Tag Archives: thisweblog

Dark Grey Lines after viewing this blog

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I changed the layout of my blog a little to be “darker”:

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Unfortunately… when you now read some lines, you get some weird after effect: if you then look around you, you see black/grey horizontal lines all around you *grin*. I once read something about this effect a long time ago in some cognitive science class but I forgot even the name. This is what the world look like after reading a longer article:

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How can I solve this?

Update: over at ux.stackechange.com it was advised to change the background

and… yes it is only noticeable when reading a post from top to bottom, I noticed it when I read my latest post http://edward.de.leau.net/the-everyone-is-related-social-network-year-6-20110721.html and got a little bit sick while reading it (from the effects grin).

Omkat tijd Zomer 2011

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Je zag het al: de website ziet er niet uit :) (maar geen zorgen je kunt overal bij). Het komt omdat ik ergens halverwege ben blijven steken met wat probeerseltjes en de meeste nog niet eens “aangezet” heb.  Ik moet er nog veel aan doen maar ik kom er niet aan toe. Ik was aan het spelen met de nieuwe custom post formats maar ik moet nog styles voor alle typen maken en bovendien de bestaande 10.000 postings opnieuw doorgaan om te kijken of het enigzins matcht.

Ik ben nog aan het na denken over wat zaken. Ik zit erover te denken om weer eens  een eigen thema in elkaar te gaan steken. Om eindelijk eens de complete lijst  van requirements van WordPress te gaan koppelen met de daadwerkelijke implementatie van hoe de site uit ziet.

Grofweg zit ik er aan te denken om al mijn requirements als custom post types in elkaar te gaan steken “requirement”. Als je niet weet wat requirements zijn: zie wikipedia.

Dat zou betekenen dat ik op meta niveau in mijn eigen weblog al mijn requirements (waarschijnlijk honderden of zelfs duizenden) opgeslagen heb. Normaliter zijn die die dan vrij tekst achtig zoals use cases, user stories maar ook non functional requirements. Maar deze keer wil ik ze zo implementeren dat ze een soort directe link hebben met settings in een admin screen. Het wordt dus een soort WordPress theme-language. Met die WordPress theme language kun je dan een thema “opschrijven”.

Voor mensen die WordPress gebruiken voor hun “living” (Ik was op de WordPress meetup Amersfoort (zie http://www.webtaurus.nl/amersfoort-webdesign/ , http://wordcampnl.org/meetups/2011/03/24/wordpress-meetup-amersfoort-dinsdag-10-mei/, http://www.burobjorn.nl/blog/2011/05/12/wordpress-meetup-amersfoort/ en het was leuk om allerlei mensen te zien die met WordPress bezig waren) kan het dan betekenen dat een soort core van functionaliteit bestaat uit checklijsten die je met een klant kunt doornemen en die direct implementeerbaar zijn. Voor mensen die theme’s schrijven is er and een zeer smarte checklist waarover geen discussie kan bestaan. Het kan een soort accelerator zijn.

Bij een eerdere plugin heb ik al een laagje bovenop de settings.api  geschreven waarbij op alle functionaliteit in-gehooked kan worden. D.w.z. als je bijvoorbeeld een “gebruiker kan eigen favicon kiezen” functionaliteit hebt dan is dit 1 class: favicon. In die class zit dan zowel de admin functionaliteit als de front-end functionaliteit. bovendien zit in die class ook het help scherm in de admin als ook de validatie regels voor de form in de backend enz… Ik heb die code dus en er kunnen nog wel wat laagjes omheen. Ik geloof sterk in het toevoegen van lagen. Ik heb gemerkt dan het toevoegen van lagen heel creatief werkt. Plotseling ontstaan er weer allerlei nieuwe ideeen nadat je een laag hebt toegevoegd. Het wordt wel ingewikkelder natuurlijk. Een van die ideeen komt nu hieruit voor: als alles een plugin is. Dan kan er een taxonomie van plugins gemaakt worden die gekoppeld is aan een functionele of non functionele beschrijving van die plugin. Die beschrijving kan heel smart gemaakt worden omdat de plugin al bestaat. De complete uitdraai van die functionele smart beschrijvingen van de gehele set aan plugins leest als een boek met ja/nee checkboxen. Die zijn gekoppeld aan custom post types om te publiceren op meta niveau van wat de requirements zijn als een soort levend boek, mogelijk met code. Het wordt dus een thema met een meta thema maar dan met duidelijke taxonomie.

