Mike Little’s Journalized

I was asked what I thought of B2 the other day in one of my comments. Here’s what I wrote in reply.

I really do like B2. When I decided I’d like to get into this blogging stuff, I looked at a few, but didn’t really investigate too closely. More a case of reading through feature lists, looking at the maturity of the products and getting a general feel for the ‘polish’.

I chose B2 partly because it had the best feel to it, and because I’d not done any PHP work for ages.

Since then, I’m really impressed with it. There is quite a community built up around it with lots of support, Michel and Macshack are very responsive. More importantly for me, plenty of hacks, mods and add-ons are being developed. I’ve contributed to a few, and created at two myself.

The code is not as clean and well structured as I would like, but the up coming version 1 is a complete re-write using a template based system.

After seeing my blog, my step-son Steve decided he wanted one, and it was no problem to set him up as a subdomain on my host using B2. Since then I bought him his own domain and hosting (for his birthday) and transferred his existing site over to the new one with no problems. I know MySQL quite well so it was no problem to update the absolute paths in his data to be relative for the new location.

Now my 11-year old grandson has started his blog, again as a sub domain on my host. Whilst he doesn’t update it as often has Steve or I, he does enjoy messing about with it.

All in all, I cannot recommend B2 highly enough.

Do you remember all that fuss about referrer advertising? A company mastadonte were hitting web logs with the referer set to a page in which they tried to sell referrer advertising. Well, they’ve decided to change their mind:

We decided that it’s in the weblog community’s best interest to discontinue this project.

However they weren’t the only ones who thought of it. I’m now getting several blocks (up to 10) of hits (all from the same IP address) with porn sites in the referer field. Luckily they are only HEAD requests which don’t show up on my referrers list. I will have to keep an eye on it though.

PS: Yes I know referrer is spelled wrongly twice! The name of the HTTP request header was spelled wrongly in the specification. So one should really refer to it with it’s ‘correct’ spelling!

In the end, we weren’t able to go to Anthony’s wedding reception. An unexpected expense for the car took up nearly all the money allocated to the trip. A bit disappointing really.
Jamie has still gone to stay overnight with her cousin Chloe. So Jan and I will have some peace and quiet tonight.
Maybe we’ll watch my new Lord Of The Rings DVD?

Did they think it through when they bought this URL?
This is a site which will help you to find out who represents an actor.

And the URL? http://whorepresents.com

Thanks to Dom S for the link.