily told me that it was. Moral of the story - don't trust them!
I'd love to be able to report some of the odd sales and support queries we get, but this week we've had one that I can mention:
- caller number 1 who wins the prize for odd sales query of the month wanted to know if we ran an escort service
- caller number 2 wanted to apply for a technical role and asked what a PDF was. And no - their native language was English!
Argos has opened in Carlow, so I'm going to see how bad the traffic is shortly. Hopefully the bypass will help take some of the traffic away from the town, as the commercial centres must be suffering. I'm currently in the market for DVD storage solutions and a new TV stand, so I'll be heading to a few of the shops around the town this afternoon to see what's available and at what price.
AJ has an interesting post about security. His focus is on what the search engines are indexing and highlights some common mistakes.
Tonight is the Oscars. I'd love to stay up and watch them live, but I've got to be awake for work in the morning! The Academy is offering some really cool posters again this year including one celebrating 80 years of best picture. It won't be shipping until after the ceremony (obviously)
While working on one of my quieter blogs I realised that Google Analytics wasn't installed BUT the Google Analytics web interface happily told me that it was. Moral of the story - don't trust them!
I'd love to be able to report some of the odd sales and support queries we get, but this week we've had one that I can mention:
- caller number 1 who wins the prize for odd sales query of the month wanted to know if we ran an escort service
- caller number 2 wanted to apply for a technical role and asked what a PDF was. And no - their native language was English!
I like checking FeedBurner statistics from time to time. Some might call this navel gazing, but I am interested in seeing what is going on in terms of RSS subscriber figures etc., This is especially important for the company blog.
So I was quite upset this evening to discover that the "all time" statistics option is no longer available in my Feedburner control panel.
I checked their official forums and was able to confirm that it's gone, though nobody from FeedBurner seems to be willing to offer an explanation as yet.
There is, however, still a way of getting the data out from Feedburner.
When you login to your account select the feed you are interested in.
You should see an Export option on the menu bar to the left and you can choose to download as either Excel format or CSV.
Once you've exported the data from FeedBurner you can then use it with any software you like to generate pretty (or not so pretty) graphs etc.,
It will be interesting to see how this change pans out.
Is this yet another case of a Google acquisition turning sour?
So are there any alternatives out there to FeedBurner?
So I was quite upset this evening to discover that the "all time" statistics option is no longer available in my Feedburner control panel.
I checked their official forums and was able to confirm that it's gone, though nobody from FeedBurner seems to be willing to offer an explanation as yet.
There is, however, still a way of getting the data out from Feedburner.
When you login to your account select the feed you are interested in.
You should see an Export option on the menu bar to the left and you can choose to download as either Excel format or CSV.
Once you've exported the data from FeedBurner you can then use it with any software you like to generate pretty (or not so pretty) graphs etc.,
It will be interesting to see how this change pans out.
Is this yet another case of a Google acquisition turning sour?
So are there any alternatives out there to FeedBurner?
Mark Carey is one of the more active MovableType plugin developers. Some of his plugin have to be simply categorised as "cool". There's no other word that sums them up aptly, though I'm sure you could find plenty if you tried.
His latest plugin release is a stroke of genius - Wordpress Interface for Movable Type
It does pretty much what it says "on the tin" and replaces the MovableType "classic" interface with one that not only looks and feels like Wordpress, but also emulates a lot of the behaviour (from a UI perspective).
You can give it a whirl here - username: demo pass: demo
Screenshots and more details on his original post
He may have done it almost as a joke, but it also shows how incredibly flexible Movable Type can be.
Evil thought - you could replace someone's WP install with this and they probably wouldn't even notice!
His latest plugin release is a stroke of genius - Wordpress Interface for Movable Type
It does pretty much what it says "on the tin" and replaces the MovableType "classic" interface with one that not only looks and feels like Wordpress, but also emulates a lot of the behaviour (from a UI perspective).
You can give it a whirl here - username: demo pass: demo
Screenshots and more details on his original post
He may have done it almost as a joke, but it also shows how incredibly flexible Movable Type can be.
Evil thought - you could replace someone's WP install with this and they probably wouldn't even notice!
Much to my amazement not only was this blog shortlisted for the awards under "Best Technology Blog", but the company blog was shortlisted under the "Best Business Blog" category.
Best of luck to all the nominees and maybe I'll see you on the night - if not I'm sure someone from the Blacknight crew will be in attendance....
The person who deserves all the credit, however, is Mr Mulley himself. I honestly don't know how he finds the time or the energy to get involved with so many things!
On a slight aside, Eoghan did an interesting analysis of the slightly longer list of nominees comparing page "weight". It makes for interesting reading, especially if you're in a country with not so impressive broadband coverage (ie. Ireland - in case that was too subtle!).
Of course the problem is trying to strike the balance.
Images and other multimedia can brighten up a site (or blog) quite a bit.
I've been using images in my posts here more and more over the last year or so and the company blog gets an interesting (IMHO) variety of stock photos added to most of the posts. The problem is when the extras start to detract from the user experience. Javascript maybe enabled by most people, but do you have to have THAT much scripting to render a simple page with a bit of text? Probably not...
Best of luck to all the nominees and maybe I'll see you on the night - if not I'm sure someone from the Blacknight crew will be in attendance....
The person who deserves all the credit, however, is Mr Mulley himself. I honestly don't know how he finds the time or the energy to get involved with so many things!
On a slight aside, Eoghan did an interesting analysis of the slightly longer list of nominees comparing page "weight". It makes for interesting reading, especially if you're in a country with not so impressive broadband coverage (ie. Ireland - in case that was too subtle!).
Of course the problem is trying to strike the balance.
Images and other multimedia can brighten up a site (or blog) quite a bit.
I've been using images in my posts here more and more over the last year or so and the company blog gets an interesting (IMHO) variety of stock photos added to most of the posts. The problem is when the extras start to detract from the user experience. Javascript maybe enabled by most people, but do you have to have THAT much scripting to render a simple page with a bit of text? Probably not...
Byrne Reese is a really cool guy who seems to come up with cool stuff on a regular basis.
He's just released a small plugin for Movable Type that will bring "pingback" to Movable Type and make the transition from Wordpress that bit easier for users.
Very cool!
(It's implemented here as of 5 minutes ago, but may explode!)
He's just released a small plugin for Movable Type that will bring "pingback" to Movable Type and make the transition from Wordpress that bit easier for users.
Very cool!
(It's implemented here as of 5 minutes ago, but may explode!)
I've got a very long todo list this week - keep an eye on the company blog for updates!
I see Stephen McCarron from Hosting365 has finally started a blog. Will he keep it up??
It seems that LetsHost don't like anyone to mention the fact that they use slow servers in the US... Mention it and they cut you off! How charming! If we cut off every single person who said "nasty" things about us we'd be out of business!!
Seemingly you need to be a Postgrad to read this site!
I see Stephen McCarron from Hosting365 has finally started a blog. Will he keep it up??
It seems that LetsHost don't like anyone to mention the fact that they use slow servers in the US... Mention it and they cut you off! How charming! If we cut off every single person who said "nasty" things about us we'd be out of business!!
Seemingly you need to be a Postgrad to read this site!