Ik heb geen idee hoe ver ik hier mee kom. Het wordt erg ingewikkeld omdat requirements weer genest zijn. etc.

Een ander iets is integratie. Mijn delicious perl script is gestopt omdat delicious in een build up fase is na de overname. Deed me denken om eindelijk eens een aparte server op te zetten die louter gaat dienen als integratie punt naar deze  weblog. D.w.z. deze server haalt allerlei content binnen en pompt die via of XMLRPC of via php calls of direct op de database binnen op dit weblog en mogelijk andere. Het voordeel daarvan is, is dat er geen load is op de site t.b.v. integratie en dat ik vanaf die server ook naar meerdere punten data kan verspreiden. Ik moet daar dan wat code voor schrijven. Theoretisch hoeft dat geen gui te hebben maar… als ik er ooit een mooi WordPress verhaal over wil maken zou het mooi zijn als ik dat ook een WordPress install maak. Dat maakt het eindresultaat meer buzzable.
Voor die server moet ik dus plugins schrijven die kunnen integreren met een ERG VEEL websites. Ik zat daar ook aan te denken omdat mijn favicon plugin toch een erg zware load op de CPU veroorzaakt alsmede een gigantische request database. Zou mooi zijn om die extern van een blog te laten runnen en dan mogelijk te kunnen splitten qua load. D.w.z. enkele plugins op 1 integratie server en weer andere integratie plugins op een andere integratie server. Zeker in het cloud tijdperk kun je dan snel groeien en snel een nieuwe integratie server omhoog gooien met een gedeelde memcache server.

Ook qua hosting zit ik een beetje aan mijn limiet. Ik ben nog aan het nadenken wat mijn volgende stap is voor edward.de.leau.net ik ben er nog niet helemaal uit.

Daarnaast is het prive blogging concept nog wel interessant. Iemand start met louter ‘tags’ omdat hij geen idee heeft waarover hij gaat bloggen. Na een postje of 5000 zijn er trends in die tags die kunnen leiden tot verdere categorizatie of sub blogs e.d. Ik heb hier ook nog wat ideeen over. Daarnaast het enterprise blogging, ook hier is nog een hele markt open voor vertical solutions bovenop WordPress.

Gelukkig heb ik de luxe om er lekker lang over na te denken en dan pas te starten met coderen :)

Cha Cha Leau.co

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http://leau.co ,  … wat zal ik er mee doen? (waarschijnlijk iets geks) (en hoogstwaarschijnlijk over een paar jaar nog niets).

I’m blogging and twittering on my LAN: bye bye!

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A new phase has entered for my blogging habits which I will enter in the about section of this weblog. It will greatly reduce the amount of activity on this weblog. Anything I would post out there, I will now post in here :) (of course there will be some postings upcoming e.g. to inform friends and family about the birth of our new son!).

For the past 10 years I have been blogging (also personal stuff) on this public weblog. But now that my LAN and homeserver environment start to become a little bit more mature in terms of infrastructure and connected software solutions I’m diverting most of my blogging to within my household. I think this is what will happen next in terms of home computing: improving households.

So what’s the use of blogging within your own household? Is that nuts? That’s the same question which was asked about why someone should create a “homepage” or “why someone should start a blog” 10 years ago (when I started it). I will expand some more in the about section when I get to it (todo). But the moment to start making the split between the cloud and the household is now (and of course thinking of the integration of it). I may start removing public stuff and migrate them internally.

tip: if you want to move this way also:

  1. Learn about your tools: these days programming and “computer” technology are needed like a hammer and a screwdriver. Its not about the tools itself but having the opportunity to hang a painting on the wall without asking someone to do it for you. They belong in your base set of skills.
  2. tools: buy a server for within your household (any including a NAS Linux box)
  3. tools: install a webserver on it
  4. tools: install a wiki on it (dokuwiki is great) and just add pages: finance overview pages, topics on your suppliers, handy addresses, car info, kids info, discussions and so on. ANYTHING, gradually.
  5. tools: install other handy stuff like a central shared agenda and a central todo list and any other household applications out of the zillions out there
  6. tools: install WordPress with the P2 theme (using sqlite instead of mysql is great on nas box) and hack into it that any post that is labeled “todo” ends up in the sidebar as todo item. Since it auto updates it functions as a home messaging system its great when adding beeps to it and stuff. Learn about the WordPress taxonomies and what you can do with it. A tag cloud is great and interlinkages with your home wiki are very handy.
  7. functionality: Interlink everything and add a lot of content: your thoughts, your finance, your agenda, your contacts, your home automation system, your music, your movies, your books, your comics, your things to sell, your backups, your business ideas, your hopes and desires, your correspondence, your important documents, your pin codes, your disconnected social network, your garden information, your recipes, your manuals and inventory and devices and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on.

