Richy's Random Ramblings » Net: Blogging

Blogging: New blog design v5?

Richy C. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:54:19 +0000

Well, this at least the 4th major redesign this blog has had (previous ones being: January 2005, August 2003, June 2003) and it’s the one I’ve spent least amount of time on, but looks the nicest in my opinion.

I’m using a combination of TheBuckMaker’s Aerodrome theme with the WPTouch iPhone theme providing the iPhone theming (with the compatibility being checked by using the How to emulate iPhone (Change user agent) in Safari and Firefox tips for testing on the desktop). I’m also utilising the Twitter for WordPress plugin to pull my @rchiswell twitter feed and SEO No Duplicate for search engine canonical links. I’m also using the WordPress plugins WP-PageNavi, Trackback Validator, Sociable and Chris Black’s digg widget.

Hopefully, not only has it provided easier access to the rest of my online presence, but it has also made the site a lot easier on the eye and helps you access the information you came here for quicker and easier (although feel free to read any of my ramblings which takes your fancy).

Influential Twitterer

Richy C. — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:45:15 +0000

It appears I’m as important as my ego has been telling me. I’ve been on Twitter less than 48 hours and already famous well-known people such as Robert Scoble, Martin Belam (aka Currybet), Chris Prillio, Danny Choo, The Planet (the web server company), Isabel Wang, Neil Turner, Katy Bairstow and even His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has joined my army of minions and are following and listening to my every word.

If all those famous names are following me, I’m obviously very important and you should be following me too (/me does mesmerising hand-waving movements).

Yes, I know some people may have setup an auto-follow system somehow, but my ego is telling me otherwise

xckd: Learning a new language

Richy C. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:52:06 +0000

xkcd

This comic on xkcd is quite relevant at the moment ~~Yes, I’m splitting up with my other half~~ – No, don’t panic K, I’m not really But she and I were watching Firefly over the weekend (10 out of 14 episodes done: big pity they cancelled it) and we did find it annoying that we didn’t understand the Chinese language in it: and we know at nearly the big “three oh”, we’re both going to find it difficult to learn a new language (especially since we would prefer to learn Japanese or Mandarin/Cantonese) as our brains have “solidified”.. Shame!

Anybody got any tips for learning totally new languages when you are a bit old in the tooth? Neither of us know any other languages (apart from several computer languages and very basic French: but those don’t count)…

Blogging: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Richy C. — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:41:12 +0000

Ok, no lies, but last months blogging stats.

I currently have 763 posts (14 during September) and 2,410 comments (only 8 of those during September) with 436,819 spam comments caught by Akismet (a further 70,298 were caught by Spam Karma before that) since my last install.

Since I seem to have conflicting information from my stats systems, I’ll put the data in a table:

Item/Source	Google Analytics	AwStats	Webalizer
Unique Visitors	3,287	6,785	10,799 -”Total Unique Sites”
Visits	3,424	46,744	73,298
Page Views	4,426	81,673	125,511
Average pageviews	1.29	6.88	n/a
Bandwidth usage	n/a	2.45Gb	2.67Gb

And now for the top 5 visitor locations – it’s amazing that the 3 different stats programs gave different top 5 results: 9 different countries were in the top five:

Item/Source		Google Analytics	AwStats	Webalizer
Visitors	UK	2. 32.56% visits	4. 2121 pages	3. 0.68% hits
	US	1. 43.08% visits	1. 47,195 pages	2. 3.34% hits
	Canada	3. 3.68% visits	5. 1415 pages	11. 0.02% hits
	Australia	4. 2.75% visits	6. 1004 pages	9. 0.08% hits
	Germany	5. 1.55% visits	9. 673 pages	16. 0.01% hits
	India	6. 1.08% visits	21.93 pages
	Sweden	10. 0.58% visits	3. 11,201 pages	4. 0.51% hits
	Unknown	38. 0.15% visits	2. 12,654 pages	1. 94.48% hits
	Mexico	37. 0.18% visits	37.11 pages	5. 0.23% hits

But what browsers do my visitors use? I’m a bit disappointed not to see ArcWeb or Fresco in this list:

