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FeedBurner Pro stuff is now free

This news is pretty cool - all of FeedBurner’s Pro features are being rolled out across all accounts for free. Clearly, Google don’t need the money and have a different business model in mind - people’s data.

Still, I’ve enabled ProStats and am looking forward to using the MyBrand feature (so I can pop my feeds onto feeds.upfold.org.uk in due course). You have to email them to enable that, so I’m still waiting for a response.

Pretty cool features to have for free though. Don’t worry, we’re working on them for FOSSwire too! Well, I’m not, but other people are. :)

Skitch invites

I have 5 Skitch invites. If anyone wants one, drop a comment. :)

Don’t put your email address in the body of your comment, just put it in the email address field then I can see it but not the spambots.

UPDATE: all gone!

Akismet isn’t working

We get a fair amount of traffic over at FOSSwire. Like most of the WordPress installations I have a connection with, we have an Akismet installation running there to deal with comment spam.

To its credit, it’s pretty good, but recently I’ve been having to manually clean up a load of trackback spam that’s getting past the filter. It’s a real pain and irritates me immensely. Usually Akismet works so well…

Maybe it’s worth installing an additional spam comment solution such as Bad Behaviour. I really don’t know. Anyone else had any success with any other anti-spam solutions?

Site updates

I’ve just finished rolling out an update to the site here, so you might have noticed a few changes. Here’s what’s happened:

  • Twitter integration. A nice red Twitter banner appears at the top of every page with my latest tweet.
  • New page - the portfolio. Admittedly, it’s not a true portfolio, but I couldn’t think of a better name. That page is all about raising my profile with potential employers. That’s the aim.
  • New header image!
  • Tweaks and optimisations to make things run better and more smoothly. For the time being, my Zooomr photos in the sidebar have been removed, as the Zooomr photo page RSS feeds no longer work since Mark III (apparently they will be reinstated shortly). Before the update, pages were taking longer than necessary to load because of the overhead of checking Zooomr for a non-existent feed URL every pageload (and the feed caching didn’t kick in because it was returning a 404).
  • A few CSS hacks and alterations for better support at lower resolutions and in IE.

By the way, if you can’t see the new design tweaks and the Twitter banner isn’t red, hit reload again to make sure you have the latest stylesheet cached.

Anyway, must now get back on with the Project, before I’m missed!

Incidentally, if you’re tracking version numbers this revision to the design could be called version 3.1 (I probably missed out minor revisions in the 2.x range as well):

  • 1.0 - original Blogger template
  • 2.0 - modified WP-Andreas09 in orange
  • 3.0 - original revision of this design
  • 3.1 - current revision

Trying out Automattic Stats and Reinvigorate

A couple of days ago I got my private beta invite for web statistics service Reinvigorate. I have to say I much prefer Reinvigorate’s interface to that of Google Analytics and hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll collect enough data so that I can see whether it really is better or not.

In other statistics news, I’ve also downloaded and enabled the Automattic Stats WordPress plugin. It’s free, you just need a WordPress.com API key (which you will have if you’re running Akismet) and supposedly also tracks stats in the same way that a blog hosted on WordPress.com does.

I’ll give both a try and see what they’re like!