Damn Lies!

Wow, my page counter, which has been going about 4 months less than this blog has just passed two mil­lion!
That count includes bots and refreshes, whereas the real counter is a count of real vis­it­ors.
The stats counter, which has been going a year less, stands at almost 170,000. I seem to be run­ning at about 370 to 450 real live vis­it­ors a day. Most of them (76%) are still run­ning Inter­net Explorer, but that’s a long way down from pre­vi­ous months, with Mozilla/Firefox and Nets­cape tak­ing up another 22% of the total. Inter­est­ingly the vari­ous fla­vours of Win­dows account for just over 90% of my vis­it­ors, with Mac OS X (3.8%) and Linux (2.6%) mak­ing up the only other size­able chunks.
In all of these I don’t count myself, of course: all of the machines/browsers I use have cook­ies to exclude my own vis­its from the stats.
Google is the top search engine with over 71% of search hits, fol­lowed at a dis­tance by Yahoo! (16.1%) and MSN (8.4%). AOL (2.4%) heads the rest of the pack (22 dif­fer­ent search engines iden­ti­fied).
“chester ben­ning­ton”, “mike” and “s club 8″ are the most pop­u­lar search terms bring­ing people to here.
*Yawn* even I’m bored now, so I’ll stop…

New Home

Well, we’re all aboard and settled in to the new server now. It is much, much faster than the last place. I’m not con­strained space wise either.
I still have some tweaks to do, e.g. I haven’t set up any cron jobs yet. But everything is hunky-dory so far.
I think it’s about time I redec­or­ated, so to speak!

Moving

I have set in motion the move of zed1.com to another server. DNS takes a while to propag­ate, so you may find this site dis­ap­pears for a while…
It should all be sor­ted in the next few hours and then hope­fully things will be a little faster again.

Update If you have trouble con­nect­ing to the site, you could try http://zed1.co.uk which will remain point­ing at the old server until I’m sure everything has transferred.

Fur­ther Update: If you are read­ing this update, then you made it to the new server!

Email Problems

It looks like some of my email was down for a few hours this after­noon. If you sent any­thing to a zed1.com email address any­time in the last 9 or 10 hours it most prob­ably went miss­ing. Please send it again if it was import­ant. If it was spam don’t bother :-)
I think I will be mov­ing my host­ing in the next couple of weeks. This loss of email (and it appears noth­ing bounced, everything was lost) is the final straw. I’ve been very happy with my host­ing for sev­eral years now, but recently things have gone down hill rap­idly. The shared server is over shared, out of disk space, and the pro­cesses reg­u­larly grind to a halt. Cus­tomer ser­vice response time has to be meas­ured in days at the moment.

WordPress: Web Application of the Year

Ars Tech­nica for­um­go­ers have voted for WordPress as the Web Applic­a­tion of the year!

WordPress is the most prom­in­ent rising star of web­log soft­ware, com­pletely free and with a large and act­ive com­munity. Styles, plu­gins and hacks are read­ily avail­able, with prob­lems such as com­ment spam­ming being addressed far more rap­idly than com­pet­ing applications.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Matt, Ryan, and the team!

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism

Found­ing mem­ber Larry Sanger has writ­ten a well con­sidered art­icle: Why Wiki­pe­dia Must Jet­tison Its Anti-Elitism over at Kuro5hin. In it he explains why, as Wiki­pe­dia hits the big time, it has to address its per­ceived lack of cred­ib­il­ity, and the dom­in­ance of dif­fi­cult people and trolls. A couple of prom­in­ent art­icles last year brought the former prob­lem into sharp relief.
He points to anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expert­ise as the root cause of the prob­lems. I have to agree with his reas­on­ing, and also his pre­dic­tion that unless it is addressed that there will be a ‘fork’ of the pro­ject with the express pur­pose of pro­du­cing a vet­ted ver­sion of the work with a tan­gible level of credibility.

Hat tip to Matt