Posts in category "blogging"

One of my favourite and regular UK bloggers, Jonathan Beckett, had gone rather quiet recently so I assumed he must have moved blogging platform the the Nth time, gone on holiday or possibly his feed was screwed without his knowledge so I sent him a polite email asking ‘Dead or just resting ?' and he informed me he'd intentionally changed blog address without telling anyone.

I think this sudden, unannounced, abrupt loss of service is an excellent idea for all bloggers - it's a bit like writing ‘I love small, fresh, juicy satsumas' buried deep in the middle of a technical report to be delivered to a client or pausing for 5 minutes, with your face in your hands, during a presentation at Oracle Open World. It helps to focus the mind and check whether anyone is actually reading or listening.

In fact, this method of social network suicide followed by starting again from zero and organic gardening is a strategy I have used more than once during my blogging lifetime. The only difference is my stats genuinely reverted to zero but I wasn't inundated with curious Tweets, scribbling on my Facebook wall, IM's and concerned email messages enquiring about my state of mind and asking for details of the new blog feed.

I was greeted a wall of silence, pierced only by a solitary email: ‘I simply adore Clementines'.

StatusNet names all releases after R.E.M. songs so heres my idea for future Habari release codenames. Its a well kept secret that all Habari developers and users adore that popular beat combo - The National.

The Habari development roadmap in full

• 0.7 - October 2010 -Developer Release 1 (‘10/10/10')
• 0.8 - January 2011 (‘Pay For Me')
• 0.8.1 - February 2011 (‘Murder me Rachel')
• 0.9 - June 2011 (‘Lit Up')
• 0.9.1 - August 2015 (‘Slipping Husband' aka ‘Slipping Release')
• 0.9.2 - November 2015 (‘Mr. November')
• 0.9.3 - January 2016 (‘The Geese of Beverley Road')
• 0.9.3.1 - January 2016 (‘Mistaken for Joomla')
• 0.9.3.2.1.3(Alpha 3, RC1) - January 2016 (‘Start a War')
• 0.9.4 - March 2017 (‘Afraid of Everyone')
• 0.9.5 April 2017 (‘Your Patches Were a Kindness')
• 0.9.9 - June 2017 (‘Conversation 1,000,016' aka ‘Taxonomy revisited')
• 1.0 (Final) - Thursday December 25 2019 (‘Bloodbuzz Ohio')

Apart from a short-lived crisis of confidence - after losing a Draft post, I spontaneously migrated this blog to Wordpress as an interim hop before completing 99% of a full blown migration to Django-Mingus which I then immediately discarded - I have used Habari as my preferred blogging platform for two and a half years.

It's been a while since the last major Habari release (0.6) but, because I run the latest 0.7 development code (using SubVersion), the lengthy gap and absence of a formal 0.7 release didn't particularly bother me.

However, the 0.6.4 release is pretty dated now and lots of new features have been added and bugs fixed in the intervening 18 months. Also, I think there are potential developers who are keen to get the latest and greatest version of Habari so I was pleased to see that the Habari project released a '0.7 Developer Release' yesterday.

Occasionally, I have posted stuff on Posterous and Tumblr because I didn't really feel it ‘belonged on this blog, it wasn't worthy or it was a throwaway one-liner and not a proper blog post. As I subsequently deleted my Posterous account (as I didn't like their negative campaigning against Tumblr), some of this content has now been lost forever.

I think, from now on, I will post everything on this blog where it's under my control.

I am about to embark on migrating this blog from WordPress to Django-Mingus because I simply can't stand the WordPress Compose Post interface (if you can call it that).

This exciting move comes less than two weeks after I spontaneously decided to ditch Habari after the lack of a functional 'Auto-Save' plugin caused me to lose 17 minutes work.

You may say 'I'm reading this in my preferred RSS reader so please don't bother me with such minutiae'.

