Recently in About the site Category

I haven't posted for a while, I know. I've been busy doing other things is all. Some of which you may hear about soon, others only if I get around to posting about it.

One thing I have done recently is set up an http://about.me page. For most people, that's a very easy thing to do. If the name you want hasn't been taken you're good to go. For me, picking the name sroot turned out to be quite a challenge!

I've always had problems with my name and computing. On unix and linux, 'root' is the name of the super user. 'root' is god. 'root' can access anything, do anything, delete anything. When a server gets hacked, the last bit you want hackers to get access too is the 'root' account. Many services often prevent anyone registering the name root. Many prevent people registering anything that contains the string 'root'. I first remember noticing this when I tried to get a hotmail account. 'steveroot' and 'rootskitchens' were simply not allowed.

When I tried to sign up for an about.me page, I figured the failures being displayed were because of my name. I like the about.me site, so I persevered. I emailed their support and they helped! It turns out the name was blocked by the AOL namespace. I don't really know what that means, but I guess their usernames connect with AOL services in some ways and my name failed to be accepted. What's most impressive, is that for this FREE service, they actually took the time to find a solution. I genuinely expected to be told, 'you can't have a name that contains root, try using a nickname, or maybe remove the last letter like steveroo'.

Having had them go to so much effort just for little old me, I hope my about me page http://about.me/sroot does them justice.

By the way, I'll keep that page up to date with things like my twitter name, social media spaces and any other big projects I may be working on.

So I may have been quieter than usual over the summer, but the blog still goes on. What visitors are reading though has changed since last year when this post gave the top 4 posts. Now they are:

1. Useful Windows Shortcut key to show Desktop is still number - This was written for XP but the shortcut works in Vista too.
2. Margins and Markups - what the difference is and how to calculate them.
3. Red mushroom with white spots - a photo I took while walking
4. BBC iPlayer and it's built in Kontiki software - though I must make a new entry about this, as the iPlayer has moved on since 2 years ago. We're now watching iplayer via our Ninendo Wii! Nicola used it to watch Gavin and Stacey for the first time to see the kitchen I designed (it's the maple one, in the house set in Essex).
5. Welcome to the Christmas Party season - a review of our 2007 works christmas party.

I've just moved the blog to the new server. More on that later. I've been very slow on posting things lately, perhaps once this task is off the to do list I'll make a little more time.

For many, many years (well, since 2004 which is a long time for internet things) my web server has been at Rackspace. Well, I say 'my' web server but in reality it's their web server, dedicated to just my use and fully managed by them.

They've been great. Small amounts of downtime, answering the phone at 2am to help me fix things I've broken, swapping out faulty hard disks, power supplies (twice). They are however very expensive and as my server needs haven't grown as fast as computing power, I can now save some money moving onto a virtual server. The theory is that the hardware down time wont happen on the Virtual Server. My rackspace server has a single disk, single power supply. Multiple disks and power supplies cost a lot of money so the chance of failure was worth taking. Now though, servers are powerful enough for the resources to be shared across multiple users so we all benefit from RAID 60, multiple power supplies. If my needs change (EG a lot more visitors than currently stop by) then the Virtual Server can be moved to another physical server without any noticeable down time, where it can have more resources (bandwith/processor/disk space etc).

So, this week I've signed up for 8 shares on a server with 'gandi.net'. They're a web host based in France so close enough to the UK to retain network speed (all the other good virtual hosts seem to be in America). I was a little concerned about not having my trusty 24hour phone number but I've just had my first email support call answered very quickly. I couldn't get a piece of software to install (IP tables) and it appeared to be an issue with the Xen Vitual host setup. I emailed and the resolution came back within 2 hours. I decided to install the latest Ubuntu 9 server which they only released last week, so I was no doubt the first to come across the problem. After emailing me, they posted the solution in their forum and wiki. Great!

I might write some more on the move later but as you might be able to tell from the lack of posting lately, I'm really busy with other things. At the moment at least, Gandi looks great.

Wow. 4 Years. Amazing. Amazing I can still type so much waffle. Amazing to me anyway.

Last year's comments are still valid. Statistic wise, page views grew to over 26,000 this November (10,208 Nov 2007, 6,024 Nov 2006)

My backlog of unposted things is growing longer by the week but I don't mind, it's because I'm busy with other things. Eventually I'll tell you about the Australia Photo used in a CGI competition and the reply I wrote to a trade magazine that became a full page article in it's own right. Some things though will never see the electrons of publication, despite my lack of writing ability, waffle seems somewhat thereputic.

Most popular pages are:
Useful Windows Shortcut key to show Desktop - This was written for XP but I'm told works in Vista too.
BBC iPlayer and it's built in Kontiki software
My Best PDA Phone Ever (which I still rely on every day by the way)
Margins and Markups - more relevant than ever as the whole country get's used to the new VAT rate.

Wow! That went quick. It was just over 3 years ago I installed some blog software called "Movabletype" onto my web server to run my personal playspace. I guess blogging is a phase of life that's still in me, though several things have been and gone. My running phase never quite restarted after "je suis tombe". Speaking of which, The French lessons I began in January finished and I haven't been able to get on the next ones (the teacher's great, but the course is over subscribed again and I wasn't quick enough to book in). I still get tears in my eyes when I read this post.

