Category: Net: Blogging

Well, the nomination stage of the 2003 Bloggies has finished and now it’s time to vote!

Yes, I know this appears to be old news already, but in all fairness, I did see the voting page before I left for work this morning (I in fact checked it before I went to bed, but it hadn’t yet been updated) – but I didn’t have time in the morning to actually blog about it.

Much to my disgust and disappointment, I didn’t make it into the final voting stage. Drat 🙁 Oh well, there’s next year to hope for.

So – who did I vote for and why?

63days (2months and 2days) since starting this blog, I have now reached entry number 200 (this one!). Woo! Go me! 🙂 It took me 31 days to reach post 100 – so I’m currently blogging at the rate of 100 entries every 31 days – and, I work it out that by the time this blog is a year old I would have made 1,100 entries. Wow. I was actually hoping I could have hit the 200th post mark at the end of 2002, but, alas, it wasn’t to be.

Neil, on the other hand, takes around 45 days to do 100 entries – so I should, in theory, overtake him at some point…

A few boring statistics follow (mainly so I can look back in X number of units time and think “ahhh….”).

It seems (according to Robyn who heard it off Bill) that it’s time for the 2003 Bloggies – the third annual weblog awards.

People have got until the 12th of January 3pm GMT to place their nominations – so if you can think of a nomination – make it! I nominated Blogrolling (which provides the ‘recently updated blogroll’ on my site) and Bloglet (which I’m trying out) for the category of “Best weblog directory or update monitor”, MovableType (which I use to maintain this blog) for “Best Web Application For Weblogs”, Google Weblog for “Best Computers Or Technology Weblog” and a few others (whose nomination is between me and the Bloggies for now).

Go ahead – nominate the blogs you like (my blog, hint hint, could be nominated for “Best European Or African Weblog”, “Best Kept Secret Weblog” – even though I’m getting around 200 visitors a day – and the “Best New Weblog” category). Just enter your nominations, your email address and away you go!

Ok, since it’s the end of the month (and, indeed, the end of the year) I may as well do a ‘Statistics Summary’ of my blog again.

During December I had a total of 58,312 hits (up from 12,658 last month) or 7,395 visits (up from 1,838) – that averages out at 1881 hits/238 visits a day (up from 666 hits and 96 visits). This month has seen 651Mb of traffic to the 175 entries and 47 comments (up from 121Mb traffic to 89 entries and 16 comments last month). I was actually hoping to hit the 200th post/entry mark tonight (hence why I’ve been blogging quite a bit the past few days) – but I doubt I’ll be able to think of another 24 decent posts in the next 3.5hours.

To satisfy Neil‘s curiosity, here’s how my blog works…

Basically, it runs on the Movable Type blog content management system (which uses MySQL and Perl) on a Debian Linux server running the Apache web server. The web pages it outputs are made into PHP files (using Apache’s mod_mime extension with .htaccess functionality to force the .html extension files to be interpreted as PHP).

I’ve used PHP to help split the site down into several extra “template” files – therefore if I want to make a change to the title bar of the site or to the column which runs down the side – then I just change the appropriate template file, “rebuild” it and the entire site is dynamically re-updated.

That’s the basics: now onto the more complicated stuff…