Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek, geek and more geek.

New Site Published — St Bede’s College

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The new web site for my daughter’s school, St Bede’s Col­lege has finally gone live today. This is great news! It is a much bet­ter look­ing replace­ment for their old site and will give a much needed boost to their on-line presence.

Of course, it is built com­pletely on WordPress, with a ton of plu­gins, a couple of cus­tom wid­gets, an ori­ginal design by an ex pupil, and a fairly soph­ist­ic­ated theme by me. I’ll give more details shortly. It should look OK in most browsers. I’d appre­ci­ate a com­ment if any­one spots any major breakage.

The hard­est part (or at least the part that took me the most time) was con­vert­ing their old pages which were writ­ten as old-school 90’s stylee static pages — chock full of present­a­tional HTML — into Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) ones. As far as I can tell every page nowval­id­ates as XHTML 1.0 strict.

The small team of staff mem­bers who have helped me design the archi­tec­ture of the site, up date the con­tent, and add new stuff, have done a mar­vel­lous job. Espe­cially whilst cop­ing with all that goes on at the begin­ning of a new school year.

Screen shot of St Bede's College website

Go check it out.

Wordcamp UK — Change of Venue

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After some last minute changes (and upset­ting a few people) there is now a new venue for the WordCamp UK 2008 event.

The new venue is The Stu­dio, it is still in Birm­ing­ham, and in fact quite close to the pre­vi­ously planned venue. The Stu­dio has a dir­ec­tions map and their main web site lists all the fea­tures. The event will be hos­ted in ‘Atrium Bar’ and the adjoin­ing ‘Open’ room.

Someone kindly set up a Google Maps dir­ec­tions page.

For full details go to the WordCamp UK wiki.

One million spam comments caught

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I noticed a few days ago that Akismet had caught more than 1 mil­lion spam com­ments on this blog. That’s an incred­ible amount. I didn’t think more about it until I spot­ted that Dar­ren Rowse blogged about “The Blog Tool that Has Saved Me Months of Work” refer­ring to Akismet hav­ing caught 2 mil­lion spam com­ments for him. He cal­cu­lates that it has saved him over 46 days of mod­er­a­tion time.

Wow! That means it must have saved me 23 days effort, using his cal­cu­la­tions. If I include the 200,000 or so it has caught on the other blogs I man­age, it’s an awe­some amount of time saved.

I have to agree that Akismet is a fant­astic tool, and second his com­ment to encour­age you to pay for Akismet if you are get­ting a great ser­vice out of it.

One Million Visitors

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Wow, I pay so little atten­tion to this blog at the moment, that I didn’t notice my vis­itor count rolling over 1 mil­lion. It must have done so at least a couple of weeks ago. Update I checked and it was May 30th at approx­im­ately 15:47 GMT and it looks like it was a vis­itor from the Netherlands.

My page view counter is nearly at 10 mil­lion too.

Journalized Dugg!

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Wow! I hit the front page of Digg.com about 20 hours ago, for an old post­ing. The piece is one I wrote back in Septem­ber about new fea­tures in Gmail only being avail­able in the US Eng­lish ver­sion.
With the new Chat fea­ture now released I guess some people were search­ing to find out why they didn’t have it. They found me, and Digg user Gurgle dugg me.

Iron­ic­ally, I didn’t find out about it until mid after­noon because GMail is being really slow at put­ting mail in my inbox. My stat­ist­ics pack­age mails me every 100 unique vis­it­ors. Around 1:30 this after­noon, I received over 50 of these emails all show­ing in GMail as hav­ing been sent “8 hours ago”. I looked and saw that most of them were around 5 minutes apart! I checked my stats pack­age and saw the spike!
visits by hour (click for lar­ger view). You can see from the hourly chart that for the hour of 5am GMT I got over 1100 vis­it­ors!
The vis­it­ors bar chart for the month has yes­ter­day stick­ing out like the pro­ver­bial sore thumb!
monthly stats (click for lar­ger image).
In all I had just over 10,000 unique vis­its yes­ter­day: over 7 times the cur­rent aver­age! I’m pleased to say the server held up well. Partly thanks, I’m sure, to Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache plu­gin. My Webal­izer stats are show­ing 17,000 vis­its for the domain as a whole yes­ter­day (264,000 file hits), almost 3GB of band­width. My last host­ing arrange­ment would have ground to a halt in less than 15 minutes!