A few days ago, a major update for WordPress (the software that I use to maintain this blog) has been published: version 3.0 Thelonious
. I just finished the install, without any hiccups. I guess there won’t be many differences for you to notice… the only thing that I noticed is that the new WordPress default theme is not that unlikely to the theme that I came up with for this site (well, it does look more refined, but the basic elements like the header image, right-handed sidebar, and a larger default font are the same. That feels nice.
Posts Tagged ‘blog’
Updated to WordPress 3.0.
Monday, June 21st, 2010End of the egg counts & the absence of war.
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010I have been subscribed to a blog that presents George Orwell’s diary for almost two years now – it has been an interesting read so far mostly because of its quirkyness. The main thing Orwell wrote about in his diary were accounts of his gardening activity, with special attention being paid to the number of eggs laid by his hens. Slightly entertaining, particularly because of a whole lot of really funny reader comments on the ups and downs of Orwellian egg production.
Recently, things have changed. We are now in the summer of 1940 and Germany has attacked France. Britain is part of the war and the bombings begin. George Orwell provides us with sharp observations about how war somehow remains absent from the everyday lives that he witnesses and participates in. I definitely recommend subscribing to this weblog/historical diary.
Migration to WordPress.
Sunday, January 24th, 2010Since I got the job to set up a blog for someone else, and since it was decided that the blog should be done with WordPress, I started to play around with this blogging package a few days ago. To learn how to set things up and make modifications, I tried to replicate the style of my own blog, which is based on the very simple blosxom. One thing came to another and finally I tried to import all of my blosxom blog entries into the new WordPress database – and here we are! I decided to switch to WordPress because:
- it is maintained much more regularly,
- it is much more comfortable to use,
- it offers more and more useful plugins,
- I hope it will make it easier to keep off spam,
- it finally allowed me to make a tag cloud.
The latter can be marvelled at to the right. I am quite baffled at how closely the tag cloud represents those aspects of my life that I put into this blog in the course of the last six years. It will be interesting to see how the cloud develops in the future…
I decided against keeping the content in the same address location because of the cryptic cgi blabla that was part of the old address. Therefore I would like to ask you to update your bookmarks and feed readers to go to the new address: http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/frers/blog.
Some blog functions currently broken.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008Dear readers, please bear with me! The university that hosts this blog, Freie Universität Berlin, is currently shifting web services to a new server system. One of the neat side effets of this change is that now we can use PHP and MySQL goodies for the websites hosted by zedat, the university’s IT department. One of the bad side effects is that some things may be broken temporally. In the case of this blog, the archive, permanent links, and everything that does not appear on this front page is broken. My guess is that the new cgi script service does things differently when scripts want to generate dynamic web pages… I am confident that this problem will be resolved soon: the zedat team offers the best university IT service that I have had the pleasure to deal with. Stay tuned.
Say hello to my 100000th visitor.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Woot! After being online for more than six years, my website got the onehundredthousandth visitor. It’s been a while and quite a few things have happened during this time. A blog was added, the layout changed a bit here and there (mostly on the main home page) and quite a bit of video and text content was uploaded. Some of the changes to the website can be tracked in the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine.
Schöne Suche.
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008Heute hat jemand nach wer hat den Ozean erfunden gegoogelt und ist in diesem Blog gelandet. Sehr hübsch. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich es bedauern soll, die Antwort nicht zu wissen…
Mapping website visitors.
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
SiteMeter has started offering a view of recent website visitors a few months ago. A nice feature, which I sometimes check out. Today’s map is good enough to be shown. The criteria for good enough is: representative enough. Since only the last 100 visits are shown using a free SiteMeter account, it is difficult to capture the the breadth of the global distribution. The rarer visitors come from specific locations (Latin America and Australia are both pretty rare for me), the easier they fall out of the ‘last 100 visitors’ statistics.
In this map you see two things that are typical: visitors from the Islamic world (parts of Africa, the Middle East but most of them from Malaysia) who come to read my comparison of Ibn Khaldūn and Comte, and a substantial amount of visitors from North America. European visitors are mostly from Germany, but also from Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Scandinavia, the Baltic States and the other European countries.
Blog available again.
Thursday, August 25th, 2005To those of you who wondered what had happened: the zedat people performed a system update which oviously caused some kind of havoc on the generation of cgi scripts. Daniel notified me that the blog hasn’t been available since sometime yesterday. :O I notified zedat’s web admin and in the course of less than an hour the problem was fixed. That’s a good response time, I’d say. Thanks Daniel, thanks Phillip.
The beast in decline.
Friday, May 27th, 2005
On the diagram you can see a pretty average distribution of browsers visiting my site. Since the free account at SiteMeter only includes browser share statistics for the last 100 visits the variation can be pretty big. Firefox’s share has been increasing over the last few months, although it has been hovering around 20% for the last two months or so. The development which I watch most closely these days is the percentage of Internet Explorer 5.x users that are visiting this site. This has been steadily decreasing and is usually below 10%. What is even better: more than half of the IE 5.x share consists of Mac Internet Explorer versions that are much, much better at rendering according to standards (that is, their Tasman rendering engine keeps up with most of the CSS Level 1 code that I throw at it). This makes the actual share of Windows IE 5.x – a.k.a. the beast – using visitors something below 5%. That in turn means that I will soon stop supporting this browser and rely more heavily on using modern CSS to manage the layout of my page. I did a similar thing when I dropped support for Netscape 4.x versions several months ago. However, in that case I waited until the Netscape 4.x share dropped below 1%. Why do I handle things differently for Win IE 5.x and start dropping support at a share of about 5%? Because windows machines that are able to run IE 5.x are able to run Firefox well enough too. And they should run it because of the tons of security holes that are opened by browsing the web with this hideous beast of a browser.
