Or don’t. That’s cool too. The chances of you missing anything vital to your well-being is slim, unless your well-being depends on what I have for lunch. I do usually twitter if I’ve posted anything substantial here though.
I was in two minds as to whether or not to put one of those twitter widgets over on the left sidebar here that lists your last few tweets. Decided that the place was cluttered enough already.
Update: Changed the date on this to get it back on the front page for a bit!
A couple of you have gotten in touch today telling me that your virus checkers have been going nuts this morning when visiting this site. As I hadn’t changed anything overnight, I had a bit of a panic attack.
What it is (as I discovered after about 30 minutes of terror) is that the Kaspersky anti-virus software did an update overnight, which had a teeny mistake in it that gives an alarm for any website that uses google adsense (which is an awful lot of us). This is described over on the Kaspersky forum.
It is a false positive, and will be getting fixed by them as soon as they can get around to it. I apologise for any fright Kaspersky users may have had on visiting my site.
The Alexa Ranking theoretically determines how popular your website is, out of all the websites in the world. It does this by extrapolating from the behaviour of users who have the Alexa plug-in installed to their browsers. For instance, this humble stop along the internet superhighway is currently the 520,865th most popular by Alexa’s rating, though it fluctuates fairly wildly. That sounds pretty awful, but there are a heck of a lot of websites out there, so it actually ain’t bad. Because I am something of a numbers geek, I watch it leap about, seemingly independent of how many visitors I actually get, and have watched the ranking of some other sites I frequent, and I’ve reached a startling conclusion. Well, not literally startling. I just said that to make this sound more interesting. Alexa ratings aren’t exactly the sort of things that startle anyone, unless perhaps you are the sort of person that is shocked when a rather large yet unimportant number gets a little larger or smaller. I am not such a person, and I’ll wager neither are you.
It turns out that the best way to raise your Alexa ranking is simply to make a post telling people how to raise their Alexa ranking, and then thousands of people come in from the search engines to find out how. Because they all have the Alexa widget installed to raise their own page ranking, it also raises yours. (If you really want to go for broke, make a website all about SEO, Alexa, and Adsense. You’ll be in the top 10,000 before teatime.)
Now, some might suggest that this is a fatal flaw in how Alexa rankings are worked out. It means that the websites frequented most by people who care about such silly things as Alexa rating have inflated figures, rendering the ranking system mostly meaningless. In particular, websites dedicated to Search Engine Optimisation and such things frequently have ridiculously high rankings.
Some might even say that anyone who used such a method to raise their Alexa rank would be a terrible person. Or a very silly one, considering how little meaning the Alexa Rank actually has to 99.9% of web users. Possibly even both terrible AND silly. Some might also declare that it is good that I have warned of this danger, so that we might all be alert for such outrageous scampery.
Myself, I choose to break into a chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “A Paradox”!
Let’s sing along! There are pirates in it too! Pirates make everything better.
Alright, it’s not really a paradox. It’s more an out of control positive feedback loop, but I don’t know any songs about that.
I’m about to upgrade the theme this site uses. Anything could happen in the next half hour! The newer version should hopefully fix some pesky bugs that have been annoying me for a while.
I’ll try not to break anything.
Update: OK, that seems to have gone fairly painlessly. Had to tweak a bit of php to get things back to how I like them. The good news is that the new version of the theme has proper results for the “related posts” section, as opposed to random jumble, so I haven’t had to remove that section like I did previously.
The bad news is that it seems to have made my beautiful googlesearch blocks go a bit odd, with grey boxes around the individual parts. I can live with that for now, but will try to bring them back in to line.
Update 2: turns out the related posts code was still iffy with the new release of the theme, so I have tried to integrate another related posts plugin into it instead. I am horrible at php, but it seem, after about 20 tries, to look about right.
I don’t know if this is just me, but in the last couple of months I have seen an extreme drop in the amount of email spam I receive. It’s not being swallowed by the spam-filter in my email software. It’s simply not getting to my computer in the first place. Perhaps it is being filtered out by ISPs, but I am more inclined to think that they’ve given up sending it to me.
At around the same time-frame that I saw the decrease in email spam, this happened to the comment spam here:
It suggests to me a change in strategy by the world’s spamhauses. However, of the thousands of spam comments this blog received in the last month, only one managed to escape Akismet’s awesome filtering powers (And was duly deleted by me). The minuscule cost per spam-comment allows the spammers to cast their net extremely wide, but even so, I must confess that I don’t really understand how comment-spam can be an economically viable method of attracting customers. Instead of posting billions of gibberish comments a day, they would do a lot better to put that effort into writing in coherent sentences.
A friend asked me a couple of days ago why some people have avatars in my comment sections, and some folks don’t. A fine question!
This site uses Gravatars, globally recognised avatars. These are avatar pictures tied to the email address you enter in the comment box, and a great many sites use them now. By setting up your gravatar, your picture will follow you around the internet with no effort at all!
Just a brief update. I’m moving house tomorrow, and still have some packing to finish!
From my logs, I can see that a lot of folks have been having trouble with the reCaptcha device I was using to prevent spam. Losing valid comments makes me sad, so I’ve decided to deactivate that for now, and try a spam filter instead. We’ll see how that works out.
While I pack, I’ll see if I can come up with something to say about the western leader’s response to the NIE that doesn’t involve strings of expletives.
A little later… I had a sudden flash of inspiration! Brought on by Atrios’ constant invocation of the King of Spain. I’m a genius, I tell you!
Thursday morning: The removal men will be here in an hour. Time to dismantle my PC. Cable gets installed at my new place tomorrow. See you on the flip side!
I’ve had a couple of emails about the site looking a bit strange since I switched to the new theme.
The sidebars on the right are *supposed* to be next to eachother. In certain circumstances Internet Explorer likes to stack them instead. Harmless enough, though it can make the page rather longer than it needs to be. IE also has the text input box for the comment recaptcha device slightly shifted over. Don’t worry, it might look a bit disturbing, but it still works! These days, it’s rather difficult to get a complex site to look identical in all search engines. Well, unless you’re a php wizard, which I am most certainly not.
Anyhows, the long and short of it is that this site works best in Firefox, though I do try to keep it neat looking in all browsers. It’s also the browser I use myself mostly, as it has the exceptionally useful firebug plugin, which makes debugging web pages massively more simple than it used to be.
What is your avatar supposed to be? I can make out some ears!
It’s Barney! George W Bush’s long-suffering Scottish Terrier. Hate the dog-owner, love the dog.
Karl Rove once stated that “Barney is a lump”. Applying usual method of deciphering anything Rove says, we can assume that Barney is in fact a lovable ball of energy. And five times better a human-being than Rove or his master will ever be.
I’m trying out a new theme. It has a lot more features than Tarski, and has an extra column, which is quite handy. I’m not sure if it doesn’t seem a little cluttered though.
What do you think? If this one doesn’t work out I can go back to the old one.
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