In that way you will be prepared for the next step.

Slowie de Slowie Bloggie

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This weblog is slow again. Since the admin pages are still blazingly fast it is probably something somewhere on the front end. Either I coded something very inefficient (probably), a plugin is going haywire (could be) or something in one of the widgets takes ages (could be).

So while you are waiting… I’m going to perform some tests.

update: it’s strange but as soon as I delete the cache manually (i cant delete it via the webinterface) everything goes fast again. I also notice some bot filling the cache with pages seconds after I empty it.

So… either the bad bot is ruining this or there is a cache plugin problem with maybe a specific post or page.

update 2: some minutes after i deleted the cache the problem occured again. The cache fills up amazingly quick with a lot of pages due to the bot. I think it is the Googlebot but I’m not sure. Maybe if there are too many pages in the cache that the system freezes up, seems strange but it could be. So I temporarily turned off the cache. In the past I tried other caches like supercache but I noticed that caused an immediate high peek in my cpu and memory usage on the server, it basically sky rocketed probably due to the large amount of pages.

Hmm…?

All WordPress RSS Feeds Hosted and Managed?

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imageWordPress offers feeds on anything (posts, tag pages, categories, and so on, and so on). On my blog alone it must be over 15.000 different feeds or more that are available, so I don’t have a clue what’s going on with my feeds and … I don’t want to host them from within this application, It’s really something that I typically would want to place at a 3rd party.

A while ago Samir wrote a long blog article on my question , (you should really read this  first to understand the problem). Today I found Phil Hollows answered in the comments on that blog post:

FYI FeedBlitz has launched a FeedBurner alternative (see http://tinyurl.com/dh6b7x ). We now have an OPML import facility which we haven’t tested against 9,000 feeds (largest import todate – just under 100) but it sounds like a good challenge in terms of pushing the system a little (or a lot – we’ll see).

Edward, if you’re still interested in a service please email me and we’ll figure out how to get you going phil@feedblitz.com or tweet me @phollows. You’ll need an OPML file of your feeds.

Best,

Phil Hollows
Founder, FeedBlitz.
http://www.feedblitz.com

Which you can find here: http://blog.feedblitz.com/2009/03/feedburner-alternative-blitz-your-rss.html

And now I am thinking…hmmm.. I probably would want to auto-redirect people who click on the rss feed link in WordPress on e.g. http://edward.de.leau.net/about/science (and a couple of thousand other dynamic created tags) to the new location, furthermore the new link should be auto inserted in the header of the page. It really will be a heavy thing I guess.

I think it should be more some kind of WP API to hosted RSS service provider API, so I don’t know if creating a static OPML would be the ideal thing, then again, it’s better than anything currently around.

Now, before I contact Phil I probably first have to dive into this service, let’s do that first.

Ad Spots on the Blog and Open-X

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Update: This WAS a boring post on ads on my blog but transformed in installing Open-X.

I installed Open-X it is one of the packages which can be choosen to be installed out-of-the-box at Dreamhost and was already for a long time on my wishlist. I now installed it at my hoster: MediaTemple.

Open-X is interesting since it can manage ads, advertisers, campaigns and so on. After installing it and playing with a little (I have yet to dive into the extensive docs and forums) it is even more interesting than I thought. I’m not even that interested in “making big money online” but actually more interested in the state of the tools and the terminology in the field.

I’ll postpone the ad thing until I have time to dive further in Open-X (but as you can see, the ad above is served from my open-X server, I will first have to work my way through utilizing it) (so it is a test-ad or… test-ed :) ).

In short:

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Both the left and the right are websites. The orange thing is a special website: it retrieves banners from websites and it places those banners on websites

Open-X is the software tool for that.

It can manage clients & campaigns on the one hand and can manage publishers and zones on the other hand.

Zones are defined locations within a publishers website.