Onto happier things, someone other than me visits these pages. The server log shows that in November 2007 there were 10,208 page views. That compares to 1,599 at the end of the first year and 6,024 a the end of the second year.

Most people still look for this page on what the shortcut key is on Windows to show the desktop and minimise all the open programs (Windows key & D at the same time, at least for XP, I've not tried Vista enough to find out). That's not so closely followed by people searching for "steve root", I wonder who he is? After which, How much do books weigh? and how to know that shelf you are putting up is strong enough. I'm also not the only one to wonder "is damn a swear word?".

Did you know it's been almost two years since I created this site? Well, it has. About a year ago I revealed some of my top secret* page view statistics. Then the monthly page view totals looked like this:

Month: Pages Viewed
Nov 2005: 1599
Oct 2005: 1180
Sep 2005: 676

Compare and contrast the following then:

Week: Pages Viewed
17/Sep/06 1989
10/Sep/06 2053
3/Sep/06 1929

Yes, you read it correctly. There are now more visitors each week than in a whole month from last year. Another example from the logs is that 821 "Distinct Hosts Served" during the last week - say hello in the comments everyone! (see this entry for more detail about what web site stats mean).

What are you all coming here for? Well, according to the search logs - most of you are still looking for this entry although flavour of the month is Steve Irwin - he got a mention in our holiday photos. For those who don't know, Steve Irwin became famous from his TV programmes on wildlife (he became known as "The Crocodile Hunter"). He had a Zoo near Brisbane but was killed recently by a Sting Ray while filming a new series.

The question you're probably all desperate to hear the answer too is "How much have you earn't from the Google Ads?" (written about here). Well, it's safe to say that I haven't even reached two significant figures. That's another way of saying less than US$10.

*OK, they're not that secret it's just I don't process the log file often.

Well, traffic levels here are increasing regularly. Guess either a) I have a lot of friends b) Theres actually some content here people want to read c) Lots of people are getting lost and ending up here.

I've decided to try hosting some googleads here. The theory is if you are reading one of my pages, google will put some relevent adverts alongside the page. If you happen to be interested in that companies product (it's almost always going to be a product) then you can follow the link. The company pay google a few pennies for every person that follows the link, and google pay a (no doubt) miniscule percentage to me. Be interesting to see if it provides any holiday spending money.

Before you ask:
1) no, it doesn't work if I click on the links to earn money for myself. It also recognises the same person following the link, so don't bother clicking on an advert 30 times - computers can be clever things and will simply not count you.
2) Yes, if i do actually ever recieve a cheque from google for this, I have to pay tax on it :-( For me, that will simply be a case of raising a corresponding invoice to cover the reciept and it will be part of my business accounts. I guess other people have to register with the tax office and start doing a tax return.

It's been a whole year since I started this blog. I've managed to write at least one post each month, although somtimes the gaps between entries have been quite large.

Visitor numbers have been quite impressive - more interested than I would have guessed:
Month: Pages Viewed
Nov 2005: 1599
Oct 2005: 1180
Sep 2005: 676
Aug 2005: 434
(I accidentally deleted the log files from before July)

anyway, I'm out of time again - more to write later!

Made a few changes to the site stylesheet, made a screenshot of before and after too (I normally forget).

Another thing I'd like to do but probably won't get much time to sort out.

I'd like to make sure I put a little relevant image with every post. Something relevant, like a photo of someone if I'm writing about them, or a small map if I'm talking about a place. May be I'll go back over some of the old postings and add some images into them.

I know i've been rather quiet here lately. There's lots I want to write about, just not getting the time at the moment. Last month (August) we set a new sales record in the shop (an amazingly large amount of sales that I won't say because our competitors might get jealous - no point upsetting them).

The Boughton 10K is fast approaching and I'm busy entering entries into the computer.

Hopefully, I'll get time to write about some things soon (like all those old memories and life observations). Until then, I better concentrate on getting all my work done.

I've been approached by two companies this week wanting to advertise on my blog. Hmmm, confused I am. Can't really tell if it is random spam they are sending or if there really is something on this site that's attracting millions of potential customers for someone. (Well, I doubt it's millions because I have logs of server load and visitors).

Should I sell some space? Should just say no and keep this ad free ? Ah decisions decisions.

Those nice people at Movable Type have not only finished testing the new version of Movable Type, they made a nice little badge for the people who helped look for bugs. In all I found 1 bug that no one else had reported (fixed in less than 24 hours) and 1 that had already been reported and fixed (the beta was being fixed and re-released daily and I was one release behind the current!).

Now the new version is complete I'm running out of excuses to delay starting my first MT plugin...

The beta test is going really well (at least, I haven't found any major data damaging bugs, or been able to break it in any way). Therefore, I'm going to reset the site templates to the new defaults.

The site templates control how these pages look. I'd done a little customisation of the templates (adding things like the rotating banner at the top of the page with all the family photos) but I never quite made it look the way i wanted. The new templates have a few new features too, so be prepared for some strange looking pages while I experiment.