However, when I migrated from Habari to WordPress a month ago, I flooded you both with my most recent posts duplicated so this is just prior warning that similar oddness may well occur as I endeavour to hook up the new blog feed to FeedBurner.

This may or may not signal a period of blog hopping and I'd like to say this will may trigger a series of interesting posts about which blogging platforms I considered and discarded and top tips on planning and executing an efficient blog migration.

One of the reasons for the reduced blogging frequency, Kenneth, is that I spend every waking hour devoting time to the thorny problem of monetizing this humble blog. Previously, I experimented with Adsense but sadly the revenue stream was insufficient to enable me to retire.

I am now pleased to announce the results of my research and contemplations.

Do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Be patient. Wait. Don't get frustrated. Just wait.

Sooner or later, you will receive an email promising you riches and wealth beyond your wildest dreams.

In return for posting a link to a Web site, I am going to receive a goodie bag containing the following:

• 2 Packs of Love Hearts
• 1 Pack of Chewits
• 1 Pack of Black Jacks
• 1 Pack of Refreshers
• 1 Millions Tube
• 1 Pack of Giant Parma Violets
• 1 Chunky Drumstick Lolly
• 3 Packets of Fizz Wiz
• 1 Marshmallow Flump
• 1 Pack of White Mice or 1 Pack of White Chocolate Buttons
• 2 Snap Crackle Chewbars
• 2 Fruity Pops
• 1 Piece of Bubbaloo cola gum
• 2 Fruit Fizzers

'The Retro Sweets Pile comes to you packaged in a clear bag.'

...which is very important as if the goods were packaged in a brown bag, people might think your were receiving sex aids through the post.

Prepare yourselves for a bunch of unobtrusive links to mindless, desperate UK based SEO agencies appearing shortly. Prepare yourself for a bunch of anecdotes about tooth decay and late onset diabetes.

Rich Manalang is taking a back seat and suspending some but not all of his online activities which is an interesting exercise I will follow as it unfolds. Or, rather I won't, because he won't be blogging about it. I suppose I could always email him at work.

I suspect Google Buzz was the final nail in his Web coffin. It certainly was for me. The privacy issues, the multiple, loud and prolonged orgasms from the Technorati, the same old avatars gradually showing up in my 'Friends' list quickly followed by the immediate same sense of 'Emperors New Clothes' and the inevitable post coital cigarette: 'How was it for you, darling ?'

Rich's decision to take a step back interests me as in the past, on at least two occasions, I have gone slightly further and committed Web 2.0 suicide. This entailed spontaneously and maliciously terminating a bunch of accounts on FriendFeed, Tumblr, LinkedIn and elsewhere. Of course, it didn't last and in due course I miraculously resurrected myself - but after slightly longer than three days.

What I find slightly odd about Rich's decision is that he will preserve 'IM and email' - I presume he means in order to work but maybe he includes personal use too - but he then goes on to include Google Reader as he finds 'GR adds order to the chaos'. I agree completely although I think the experiment would be much more interesting if he ditched GR and idle Web browsing for that matter too.

I suspect if I embarked on a similar exercise I would revert to scanning my small set of favoured Web sites. I also suspect, and it sounds slightly counter intuitive, that I would find lots more to blog about. Of course, Rich can't blog more because blogging is also suspended during this hiatus period. I also find this odd as he states outputs (5%) are much more valuable, but greatly outnumbered by, endless, mindless consumption (95%) so it would be interesting to see whether his outputs increase as a result of his self-imposed exile.

