I always sort of didn’t like mainstream social networks, to put it lightly, and never really wanted to consider using them. As it happens, I need have only had that attitude about MySpace, not the rest of them. 😉

What is my point here? Why has it been so long since the last blog post here? I’ll take those questions in the wrong order. Stuff has been pretty crazy recently – trying to fit in (literally) full-time Vaveo development, trying to keep up a post a day on FOSSwire and lots of other things has been pretty difficult. So this blog kind of comes at the bottom of the stack and never gets all that much attention. I’m sorry – a week between posts isn’t a nice place to be, but it’s all I’ve been able to do recently.

I’m still here though and doing well.

Now, to the point of this post. Well it all started when Chris decided that we may have plans to do a Facebook application for Vaveo. I have no idea whether I’m allowed to say that, but well, I just did. Sorry, Chris. 🙂

» Read the rest of this post…

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. 🙂

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!

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?

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:

• Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible integration. A nice red Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible 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 Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible 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

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!