Nov 15 2007

Up Late

Category: Dasha&Kittens,Kazakh Driving,Personal,Videos,WordPress — ChrisM @ 5:32 am

My lessons for the rest of this week were cancelled on Wednesday, as the student is busy organizing his relocation to Moscow. This means less money coming in, so I have tried to catch up with a few more sponsored posts. Karra and Muska are a little confused, as since I started giving conversational English classes, my bed times had been closer to midnight than 6am. They have wandered in and out of the living room a few times, demanding strokes, and eventually giving up, to return to the bedroom. Hopefully they’ve not woken Irina up.
Anyway, the following animation was posted to my Facebook funwall, it portrays one cat’s not so subtle attempts to wake its owner.

I think I will check for any blunt objects near the bed before sleeping tonight 😉

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Oct 29 2007

Opening Links In A New Tab

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 6:24 pm

For some reason, FireFox will no longer open links in a new tab, when I middle click on them. BUT only on this website, and only when looking at the public face of this site – within the admin area, all works as it should.
Has anyone else come across this problem? I am trying to think of any plugins I have recently installed that could cause this change. It is not exactly the end of the world, but it does interest me what could cause this behaviour…

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Aug 27 2007

Busy Day

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 10:47 pm

Today I decided to finally get around to catching up with all the background work on this blog. That meant going through my plugins one at a time, upgrading them to the most recent version, and then checking nothing had been broken by this process. Readers of this blog should not notice any difference really, other than a few tweaks here and there, as well a small increase in speed of loading. Sadly, my collection of King plugins have not yet been updated to work with WP2.2.x, so this blog will remain at 2.1.3 until I find an alternative, or someone comes up with a viable and easily implemented hack – too much of this site’s design relies on me being easily able to display certain widgets on certain pages, and blocking them on others.

Luckily there are only a few days left in this month, as I have just broken the 2Gb mark on bandwidth, for the first time; this blog is limited to 2.5Gb/month, so as long as I don’t receive a sudden rush of visitors, and the search engine spiders don’t all suddenly decide to crawl the site 24/7, all should be fine. When this site was started a little over a year ago, I had a limit of 250Mb per month, and apart from when I hosted videos (I now use YouTube), I didn’t often get close to the limit…

I have also updated the listing of all the search terms this site is/was #1 for on Google. If such facts interest you, then click on the I Got Lucky link at the top of each page. I’ve also tried to re-order them into basic groups by subject, rather than just sticking the newest results in at the bottom.

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Aug 12 2007

FINALLY Finished The Recategorization

Category: Books,Personal,Windows Mobile,WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:21 am

It took a while, but all 1100 (or near enough) posts on this blog have now had new (mostly additional) categories assigned to them, where appropriate. If you check the category list on the left hand side, you will see the new additions. Although I could have added more, I wanted to try and keep to some sort of order, and I did not want a large collection of categories with only one or two posts. There are of course some exceptions, but mainly in areas that I intend to blog on more in the future.
Speaking of future posts, I really need to finish off the series of book reviews, as I only have another 3 or 4 left to read on my PDA. That said, I do have a few more lying around on one of the hard drives somewhere, and Oleg kindly put me in touch with a couple of sites that should be able to provide a few more. So, as we have just passed the 20,000 visits, in a little over a year, many thanks to those of you who visit. For new comers, please do check through the older posts when you get a chance, and feel free to leave comments if you have something to add or ask…

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Aug 08 2007

Recategorization Half Completed

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:30 am

As I previously mentioned, the blog was undergoing some work yesterday. Now that stage has been completed, I am working through all the posts, month by month, and re-categorizing those that easily fall into one of the new niches I have created. This has obviously led to a lengthening of the list of categories on the left here, and if anyone is searching for a post, you will currently notice that posts made before April this year are still to be worked on. I hope to eventually get all the work done, and perhaps encourage a little more traffic from search engines etc, as less posts will simply be labelled as Personal or Interesting – not really the most descriptive of titles, apologies to those that have put up with it for so long.

PS I am pretty sure there will be some further minor tweaking done over the coming weeks, as categories may be merged/split or simply renamed; however nothing as drastic as the work last night will be carried out, so visitors should not notice any loss in speed of the site being served to them.

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Jul 19 2007

Bad Behaviour Log Reader

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:38 am

OK, this is another post mainly aimed at WordPress and Stats junkies and/or geeks.
Bad Behaviour is one of the layers of defence I use on this blog against spam. It utilizes a split in the hyper-dimensional mandelbrot string sequence to detect malicious….
OK, no, if I’m being honest, I can not actually remember how it works it’s magic, but basically known bots, and (in)famous IP ranges that spamming PCs operate from are blocked, before Akismet even starts to check the content of comments.
Anyway, I had wanted to see what, or rather who was being blocked, but this meant trawling through MySQL tables, which even in my warped mind does not equate to a great deal of fun. So, thanks to the handy Plugins Of The Day list presented at the WordPress dashboard, I have found a plug in to check the logs more easily. See my Extras page for a link to the plug in.

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Jul 12 2007

Repetitive Post Editing Boredom

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:21 am

Wow, that was fun… Having removed a plugin that automatically hyperlinked site names in posts, I noticed that a lot of old posts no longer had the site’s linked to properly. Of those that did, some where missing the http section of the URL, so the links actually led to www.chrismerriman.com/sitename , which obviously caused issues.
Manually editing some 120 posts later, I have corrected all the links to my niche article sites. I still need to go back and check all the posts in the Personal, Kazakhstan and Kazakhstan-related categories, but I’m stopping for now.

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Jul 11 2007

Slowly Updating

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 7:46 pm

I have been trying to catch up with all the little tasks I had ignored for a couple of weeks. You can now find an updated list of the search terms this site is, or has been, #1 for in Google searches. I have also started adding the actual post, page or section the phrase was found on. It is only really of interest if you run this site (me) or find search engine patterns interesting…
I did however discover that since removing a plug in, a while back, that I need to go and edit some old posts where plain text URLs are no longer hyper linked. What fun. I will try and post the remainder of the photos from when Alex was here very soon…

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Jul 02 2007

If You Need Inspiration – Bodge

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:04 am

Or how to go about defeating website spam with SpamAssassin…

StarGazer, the guy behind my favourite plugin (WP Headline Animator), has had an idea on how to minimize blog or other web site spam using the e-mail spam protection system ‘Spam Assassin’.
The principle behind using spamassassin for webpages is quite simple, so don’t be put off by the code example he gives in the post if you are not a coder yourself. I’m not, I just tend to bodge things together until they do something interesting…

For any cynics out there, this post is not sponsored or anything, I just liked his approach to the problem of spam, and the idea of using an e-mail system to check comment spam by passing comments through to SpamAssassin in the guise of an e-mail message.

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Jun 15 2007

Alexa Barrier Broken

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 1:55 am

Just a short post this time… this blog has now entered the realm of the top 400,000 sites in the world.
Well, if you give much weight to an Alexa Rank that is.
Since installing their code, each visitor to this site is registered (once per day), rather than simply relying on visitors already having the Alexa toolbar installed.
So why do I care that much? Simple, several income schemes I use at this blog lend serious credence to any site’s Alexa rank, and, in general, the better my rank, the more money I can potentially earn.
Thanks to my regular visitors, I hope you are happy wading through the ‘interesting’ sponsored posts to find the more personal ones, and to the new visitors that appear to be arriving slowly over time, thank you as well.

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