With this software package you can not only manage your own customer ads on your own websites but you actually start a business as the intermediar between websites.

Effectively this could make you an ad company, the only you need todo is to collect companies who want to place ads on the one hand and to find publishers who want to place the ad, which goes in my long list on how to conquer the world.

My shared hosting neighbors

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The site OnSameHost displays sites sharing the same IP address. For me it was handy to look up who is sharing my shared hosting webspace.

Well, here are the neighbours:

- http://kahnconsultinginc.com/ (KCI is the advisor of choice for Fortune 500 and government organizations.)
- http://www.fasterpccleanclean.com/ (lots of info on anti spyware, nice site)
- http://www.chanelryan.com/ (This is my neighbour :) I think I will go lend some sugar)

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- http://www.follicare.com/ (to Address All Major Causes of Hair Loss)
- http://www.huntclubchicago.com/ (the hunt club restaurant Chicago)
- http://www.krista-ayne.net/ (Another nice neighbor !)

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- http://www.kristopherdukes.com/ (fashion writer blog, pretty well known but of course that is completely out of my field of knowledge)
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- http://www.kryptonproduction.com/ (an advertising production company from Portugal)
- http://www.naturecity.com (pretty nice shop with nature products)
- http://ridgewoodprep.com/ (Ridgewood Preparatory School)
- www.sarahlandon.com (Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour – The Movie site)
- http://www.tobymac.com/ (winterjam 9 tour)

Well just as in real life there is no telling who your neighbors will be but as far as I can see this weblog lives in a nice street :)

Year End Statistics of this WebLog

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With the help of the Year-End-Statistics Plugin:

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I seem to have posted about the same amount of postings as in the previous years. I have done about 700 postings this year. That is about 2 for each day. 

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When I switched to the new domain I basically didn’t take along the comments. Maybe one day when I am retired I will find some smart way to migrate the old comments. There are about 500 comments in 2008. In general I try to avoid postings which lead to much discussion. Private ones excluded.
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I seem to be using more words and more words and more words :) It basically means less links and more content on all kind of rubbish of course. An average post was 2300 characters.

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The total amount of characters typed was uhm… more than 1.5 million characters this year. If I would get 1 cent for each keypress I would be millionaire.
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I have proven to be able to write popular posts that could hit the frontpage of Digg and Reddit so this year no populair stuff for merely getting visitors (well…) which means less pageviews as last year: about 370.000 pageviews and 270.000 unique visitors. Another factor resulting in less pageviews was that I moved certain parts to other sites e.g. to http://populair.eu and that I left the frontpage for a long time under construction for an internal project.

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Visitors come from all over the world. From 121 countries/territories in the last month. Most visitors come from the US (66.666 this year) and from the Netherlands (42.444 this year). On average a vistitor visits 1.5 page. People from Congo – Kinshasa clicked on average the most pages: 4. Followed by Afghanistan and Zimbabwe
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People from the above countries spend the longest time on average on the site ! :)

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11% of the visitors are regulars, 88% are newcomers. To bring another ratio to that I would have to spend much more time on this blog which I am not planning to.

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2311 visitors visited this site more than 50 times and about 311 more than 200 times. Basically I count that as frequent audience though I have absolutely no idea who these people are apart from some friends who comment on postings.

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53% used Firefox, 40% used Internet Explorer (followed by safari, opera, mozilla, chrome, camino, conquerer, netscape and some minor minor ones)

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87% uses Windows, 9% uses Mac, 3% uses Linux. Surprisingly there is a whole batch new kind of OS: iPhone, IPod, Playstation 3, Symbian OS, Danger Hiptop and 8 visitors used SunOS :)

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Visitors use really ALL kind of screen resolutions, especially together with the different kind of browsers on all kind of devices. And yes 800×600 is still common.

And unto 2009…. the year of the Grande Recession!

The xmas layout 2008 is live

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Some fiddling with Xara, a Jquery menu which unfortunately first loads full screen and then shrinks (bit annoying), the snow I used last year (the pretty famous snowstorm) and we have the first steps into a nice xmas layout :)

Categorize your Weblog like DMOZ does

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With some fiddling I made a start of creating some sort of DMOZ based hierarchy. It clearly shows me the areas I’m active in and which one I totally disregard on this blog.