Item/Source		Google Analytics	AwStats
Internet Explorer		69.86% – 2,392 visits	33% – 43,760 hits
	9.0	0.04% – 1 visit	0% – 15 hits
	7.0	37.54% – 898 visits	13.5% – 17,871 hits
	6.0	61.87% – 1,480 visits	19% – 25,276 hits
	5.5	0.29% – 7 visits	0.1% – 164 hits
Firefox		24.53% – 840 visits	20.2% – 26,756 hits
	2.0.0.7	26.31% – 221 visits	2.4% – 3,248 hits
	2.0.0.6	58.10% – 488 visits	6.5% – 8,608 hits
	1.5.0.12	2.98% – 25 visits	0.3% – 451 hits
	2.0.0.4	2.14% – 18 visits	0.1% – 245 hits
Safari		2.69% – 92 visits	1.3% – 1,724 hits
Opera		1.34% – 46 visits	0.6% – 845
Mozilla		0.96% – 33 visits	1.1% – 1,503 hits
Netscape		0.23% – 8 visits	0.2% – 363 hits
Camino		0.15% – 5 visits	0% – 89 hits
Konqueror		0.12% – 4 visits	0% – 66 hits
Playstation 3		0.03% – 1 visit	n/a
Sony Ericsson		0.03% – 1 visit	13 hits

I think that’s enough stats for now.

Blog: Now With Speech

Richy C. — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 16:02:52 +0000

You may notice the new “Listen” option on the blog entries – this is because I’ve just signed up with Talkr which converts (via a computer) my blog entries to audio so you can now listen to my blog on your iPod or similar if you wanted to.

Listen to ANY blog

Talkr: Letting blogs speak for themselves.

Hope it comes in handy!

Sorry for not blogging much

Richy C. — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:46:11 +0000

Meh – sorry my blogging rate has decreased quite dramatically the last two weeks: a combination of workload, tiredness and problems with the Mozilla Firefox browser have prevented me from blogging when I wanted to.

What problem with Firefox? Well, I rebooted and then Firefox wouldn’t stay open for more than 2 pages at a time without crashing (sometimes it wouldn’t even load without crashing). Tried loading Firefox in safe mode (with extensions disabled) and same problem. So how did I fix it? Basically, I somehow managed to track it down to an update with Real Player pushed out via Google Updater which had a dodgy Firefox/RealPlayer integration which caused Firefox to die. Uninstall Real Player and it worked perfectly.

Only problem I have had to date with Google Updater though.

I am Richy of Borg….

Richy C. — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 14:35:28 +0000

Yes, I’ve finally joined the collective and have been assimiliated into the Rupert Murdoch Borg being known as “Myspace”. I can be found at the URL (sigh, since myspace readers may find their way back to here – that’s an “internet address” people!), http://www.myspace.com/119685198 . Nice and catchy isn’t it. I’m now just a number….

Gotta go – a big white weather balloon is chasing me….

Yes, I’m back!

Richy C. — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 21:00:29 +0000

After nearly 1.5 years, I’m back blogging – this time with a WordPress driven blog.

Why did I stop blogging?

Well, mainly due to spam. The comment spam got to such a level that every time I wanted to blog, I had to spend the time deleting spam instead. This took the “fun” out of it as well.

Hopefully WordPress (with a large number of plugins) will help keep the spam under control unlike the old version of Movable Type I had installed.

For the record, when I logged into my MovableType blog, there were over 17,500 comments! After deleting all the spam, I was left with under 3,000 comments!

Blogging: Redesign completed

Richy C. — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 15:17:27 +0000

Well, I’ve now finished the redesign of my blog (I think it’s the 3rd redesign so far) . It makes use of PHP, Javascript and CSS – and looks best in Mozilla Firefox (the little “date tabs”/”comments left” etc have rounded corners in Firefox instead of just being square tabs). The HTML (at least of the index page) validates and the CSS nearly validates (just the -moz specific attributes fail the validation – the W3C CSS validator should skip over ‘vendor specific tags’).

I’ve now reinstalled MT Refsearch (which performs a search on the site if a visitor comes from a major search engine), CacheRemote (to cache my blogroll: I did want to get it working with Gravatar – but they seem to be having DNS issues at the moment), MT Blacklist (to help block out spam), MT Macro (for the little smilies and Amazon links), and finally Neil Turner’s PHP TypeKey system.

Now just to get another site designed….

Blogging: Blog So Far

Richy C. — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:51:59 +0000

Right, I’ve done a bit of redesign work (as you may have noticed) with a nice little picture of yours truly and a blueish fixed header, “fluid” three column layout and without using pixel-specific font size (so it should resize simply in any web browser). Still a bit of work to do on the columns though, but it’s coming along nicely – however, I’m back at work in the next 8 hours, so I just hope I can find some time to finish this off (then I’ve got another couple of sites to build after that).

Anyway – I’m having trouble getting Brad Choate’s “MTMacro” plugin working with Movable Type 3.14 – with Smarty template errors when ever I use or : is there a “secret” setting I’m missing?