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Happy New Year

Bill Humphries — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 01:35:47 +0000

A neighbor’s jade plant bloomed, and managed to survive the beating from last night’s storm. A good image to end 2005 on.

My best wishes for 2006.

Seasons Greetings 2005

Bill Humphries — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 01:29:00 +0000

I didn’t get around to making a holiday postcard this year, my apologies.

In the past week I accepted a new job, friends had a beautiful baby daughter, and another learned her brother has cancer. This time of year amplifies joy and sorrow.

I wish all of you happy holidays, whichever ones you may keep this season. May your journeys be safe, your family civil, and the TSA non-draconian if you’re flying.

Two Weeks of Mint

Bill Humphries — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 08:31:09 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I bought and installed Mint to analyze the traffic here.

Mint, like Google Analytics and MeasureMap, can’t tell you about syndication feeds (unless readers come through Bloglines or similar.) So this is a sample skewed towards people who may not be cutting edge users.

Popular Pages

Do Cats Cause Schizophrenia: Recent news reports on a possible link between toxoplasmosis and mental illness triggered plenty of searches on the keyworks. I think one is a temporary spike.
Web Sudoku: Another ‘faddish’ result.
Entries about Toys: The category contains an entry with a photo of an exotic car in the body shop near me. Lots of people looking for an image of one.
Republicans for Voldemort Redux: Either people looking for the comic, or wondering about the tshirt and bumper sticker.
Entries about Humor: Mainly searches for “humor+mpeg”
Apache 2 for Mac OS X: Searches for the keywords. Tiger Server comes with Apache 2, by the way.
Lossless XHTML: From the microformats site
Localized Date Parsing in JavaScript
Christopher Walken in a Fatboy Slim Video
Visual PHP Editor for Mac OS X: Searches

Clients

Most (82%) are on Windows, 14% on Macs.
However the browser breakdown is:
- IE: 54%
- Firefox: 32%
- Safari: 9%
- Everything else: 5%
~~So 5% of my Mac readers are on Firefox?~~
ETA: Todd Larson reminds me that I ought to check my math when posting in the middle of the night. That’s anywhere from 20 to 36% of Mac visitors using Firefox.
Most readers have tiny (1,024 x 768) screens.

Onomatopoeia

Bill Humphries — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 06:45:08 +0000

I get comments, on occasion, about this site’s onomatopoeic name. Now it has been used as onomatopoeia.

Jakob Nielsen on Weblog Usablity

Bill Humphries — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 02:32:42 +0000

Jakob Nielsen’s posted his top ten list of design mistakes in weblogs. In the interest of bloging one’s mistakes, I’m guilty of at least:

No ‘about’ page.

My about is more of a colophon, and that hasn’t been updated since last century.

I should do something about that, neh?
No author photo.

Here I am in Maui last year. I’ve gotten new glasses since then.

I should get a head shot done.
Mixing topics.

Feh, I’m interested in more than Web Development.

But I don’t want to run a separate book/media blog. Come for the XML, stay for the fanboy. At least I put the natter on Live Journal.
No list of popular posts. I guess I should put that together from the logs.

Old Formats Die Hard

Bill Humphries — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 01:59:26 +0000

I restored a RSS 2.0 feed for More Like This using Feed Burner.

There are plenty of people pointing at my old RSS feed.

But the feed had been replaced with a script that was supposed to tell you that the feed was gone and to switch to the Atom feed. However, I also sent a 410 Gone header, and it looks like browsers and aggregators did not bother showing the content. I missed the semantic, and I think this blog dropped off the radar.

So, if you request the old /rss URL, you’ll get the 2.0 feed via a redirect.

Double Links in Atom Feed Fixed

Bill Humphries — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 05:42:24 +0000

I fixed a problem where my Smarty template was creating a link around an already existing link in my Atom feed. The Feed Validator didn’t catch it since it was in the XHTML.

