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 or what I think of the latest MMO outrage! I do usually tweet if I’ve posted anything substantial here though.
Update: Changed the date on this to get it back on the front page for a bit!
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No trackbacksWordPress 3 came out today, and I’ve just backed up and upgraded the site. So far as I can tell, everything is working fine, but I apologise in advance for any weirdness that raises its head.
2 commentsNo trackbacksThe observant amongst you may have noticed another button mysteriously appear in my overcrowded sidebar. It’s a Flattr button, and with any luck you’ll start seeing such buttons pop up all around the internet. It’s something of an experiment, but it is a rather innovative way for folks to reward content creators such as bloggers, musicians, and podcasters for their work without having to fiddle about with rewarding them individually. It also neatly avoids the creator feeling awkward or embarrassed about asking for donations. Invites to the beta version of Flattr just started going out, and I was lucky enough to be in the first few, so I figured I might as well give it a try and see how it goes. Here’s how it works:
To receive cake, you also have to be willing to share some cake with others. I’m looking forward to being able to give a little slice of cake to any of my fellow bloggers who makes me smile or think.
In a weird coincidence today, two of my favourite blogs have mentioned that they pay $20 a month for hosting. Both dear old Lum, and Gordon over at We Fly Spitfires. It made me wonder how many other bloggers out there are paying that sort of cash for their sites.
For most of my hosting I use Arvixe, who are vastly cheaper (I pay, I think, $30 for 6 months), and offer unlimited bandwidth. They’ve also displayed the unusual property of actually having someone I can talk to over there who understands what I’m saying, which is always handy.
Anyhows, if you’re interested in paying less for your hosting, you could do a lot worse than trying Arvixe. Full disclosure: That is an affiliate link, meaning that I get money if someone did decide to sign up with them through it. That would be quite lovely, but there are, of course, plenty of other low cost hosts out there.
Ahoy, dear readers.
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.
Write a commentNo trackbacksThe 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.
Write a commentNo trackbacksI’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.
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