turbulence ahead
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 spotaneously 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.
wit and wisdom of David Thorne
I'm not sure if it was Doug or Michael who first pointed me towards David Thorne's 27bslash6 site but his latest exchange of correspondence with Michael Harding of the South Austrailan police is hilarious and had me in stitches.
I've read the article four times now and am still smiling. You can't really quote sentences in isolation to pay justice to the brilliant humour so just enjoy the full article. The guy is a truly brilliant writer.
taking a back seat
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.
fun with keywords
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
meaningless annual stats review
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)