The new background image in the main column of this blog is one visible step in the direction redesign and recoding will take – most of the work will remain invisible to those browsing the site. However, that work will enhance accessibility and standards compliance (and propably the search engine ranking too).
Finally a custom favicon.
Tuesday, May 24th, 2005Beginning with tomorrow’s nightly build my favorite web browser, Camino, will finally support displaying non-root-level favicons such as the one used for my homepage. Favicon? Yup. Favicons are the little icons displayed by all decent browsers in their respective address bars to the left of the web address.
To greet this change in an adequate way I have changed the code for my blog to support my custom favicon in the blog too. Hope you like it, even though I am totally not a designer.
Well visited and clicked at.
Friday, April 1st, 2005This month all records were broken: My website had almost 1500 visitors performing more than 2200 clicks on my site. Check out the development as shown by SiteMeter, which I am using to analyse the visits to my site:
Neat, isn’t it? Although I guess the trend as visible in this graph will not continue – April traditionally is a weak month traffic-wise.
A sigh of relief and (hopefully) the end of comment spam floods.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004Finally, finally. After some e-mail exchange with Tony Shadwick I got the blacklist modification of the writeback plugin working. Now I am able to block the posting of comments that contain certain keywords. A few minor oddities regarding my blacklist remain to be resolved, but even as it stands right now I had several hours free of new comment spam. Yes, I am talking about hours. If I would have been able to spend all the time that I invested in removing spam over the course of the last weeks into writing new entries this blog would have been a much more interesting place. Let’s hope the best for the future – until then: Thanks Tony and Doug!
Measures against comment spam implemented.
Saturday, November 6th, 2004Most of the time I spent on my blog during the last weeks has been spent removing comment spam. I thought that removing comment spam manually wouldn’t take up that much time but I was wrong. One argument against implementing an automatized solution to this problem was that they often block IP addresses or even ranges of IP addresses. This wouldn’t have been a good solution, since blocking these address ranges would keep other, legitimate users from accessing my blog. After being frustrated by another wave of comment spam I did some more research and found a modified comment plug-in for my blog software (blosxom). This plug-in is based on a keyword blacklist, which is regularly updated. It sounds good and I really hope that it helps keep the comments in this blog spam-free without requiring too much maintenance effort.
End of summer.
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004This time of year also has a positive effect: the visitor/page view numbers for my site are increasing considerably. During the summer months both the total number of visits and the number of page views per visit are lower than they are in the rest of the year. For my site, the increase seems to begin in mid-september. I will keep you informed if the high-plateau has already been reached, or if the increase will continue into November. (Currently I have about 1.100 visitors per month with an average of about 1.6 page views per visit.)
Real-time fighting comment spam.
Monday, August 30th, 2004Wow. That was a first timer. As these lines are written new comment spam is being generated in my blog, and, of course, immediately afterwards deleted. Lucky occurence that I did another spam check after deleting the entries which I found, so that I saw that new ones suddenly sprang into existence. If only one could catch and identify the perpetrator in the act…
E-cleaning.
Wednesday, August 11th, 2004Two acts of electronic data cleaning have been performed today. (1) There were about fifty new comment spam entries (generated only a few minutes before I performed the daily routine check, therefore an almost non-existent risk of them having been indexed by a search engine) which I deleted. And (2) today the Mac OS X 10.3.5 update was published, which I used as an occasion and excuse to clean out caches, rebuild indexes and directory maps and generally let the electronic equivalent of a fresh breeze sweep through my machines here. The updates went smoothly, and, of course, the world is now a better and snappier place.
Sign of Life.
Sunday, July 25th, 2004Sorry for the long silence, and sorry for the coming continuation of same. Tomorrow I will leave with the rest of the Graduiertenkolleg for Manigot, France, where we will be workshopping the next week. After my return I will tell you more about the last week, about Spiderman 2 (which was ok but not better than the first one), and the German comedy (T)Raumschiff Surprise: Periode 1 (which was, as expected, really bad).
To explain my absence from the blogosphere: I had visitors, end of the semester action, and am coordinating Kerstin’s departure to Oslo, all of which did not leave much time for blogging…
Waves of comment spam.
Saturday, June 19th, 2004Comment spam is becoming more frequent these weeks. Yesterday I had to delete about 20 comments that were linking to a bunch of porn sites. Usually, I only have a few scattered comment spams per week, but sometimes there is a more massive generation of comment entries. I am hoping that the next revision of my blogging tool Blosxom will include some kind of anti-comment spam mechanism that does not rely on password protection (which I wouldn’t want to introduce).