Technorati - Gaming the System (unintentionally!)
A little while ago, it came to my attention that my little site is ranked quite highly on Technorati. At the time of writing, it’s apparently ranked 1753 out of god only knows how many blogs in the world (up 600 places since I first found out about this in October). Frankly, when I saw myself with a ranking that high I was flabberghasted, and more than a little suspicious that something had gone wrong somewhere. So I set out to investigate…
I already knew that a fair number of people would be linking to me because of my mod_rewrite examples and Standardista Table Sorting articles but I really didn’t think that links to those would account for the 891 blogs that were linking to me. So, I dug deeper.
I’ve got a brand going on here…
Yesterday was the first ever Web Standards Group meeting in London, wonderfully organised by Stuart Colville and with talks by Andy Budd and Christian Heilmann. Why did I go? Because I’m really trying to get out there and get to…
My new Posting Schedule
It’s time for me to get back to basics with this site. The idea behind it was always to help other people by sharing the knowledge that I’d gained. Over the last two years (yup, it’s been two years since…
All change!
The more observant of you will have noticed that the site has just been given a massive facelift. Over the last month I’ve been working hard to port all of my old entries over to Movable Type and get version…
A Fantastic Start to the New Year
Wow. Just wow. Until yesterday I’d never used digg.com. I was aware of it being something vaguely along the lines of del.icio.us, but more than that I just didn’t know. So yesterday I decided to sign up and post…
Back Online
Right, I’m back in the driving seat - we finally have the internet in our new flat. We’ve been here for a month now without it, hence the lack of updates. I’m planning big things over the next month though…
Thanks for the links
A big thankyou to Jake Tracey, who a couple of days ago wrote a great blog entry about CSS for interface design, and decided to link to my “Creating Cross Browser Compatible CSS Text Shadows” article. Over the last…
Google and prefetching
I was certain that I’d blogged about Google prefetching certain search results a couple of months ago, but it turns out that I didn’t. Basically, on some searches, google instructs your web browser to start downloading the top-most search…
Normal service shall now resume…
As of one hour ago, I am now free of my dissertation (well, except for the demonstration). A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I can now get back to implementing some of the ideas that…
Email Newsletters
Well, hello there! It seems like yesterday evening a lot more people than normal have been visiting the “Cross Browser Drop Shadows” article, which is really great. The thing is, almost all of them have no referrer assigned, which…
You use what???
Yesterday I remembered that I hadn’t upgraded my local copy of awstats since v6.2 (the current stable version is 6.4). The upgrade from 6.2 contained a few security bug fixes and things like that, but since I run my…
Wow - that was a busy month
Well, just wow. I really wasn’t expecting February to be such a busy month for the site, traffic-wise. Last month we had double the traffic that we had in january, and by the end of this month we should…
GoogleBot in form filling shocker?
I just noticed in my logs that the GoogleBot has been using the Style Changer on this site! This is certainly not something which I was expecting to happen. Has anyone else had any experience of the GoogleBot selecting…
The changeover continues…
Well, the changeover of servers seems to have gone pretty much without a hitch. Hopefully most of you didn’t even notice anything wrong at all. For the next couple of days I’m going to be at DEFCON 2, making…
New Servers
I’ve just signed up with 34sp, a web host who I’ve heard very good things about from several friends who have used them for extended periods of time. What this means, of course, is that I’m almost free of…
rel=’nofollow’
Over the last couple of days, the “Big Three” search engines have all announced that they’re going to start paying attention to a new attribute on <a> tags - rel=’nofollow’. This attribute will essentially state that the marked link…
Another Ghoulnet moan
I’d like to apologise to anyone who’s been viewing the top referers page over the last week or so. If you have been to look at it, you’ll have noticed that there, well, aren’t any referers showing up! This…
State of the Site
I know I’m a little late with doing the roundup of 2004, but bear with me. 2004 was the first year of workingwith.me.uk’s existence, and it’s been a pretty good one. JANUARY The site didn’t exist yet, but I…
State of the site update…
Well, November was workingwith.me.uk’s best month yet. We’ve broken all records for all the statistics that awstats churns out, except for unique visitors. It’s no surprise that the unique visitors stat wasn’t beaten, since it skyrocketed back in June…
Get publicising!
Today’s updates to workingwith.me.uk have been to do with publicity. If you notice, there’s a new box-out at the top-right of the standard display, called “Publicise”. Well, guess what? They’re there to help you tell people about the site!…
Unexpected Outage
My apologies to everyone for the three hour outage to the website tonight. According to my host (Ghoulnet), the server had “had hung due to an update process”. The upshot of this was that the website was down until…
State of the site update…
Since the “July Roundup” post, workingwith.me.uk has been growing slowly but steadily. Numbers of visits per day are up 30%, people are spending longer on the site (about 6.5 minutes on average this month, as opposed to 2.5 minutes…
State of the site update…
So, that’s another month over, and what have I done? Well, there have actually been a fair few updates this month. The blog now has an RSS feed, which according to my logs is certainly being used. Because I’ve…
X-Philes
A while ago, I wrote to the maintainer of the X-Philes list of properly XHTML valid websites. Yesterday, I got a reply - I’ve been accepted as the 81st valid site, which is nice. In order to be accepted…
iBook, and forthcoming updates
My new iBook arrived on saturday (finally - couriers are not good people), and it’s lovely. I have, however, found a couple of small issues under Safari. Nothing major, just indenting of the first line of some paragraphs, and…
Fan Mail
Last week, Josh Fletcher wrote to me about the site, with a couple of queries. Since there may be more people than just him who’d benefit from hearing my response, I thought that I’d answer here. Hi Neil, My name…
July Roundup
It’s been a busy few days for me - I’ve just moved house from Plymouth to Leicester, and everything’s a little hectic. I’ve just today sorted out a wireless router for the house here though, so I’m able to…
More updating fun…
Good news - I’ve almost finished getting the workingwithme livejournal account embedded into the website. Tomorrow’s job is to get the permalinks and the read comments links pointing to the embedded posts on the workingwith.me.uk website. I’ve decided that…
More progress…
Turns out I don’t need to use the XML RPC interface to Livejournal, and it’s a good thing too, because Ghoulnet don’t allow socket support for PHP to be turned on because “it has been used in the past…
Progress Report…
I’m working on fully embedding the workingwithme livejournal account into the main website currently. However, I’ve hit a couple of hitches with respect to embedding a single entry by entry ID. customview.cgi doesn’t have an option to do this,…