  • There is nothing for kids and teens
  • There is nothing about Sports
  • There is however “regional” stuff but I never tagged it like that, which is a good idea, to add a “regional tag”

It also shows some subcategories which I now have as main tag based roots. These should really go their respective place in the hierarchy.

So I now went from:

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to this:

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Which is, of course, only one of the first steps to the final hierarchy. How I’m going to display it at the end will probably follow somewhere in 2009.

At least it now has some sort of dmoz structure (although the content is not touched yet).

Blog splitsen tussen nederlands en engels

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brainstorm

Een andere doelstelling voor 2009 is het splitsen van de weblog in nederlands en engels. Er zijn zat plugins voor te krijgen en er is genoeg te lezen op het Internet over hoe anderen het gedaan hebben.

Hmmm… ik kan oftewel meerdere verschillende weblog installaties maken, wellicht met MU of iets gaan doen met automatische vertaling van postings.

Ik kan ook statische pagina’s maken met dynamische content die ik uit verschillende hoeken trek e.g. ik kan natuurlijk ook hard uit de WordPress database gegevens trekken zonder dat ik zo nodig de WordPress code nodig heb om dat voor me te doen. De teksten en “de loop” zouden in principe al genoeg moeten zijn.

Ik moet er eens over nadenken.

Ik dan dan bijvoorbeeld een travel.leau.net en een reizen.leau.net maken. Met op beide reis informatie en op beiden verschillende handige links specifiek voor nederland of “werelds”.

Maar in verband met de maintenance van de sites (backups, updates, doorvoeren van generieke wijzigingen) is het veel handiger (voor een persoon met maar 1 uur tijd per week) om maar een installatie te hebben.

Voor sommige onderwerpen zoals “thisweblog” maakt het eigenlijk niet uit of het nou engels of nederlands is voor de site zelf maar wel voor de feed.

De algemene feed (kans dat je deze leest) wordt dan overbodig, ik zou die dan statisch kunnen maken met de link naar oftewel de nederlandse site of de engelse site of deze gewoon kunnen gebruiken voor algemene informatie en verder niet meer vullen met content.

How to place the tags on my site

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this is a brainstorm posting.

I am thinking on where and how to place the tags on my site (I will skip the whole technical implementation explanation of enabling the relation between tags and manage this from my wordpress installation).

I don’t think I want to create a pulldown menu, I don’t believe people want to click.

I think it should be a 2 dimensional structure since a screen is also 2 dimensional. So simply: 1 header (which is the main tag portal) and then directly under it all tag portals that fall under that category.

If one then clicks through to that sub tag portal one again gets the sub tags of that specific tag.

Please remind yourself that a tag is never only a tag within one hierarchy, that same tag is also within other hierarchies. BUT the terminology “related” is another concept.

So I think there are either tag hierarchies horizontally and there are tag hierarchies vertically. While the vertical relations are “related” (which is actually on a post level but could be calculated for a complete tag page) the horizontal relations are more difficult to visualize. I could think of concepts like “primary relation” and so on but I don’t want to introduce that in the model unless really necessary.

tag <—-> relation <—–> tag

Hmmm… now that I think of it, it might well be that all the horizontal “related” tag relations are in fact automatically already in the model as soon as the vertical relations are defined, however, visualizing them is impossible.

if “xara” falls under “software” but also under “graphics” then “totalcommander” will be shown related under the “software” hierarchy. However if one just calls the single Xara page then there is no telling if that user is looking for Xara in the concept of “graphics” or “Xara” in the concept of “software”. The only way to determine that would be to log his visiting path or maybe even the search words with which he entered the site via e.g. google or stumbleupon.

I’ll have to think about how to visualize these relations. It should be a very simple click thing for endusers, so no advanced java relation applets between words, I don’t believe anyone will click that.

Where I want to head to is obviously do not do anything “in code” or having to define anything. The system should calculate automatically the 2 dimensional structure to show and, i hope, including outgoing links a la dmoz.

I think it might lead to having to tag each specific url mentioned in this blog. Whereafter they would automatically appear in the sidebar of the specific tag page.

Another reason for transforming a blog in a tag based portal

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A while ago I wrote here that 2 kinds of sites seem to be popular:

1. websites that focus on a specific market or niche
2. websites that give an overview of websites

By transforming your weblog in a tag based portal you will provide both:

- you can blog on a detail level on a certain topic/tag/niche
- with the structure behind it and the link directory in the sidebar you provide the overview of sites