Some of the varied and bizarre keyword searches leading visitors to this site merely confirm this blog is the ramblings of a confused madman. Here is a selection from the start of the year

• 'dyslexic blog' - curiously spelled correctly.
• 'crucifixion blog' - listen United are in debt and suffering a dip in form but don't do anything hasty now.
• 'why linux will never' - come on, you simply can't leave me dangling like that.
• 'breasts chessington' - hoping your mates didn't publish that photo of you, on the log flume, flashing your assets.
• 'brightside software enterprises friendorfoe' - stealth marketing finally starts to pay off.
• 'famous captive animals' - Skippy (the bush kangaroo) and Lassie.
• 'handsworth exoctic escort' - there's absolutely nothing exotic about Handsworth, trust me.
• 'hoax messages on friends reunited' - the ghost of the cruel, heartless Janet Oldsgate strikes again.
• 'how can i get back my lost virginity' - please send an international money order for £250 to PO Box 729.
• 'life has dealt me with a cruel card' - don't tell me, hang on. Was it the '8 of Diamonds' ?
• 'my car keeps cutting out and the bonnet is steaming' - stop blogging immediately and call The AA.
• 'pubsubhubbub is a lot easier than it sounds' - easy for you to say.
• 'the balls of allah explosive underpants' - priceless. What a superlative name for a blog/album/house/dog !
• 'what do you think is the most important decision in our life' - Will these underpants last another day ?
• 'fucking overlapping partitions when im installing linux' - language, Timothy. Nice assumption that the swear word would be included in relevant posts

That was the year that was. Statistics for 2009 with the comparative numbers for 2008 in brackets.

Summary¶

• 29,901 visits (43,732)
• 39,545 page views (63,095)
• 1.32 pages per visit (1.44)
• Average time on site - 48 seconds (54 secs)
• 91.2% new visits (90.6%)

Search Engines¶

• Google - 22,627 (32,830)
• Yahoo - 381 (704)
• Bing - 168 (N/A)
• AOL - 128 (229)
• Ask - 115 (195)

Referrers¶

• identi.ca - 575 (229)
• avc.com - 222 (348) Disqus post linked by Fred Wilson
• google.com - 216 (primarily Reader)
• oracle-base.com - 169 (225)
• disqus.com - 101

Platform¶

• Windows - 81.4% (85.7%)
• Macintosh - 11.9% (10.3%)
• Linux - 5.1% (3.26%)
• iPhone - 0.6% (0.2%)
• iPod - 0.2%
• Symbian, Android, PS3 - < 1%

Browsers¶

• IE - 42.5% (56.5%)
• Firefox - 41.4% (33.6%)
• Safari - 7.2% (6.2%)
• Chrome - 5.4% (N/A)
• Opera - 1.6% (1.3%)

Content¶

• Blog - 3,990
• Review of Virgin Media V+ box - 4,666 (June 2007)
• Virgin Media V+ upgrade - 1,871 (March 2007)
• High Definition TV on Virgin Media V+ - 1,378 (December 2007)
• intelligent automatic follow/block script for Twitter - 1,303 (April 2008)
• pictures of a Virgin Media V+ box - 1,273 (June 2007)
• 25 reasons you should use Disqus - 1,270 (April 2008)
• how I ditched iTunes and started living with Foobar 2000 - 810 (October 2009)
• Beware of Dixons Tax Free shopping - 791 (October 2005)
• Posterous leveraging Tumblr themes - 729 (September 2009)

Posts¶

• 79 (94)

This conversation didn't actually take place but it could have.

Last week, friends and I were discussing µblogging in the pub. Well not µblogging exactly but two ladies had recently discovered Facebook and were talking about the pros and cons of this wonderful social network.

One lady said: ‘Oh and another thing - I really don't like the ‘Jenny is…' status update. I just don't get it.'

The other lady replied ‘Yeah - that bit is stupid. I am hardly going to write down ‘Marilyn is…just off to Asda for the weekend shop'.

I then interjected: ‘But you don't have to put down minutiae after the ‘is…' part'. You can put anything. For example, I might choose to write

‘Norman is….seriously considering jacking his job in, pursuing his dream and opening a record shop'.

They looked at me as though as I was mad. My mate sighed and said ‘Right - who's up for another ?'

Jenny stared at me as though I had two heads and said ‘What ? You're going to open a record shop ? In these tense and difficult times. Are you serious ?'