Testing the Atom Rig

Bill Humphries — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 06:13:22 +0000

Net News Wire announced Atom 1.0 support on Thursday. I’ve been updating the feed, switching to tag: entry ids and generally futzing with the weblog. Please let me know if things aren’t working for you.

What Egoboo Is

Bill Humphries — Fri, 06 May 2005 07:00:00 +0000

Egoboo is reading a thread on DKos and seeing people sign posts with their UJ name.

Auction for Quake Relief: ‘The 57th Franz Kafka’ by Rudy Rucker

Bill Humphries — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 08:00:00 +0000

Updated: the book has been re-listed in a fashion that doesn’t get eBay’s TOS and lawyers upset. The charity is now the American Friends Service Committee because Oxfam America was not available through missionfish.

I have a first edition of Rudy Rucker’s short story collection The 57th Franz Kafka that I found in a tiny bookstore on Guadalupe Street when I was a freshman at UT Austin.

It was a funky, mind-expanding book for a kid from suburban Dallas. It’s a prized possession. It’s out of print.

I’m selling it off to raise money for the American Friends Service Committee’s Indian Ocean quake relief funds.

Bid high, bid often!

I wanted this to go to Oxfam, but I can’t given eBay policy. So I’m sending a donation to Oxfam.

Link

Navelgazing

Bill Humphries — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 08:00:00 +0000

It’s the end of the year, so time for some numbers.

Here’s the categories I used most often in my posts this year (2004):

+----------+----------------------+

| Posts    | Category             |

+----------+----------------------+

|       33 | Software Development |

|       34 | Web                  |

|       35 | Humor                |

|       37 | Politics             |

|       43 | XML                  |

|       48 | Culture              |

|       74 | Media                |

+----------+----------------------+

And here’s 2000 for comparison:

+----------+----------------------+

| Posts    | Category             |

+----------+----------------------+

|       31 | Science Fiction      |

|       39 | Content Management   |

|       42 | Bay Area             |

|       43 | Media                |

|       44 | Pundits              |

|       54 | Humor                |

|       55 | Politics             |

|       73 | Web                  |

|       80 | Culture              |

|       81 | XML                  |

+----------+----------------------+

For one thing, I’m not posting entries as often, and less entries on local items and Science Fiction. I’m still writing on those topics, but mainly on Live Journal.

This was a shock to me. I’ve really fallen out of the blogging stride this year.

+----------+--------------------+

| Posts    | Month              |

+----------+--------------------+

|       62 | January            |

|       52 | February           |

|       39 | March              |

|       33 | April              |

|       31 | May                |

|       17 | June               |

|       21 | July               |

|       22 | August             |

|        9 | September          |

|       15 | October            |

|       11 | November           |

|       20 | December           |

+----------+--------------------+

However, I’m also using del.icio.us for linkblogging, so that cuts into the numbers.

Season’s Greetings

Bill Humphries — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 08:00:00 +0000

The 2004 Card:

Clockwise from Top Left: Hitomi at 4 months; whump at the summit of Haleakala, Maui; Yukino at 4 months; Cynthia at the summit of Haleakala; whump’s 40th birthday cake; Lea Hernandez, whump, Chad Childers, and Cynthia at APE, San Francisco.

Thanks Secret Santa

Bill Humphries — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 08:00:00 +0000

My Secret Santa gift arrived today. Thanks to whomever sent a copy of Tony Head’s Music for Elevators from my Amazon Wish List!

I’ve taken care of the presents for the name I drew, but don’t want to spoil the surprise.

Compromised

Bill Humphries — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 08:00:00 +0000

Tonight, when running a validation check, I discovered the following snippet inserted at the end of the page.

The hidden iFrame loads a Windows exploit.

I have it removed, for the time being.

I don’t know how long it’s been there, but the source may be an exploit of an old version of Smarty I was using. I’ve upgraded to the current stable version of Smarty.

Maybe I’ll switch to Savant for templating.

Message to Live Journal Admins

Bill Humphries — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 08:00:00 +0000

You can change the name of this feed on LJ.

The rest of you lot can ignore this post.