Posts in category "blogging"

Norman Brightside, a little known UK blogger from the London (near England), was reeling yesterday from a cataclysmic, violent (yet unwanted) backlash of media inspired attention from Web 2.0 types in response to the impromptu and inadvertent release of 1367 GB of search data (including IP addresses, referrer data, explicit search terms and agent identifiers) from the Web server farm that hosts his incredibly popular blog.

Brightside is an IT genius who had developed his Web server tracking technology using advanced AI techniques to include the screen name of the AOL user, the room they were actually surfing from, what they were actually thinking, the strength of each individual key press together with the facial expression used when typing in search terms.

Data Mining analysts have been busily crunching the data continuously for 37 hours using Oracle Mega-Grid technology and a bank of powerful Cray Supercomputers. Details have been forwarded to Interpol and, in a curious twist, Blackburn Football Club, who are now being linked with Ashley Cole.

Norman's mum, Norma Jean was distraught:

'Oh I can't believe our stupid son, Norman, has brought shame, embarrassment and pestilence upon the Brightside family name. I knew he had a blog but how could he have been so stupid ?'

Although the data was de-personalised, analysts predicted that simple business intelligence and sophisticated cryptography techniques (1='A', 2='B' etc) would quickly reveal the end user issuing each individual search query, who could then be subject to prosecution, hanging and the immediate loss of his Telewest subscription.

Norman Brightside has gone into hiding and withdrawn the data sets from all public Web sites. He issued the following short press release from The Priory Clinic, London.

'I'm really, really sorry. I don't know what came over me. I simply didn't think my blog had that much traffic. I think there must be a problem with the WordPress statistics which seem to be under-reporting. My only defence is that my error might have been caused by the excessive heat in my hotel room. I have carefully backed up and deleted all the data now.'

However, high bandwidth mirror sites, located all around the world, are thought to still contain multiple copies of the full, unadulterated search data.

And finally, if you don't want to risk imprisonment, death or a call from the NSA, here is that earth shattering search data published in full.

65.214.44.29 - - [07/Aug/2006:01:20:17 +0100] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1"
304 106 "Why didn't United buy Own Hargreaves" "Mozilla/5.0"
72.30.98.202 - - [07/Aug/2006:01:21:57 +0100] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1"
304 106 "Who is Norman Brightside" "Opera 9.0 Beta 2"

After two months and two days, the music has stopped, the theme rotation carousel has travelled full circle and finally come to a halt.

WordPress.com offers a total of 40 themes (37 when I started) and I have experimented and laboriously captured screenshots of every single one.

I have tried out all the WP themes as they became available but it was interesting to live with each theme for a day or so.

My personal favourites were:

Andreas04 - I don't normally like three column themes but this was an notable exception. Light - simple, effective theme. If only it was a little wider.

Regulus - still probably my favourite (just) which rather negates the point of the whole pointless exercise. The header image clinches it. You never forget your first love.

Rubric - great looking theme with focus on the text but I feel Lorelle has made this theme her own.

Sandbox - a building block for DIY enthusiasts.

White As Milk - clean, minimalist look but narrow text.

And my hall of shame:

Banana Smoothie - not for everyone but undeniably very distinctive. Flower Power - not sure why this theme only uses half the screen.

Sweet Blossoms - too much colour, not enough screen.

I guess my perfect theme would be a two column, minimalist theme with an emphasis on the article text. In fact, Scott's Wallick's plaintxt theme is pretty close to perfection.

I guess I always could shell out 15 USD and build it myself on WordPress using the recently launched custom CSS.

Alternatively, I could just pay up and get my own hosted WordPress blog with complete control over everything.

So, review the Flickr set and cast your vote now.

RSS readers - don't sneer from the sidelines but tell us all what RSS reader you use and why.

The Sandbox theme recently added to WordPress is pleasant enough but the original themes developed by Scott Wallick from plaintxt.org are absolutely superb.

Clean, white, minimalist, striking, understated and refreshingly different from the thousands of themes out there.

I was enjoying a scan through the archives of Andrew Sherman's incisive, witty (and occasionally downright scary) blog when I suddenly thought Hey Andrew - where are the links ?'

Then I realised. The hyperlinks are actually embedded in the title which is exactly where they should be.

At last. After 7 months, I have finally discovered something useful you can do in Blogger which is not (currently) supported in WordPress.

Finally. All that painstaking effort creating multiple splogs, scribbling my blog URL on whiteboards at every client I visit, commenting twice daily on the A listers, spamming the newsgroups and bribing people for inbound links has paid off.

This humble blog has finally broken through the 100,000 barrier.

Day 324. Technorati Rank: 96,498 (56 links from 32 sites)

Poor old Doug (a lowly 1,389,569) needs to pull his finger out. My life is complete. Almost.

Sshh. Please don't tell my therapist but BlogPulse matches the tone, content and links of this blog with Laura's Playground dedicated to 'Transsexual and Transgendered News'.

I think I need to put my favourite pink panties on and sit down with a cold drink.

One of the things I like about WordPress is the sense of community. Wordpress users (and developers) willingly help each other out on the support forums. There is also a FAQ with useful information for newcomers and experienced users alike.

You can find similar, related WordPress blogs of interest usings tags and you can also discover new material by examining the league tables of the most popular WordPress blogs, individual articles and the fastest growing blogs over on botd.wordpress.com.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw this humble blog nestling at No. 38 in the list of ‘Fastest Growing Blogs’.

My life is now complete. Almost.

Collin from that esteemed, well respected publication The Blog Review was kind enough to review this humble blog and raised the thorny question of an 'About' page. The absence of an 'About' page is one of Collin's pet hates and Lorelle also thinks they are very important.

While I agree that background information about the author may be interesting and contact details may be useful for establishing dialog that isn't suited for comments, I don't think that the lack of an 'About' page is necessarily a habit of an ineffectual blogger.

For example, let's build my new, shiny 'About' page by answering Lorelle's probing questions:

Who are you ? Norman Brightside (clearly a synonym so what's the point)

What do you do ? I am a technical consultant for Oracle Corporation and try to help people use Siebel and Oracle (read books) more effectively.

What are you talking about ? Look at my Categories or scan the archives. Funnily enough, customers often ask me the same question.

What will you be talking about ? Most likely the same subjects as I have talked about in the past. Subscribe to the feed if you care that much.

What gives you the right to talk about anything ? Absolutely nothing. This is purely my wooden crate in the corner of Hyde Park.

What are you doing here ? What do you mean - you weren't expecting me until tomorrow and there's no desk and computer for me.

Why are you doing it here ? Because publishing a book takes time and money.

Who the hell are you ? Now, now. Language, Lorelle.

And a couple of questions of my own:

Where are you ? London, near England. How can I contact you ? Comment. I can see your email address but no-one else can.

Maybe a fraction too late for Doug Burns (whose Blogger blog has been recently hijacked) but WordPress have just announced the availability of XML import/export utilities, primarily for switching between self-hosted and WordPress.com blogs but may also be useful for backing up your blog and facilitating other platform migrations.

Tempting, very tempting

My mailbox is bulging with letters from recent and occasional visitors worried that they may have missed some WordPress themes in the recent blitzkrieg of posts during the ongoing and exciting Theme rotation policy.

Worry ye not. I am meticulously capturing screen dumps of each theme in a Flickr photoset so the poll will be absolutely fair and equitable (and Regulus will win).

The current theme is Banana Smoothie. I wonder if coffee enthusiast and cocktail maker, Jon Emmons, might be voting for this one.