Well it seems Joshua has finally given in to the hordes of taggers out there and has taken del.icio.us full time. What’s interesting though is how he’s managed this. His post to the mailing list mentions outside investment:
I’ve given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment.
I’ve taken this step because it lets me continue to grow del.icio.us while keeping it independent.
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In my earlier post I mentioned that ShortStats is unable to track failed referrers due to the way it works. ShortStats relies on a single line of PHP being inserted into each page you want to track, which then triggers a PHP script which logs the request in the database. I realised shortly after I posted that an obvious way to track failed referrers would be to put a slightly different PHP fragment into the custom 404 page. This would then log the original request (rather than the request for the 404 page itself) into a new DB table and you’d have yourself a failed referrer. Perhaps I’ve found a little project for myself this weekend…
ShortStat shows a nice breakdown by browser type
I’ve been unhappy with my host’s choice of statistics software for a while now – Analog displays too much information at the same time as not providing enough information, all in a rather unattractive package. A while ago I came across Shaun Inman’s ShortStat. ShortStat is a PHP program which should work on most PHP-capable hosts, with a lovely UI courtesy of Mr Inman.
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Bits on Wheels’ 3D Swarm view
It’s only been since I acquired my mac (not to mention my 1M broadband connection) that I’ve really started to use BitTorrent for anything. I was forced into downloading it to grab the Apple training video showing just how to crack out the mac mini. Initially I used the standard BitTorrent client, but recently I came across Bits On Wheels which takes visualization of P2P downloads to a new level. To be honest it doesn’t give you much more than the normal client, but it sure is pretty – the 3D Swarm view can be kind of hypnotic.
Yet again boredom got the better of me, and I’ve spent this last weekend working on a new site design. There are still a couple of minor IE6 problems to sort, but it seems fine on Firefox and Safari. The main change is that I’m now doing much less with the sidebar in an attempt to give a nicer minimal feel. I’m going to continue to work on some pages – I want to tailor the individual post pages to those coming from search engines, and might flesh-out the content there to display information such as recent and popular posts.
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Well, right now I’m:
- Recording the TV via the Elgato EyeTV 410 (which I can tell because there is a little TV picture sitting in the dock showing me the OC, which is cool and distracting when I’m trying to type)
- Burning a DVD of some old backups (which the helpful Toast dock icon is informing me)
- BitTorrenting various things (highly legally, honest)
So, it’s that cool. The only problem now is that I’m not sure I’m cool enough to use it…
One of the hardest things about making the transition from Windows to OSX was letting TopStyle go. Quite simply it was about the only thing that made struggling with browser inconsistencies bearable, and made playing around with CSS a pleasure. I have never been happy with the OSX replacement I got for it – CSSEdit, whilst it handled previews nicely didn’t do keyword completion as well as TopStyle, nor did it have downright handy features like a colour chooser.
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I’ve put an additional anti-spam measure in – comment preview is now forced. I’m having probems with the preview comment template right now (it looks very rough and ready) but I’ll put it right soon.
Once again comments seemed to be missfiring, which I only found out thanks to a helpful soul out there (thanks Shane!). This stumped me a bit, as I’d assumed the problems I was having was down to MT-Blacklist not working with my ISP’s Perl install. The other odd thing was that I was still recieving comment spam (which thanks to MT Moderate was not reaching the actual site). A quick poke around showed that I’d fooloshly left mt-comments.cgi in place, which was obviously how the spammers were getting in.
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So here is the problem – I’m forgetful. This means if I think of something that I should put on my Basecamp to-do lists when I’m not actually at a computer, I have to rememeber it, which I can’t do. Or write it down on a piece of paper, which I’ll loose. Today is a case in point – I know I had three things to add to my list, but I can’t remember what they are. Well, unless Basecamp has a Blackberry front end (and for that matter someone wants to buy me a Blackberry) I guess I’m going to have to solve that little problem by myself…
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Milestones, Projects and To-do lists
Basecamp has the concepts of projects containing milestones, with milestones containing to-do lists. Due dates can be set on milestones, but not on the multiple to-do lists they can contain. For my general life-fixing projects (like “Cleaning Up My Finances” or “Create New Blog”, although the later might be better categorised as a making-my-life-more sad activity than a life fixing one) milestones work quite well. These tasks typically consist of a series of phases, each with their own tasks.
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