I’ve decided to add Google Adsense to my blog. At first I was resistant to the idea, but when I read Rick Brewster’s blog entry about “Making Money With Freeware” I was convinced by his logic that I would either make $0 or more than $0 by having ads on my website. (His specific post was about putting a donations button on the site, but he also mentions advertising, so I think I’m drawing a fair conclusion.)
I’m hoping that they’re sufficiently unobtrusive that they don’t detract from my website. But feel free to leave me comments or suggestions. I’m totally open at this point.
I’ve mentioned Lightbox on Wongside before, but it’s basically the JavaScript library that runs my picture gallery (or at least runs the cool animations and the ability to go back and forth through pictures. It’s mostly generated by a backend PHP script.)
Anyways, I was way behind the times in my Lightbox version. I was running version 2.02, which is pre-April 07. So now I’ve got the new 2.04 version, which includes all these features and bug-fixes:
- v2.04 – 3/9/08
- NEW – Upgraded Prototype from v1.4 to v1.6.0.2
- NEW – Moved label text into configuration for easier localization
- UPDATED – Code cleaned up. Respect for the global namespace and native javascript objects.
- FIXED – Caption displays as “null” when viewing an uncaptioned image after viewing a captioned image.
- FIXED – Clicking ‘close’ button shifts layout as link focus’ dotted line appears.
- v2.03.3 – 5/21/07 – Support for horizontally scrolling pages. Added updateImageList method for ajax’y pages.
- v2.03.2 – 4/30/07 – Fixed animated gif support in IE/Opera.
- v2.03.1 – 4/18/07 – Fixed embed hiding. Overlay opacity var added to config. Image sets w/Imagemaps fix. Clearfix removed.
- v2.03 – 4/10/07 – Improved keyboard navigation. Animation off toggle. Hides Flash movies under overlay. Imagemap support. Valid CSS.
To me, the greatest feature is that users are no longer required to use the ‘N’ and ‘P’ keys to move through the pictures. Now they can use the left and right arrows on the keyboard to navigate.
It’s the simple things in life, isn’t it?
So I as I was going through my website logs, I came across a trend wherein a particular person at the same IP would always visit my site, open a blog post, and go right to the comment page. They would also visit Andy’s site, specifically his guest book. I noticed that this IP address corresponded with all of the comment spam I’ve been receiving on the site. (I was getting about 20-30 spam comments each day.) Fortunately, it was all caught by Akismet, which is a pretty nifty WordPress plugin for stopping comment spam.
So what did I do as a diligent webmaster and responsible blogger? I blocked the IP address, of course! Since then, the amount of comment spam I’ve received has basically dropped to zero! Amazing! Guess I’ll have to tuck that little tidbit away for future use.
I was going through my site logs today, and I came across a number of interesting discoveries.
First of all, e-mailing people to tell them that I’ve posted pictures on my site is the quickest way to drum up site hits. You can see from the relatively bi-modal distribution below, that I had spikes in traffic on April 13 and 23. On the 13th, I e-mailed CCF to let them know that I had posted pictures from the Camping Trip. On April 23, I e-mailed Real World to let them know that I had posted pictures of Charlene’s Baptism.
So clearly those e-mails had some pretty significant effects on my website traffic. In fact, my average daily website bandwidth is about 225MB. On the 13th, it spiked to 1GB, and on the 23rd, it went to a whopping 3.19GB. Wow! Someone’s downloading a lot of pictures.
The other fascinating bit I discovered was that Kevin is kinda famous. Do a search on Yahoo! for “anaconda vs. python” and he’s the first result. You can also do a search on Google for “biggest living reticulated pythons” and he comes up about 7th, just under the Wikipedia entry. Pretty cool, huh?
So this is a change you will hopefully have noticed. I’ve updated my permalinks to be more user friendly. So in your browser window, you should now see friendly text such as:
http://www.wongside.com/brian/blog/2008/04/cookbook/
instead of the former, ugly:
http://www.wongside.com/brian/blog/?p=47
You can also browse posts by categories like:
http://www.wongside.com/brian/blog/category/photography/
or even subcategories like:
http://www.wongside.com/brian/blog/category/photography/camera-gear/
So I hope this makes your life easier. Enjoy!
You, the end user, shouldn’t notice anything, but this weekend, I upgraded my version of WordPress from 2.3.3 to the brand, spankin’ new version 2.5, released on March 29. A number of the new features are detailed here. In any case, it doesn’t really matter. But Step 3 of the Upgrade Instructions said I should do something nice for myself like writing a blog post about the upgrade. So here I am, writing about the upgrade 
I must say, the past week or so of using WordPress as my blogging app has been fabulous. I love how easy it is to manage and update. It’s so easy to install too. They even have a “Famous 5 Minute Installation“. I don’t think that first time newbies (including myself) would actually be able to do it in 5 minutes, but after a few installations, there’s no reason why it couldn’t happen.
In fact, I’ve gone a little WordPress crazy in the last week. I actually went ahead and updated Jeremy’s site with his own installation of WordPress (which he has yet to update). And I did another installation for the CCF Alumni Website as well. That one isn’t up yet because there isn’t enough content yet. But it will be eventually.
If you don’t use WordPress for your blog, maybe you should. It bills itself as “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” Go download it!
For those of you who are wondering, you can find my archived blog entries here. That page pretty much covers everything from June 1, 2006 – December 31, 2007. There are links off the archive pages to more archived pages. But I’ll include them here to make it easy for you:
Wow! That’s like three and a half years of history in my life. Incredible. Maybe one day I’ll go back and import everything into WordPress. On the other hand, that would probably be a real pain, and it’s more likely those pages will forever be entombed in PHP files.
So it’s been over a month since I last posted, but hopefully that was time well spent. As you can see, I’ve upgraded my site to use WordPress to manage my blog. Hopefully, this will allow a new level of interaction and integration. It should also allow me easier access to make postings on the site as I will be able to do them via an administration console instead of having to open up an HTML file and manually edit it.
Have a look around, and enjoy!