Archive for 'Internet'
Busy Bee
Posted on 05. Jan, 2009
I've switched anthonyjhicks.com over to the Busy Bee WordPress theme by WooThemes. Fairly happy with this theme over Fresh News which I had been using for the last several weeks. Some kinks to sort out with spacing in IE6/7, and still a bit messy in the Photos section for all browsers. Some unusual random browser crashes occurring too when viewing pages.
I’m a WordPress Convert
Posted on 04. Dec, 2008
I'm very pleased with WordPress - getting comfortable with tinkering with code, databases and creating plugins. I'm working on a plugin at the moment that integrates the InstaMapper API into a widget and also a full screen tracks viewer - I'll release a beta soon. Loving the new Reverse Geocoding feature in the Google Maps API where you pass co-ordinates and return an address/locality name - which feeds nicely into my tracks viewer menus.
Absolutely love the Lifestream plugin which is now sucking in my public activity from Digg, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Last.fm, Twitter and Vimeo - creating a neat daily digest of what I've been up to, great for people not on Facebook where all this normally appears in the News Feed.
Also picked up a commercial plugin, AutoBlogged to pull in richer feeds of certain content, e.g. My Facebook Posted Items, and automatically blog it. The Akismet comment spam web service is genius, it's already blocked hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks without me having to lift a finger. Lots of outbound RSS feed options too, for example tagging a post "fbpost" sends a blog post to Facebook.
WordPress for iPhone is a little buggy, but still does a fine job. All in all really happy with the level of integration between WordPress and the various sites, tools and gadgets I use each day.
Last GPS Location
Posted on 29. Nov, 2008
I've created a sidebar widget (see on the right below the Lifestream) showing the last GPS location as reported by my iPhone when running the InstaMapper application. The widget picks up the last co-ordinates via InstaMapper API and overlays a marker on Google Maps. If you click the info bubble on the marker, there's a link to a full screen map as well. InstaMapper is neat!
24MB Broadband.. drool
Posted on 01. Sep, 2005
UK Online to offer 24MB ADSL2+ for under GBP30 per month! Where do I sign?
http://www.ukonline.net/...
BT Broadband Upgrades to 2Mbps
Posted on 01. Mar, 2005
At no extra charge. Good, because I was about to dump BT as their competitors were already offering 2Mbps for what I was paying for the 1Mbps service. The 8Mbps/500GB plan from UK Online is still looking very attractive though for GBP39.95 per month.
http://www.bt.com/...
BT Broadband connection now 1Mbps
Posted on 11. Feb, 2005
Increased my BT net connection speed here in London to 1Mbps, it's noticeably better, but still less than what I was running in Sydney before I left (1.5Mbps). I'm still toying with the idea of going to the 4Mbps plan from BulldogDSL or 8Mbps plan from UK Online. BT are currently running a 2Mbps trial as well.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/...
Aussie Blogs .. revived
Posted on 09. Jan, 2005
The update tracker is back, I've found someone to take over the entire technical side. It'll run on my servers for the next few months until it can be moved. Thanks to everyone who sent thank you emails, sorry for the false alarm.
http://aussieblogs.org/...
Aussie Blogs Closed
Posted on 03. Jan, 2005
The Aussie Blogs update tracker and web ring are now closed permanently. Keeping the site running through solving technical issues, programming new updates to the detection routines and answering enquiry emails has been a time consuming process, and in 2005 I really feel my time could be better spent on other pursuits. I've thoroughly enjoyed running the site over the past 5 years, but since moving overseas my feeling of satisfaction from running the tracker has been steadily diminishing.
Thanks to the hundreds of sites that have linked to the tracker and web ring over the years, and the thousands of Australian blogs who've benefited from the more than half-million combined referrals. Thanks also to the volunteer editors in particular Victor and Wade. And to Benn for his design contributions.
The web ring is available to anyone who would like to take ownership, however you must have a track record of at least 3 years blogging to prove you're going to keep it and running in the long term. You must also be over 21 years of age. This site (the update tracker) is not available.
The update tracker database is available in OPML format by request should you wish to build your own Australian Weblogs update tracker. The code behind the web site and detection bots is NOT available. The 15 Australian blogging specific domain names that point to this site are for sale.
http://aussieblogs.org/...
Aussie Blogs RSS Feeds
Posted on 16. Dec, 2004
I whipped up two quick beta RSS feeds from the Aussie Blogs Update Tracker this morning before work. I've been meaning to do it for ages, but well you know. There's an updates and an aggregator feed. The updates feed contains a list of the last 6 hours of updated Australian weblogs, and the aggregator feed contains the last 100 posts appearing on Australian weblogs. The aggregator feed is particularly interesting as you can basically read all of Australia's weblog posts in one aggregated feed. The aggregator probably needs a bit of work with full versus excerpt posts and support for Atom feeds, but it's a start. Feedback? Anyone?
http://aussieblogs.org/...
Aussie Blogs - approaching 5,000 monitored blogs!
Posted on 10. Dec, 2004
Since pointing the automated Aussie Blogs FinderBots at several geographically specific blog directories including Blogger.com, Blogwise, Rice Bowl Journals and Brave Journal, the database is now at almost 4,600 sites. We should also easily hit 5,000 blogs and half-a-million click-thrus in next few months, currently at 361,073 clicks. Again, while my enthusiasm for Aussie Blogs has dropped significantly after all these years of the running the site, it has been fun improving the detection bots and programming new finder bots. The dozen or so bots that drive Aussie Blogs are getting quite clever now, particularly when it comes to geographic classification. Aussie Blogs has to be one the best and most accurate single-counrty listings of blogs available. Given unlimited spare time I'd like to open source the bots and convert the site from Lotus Domino to PHP/MySQL. But, alas, no one has stepped up to help out with coding after 5 years of asking, and I have no time. If you're a proficient PHP developer and want to compile your own country specific weblog monitor, let me know, maybe we can work together on redeveloping the site.
This weekend will be the last lot of work on Aussie Blogs for quite a while. Plans:
- Set up secondary bot servers and add failover wrappers to all bots. The bots will check-in with the web server every few minutes to see who should be running, if the primary bots haven't checked in for a while, the secondary bot servers will take over. This should help ensure there are always results showing on the front page.
- Upgrade Informa RSS library to support Atom 0.3 feed parsing on the Recent Posts page.
- Various tweaks including: updating the CheckerBot excluded URL list and tweaking work file and database cleanup scripts.
- Update site help page.
http://aussieblogs.org/...
More Domains!
Posted on 10. Dec, 2004
Given the dropping USD, I thought it was good time to protect a few more Australian specific blogging domains from ad spammers. The following now point to the appropriate pages on Aussie Blogs: sydneyblogs.com, sydneyblogs.net, perthblogs.com, perthblogs.net, canberrablogs.com, australianblogs.net, australianblogs.org and brisbaneblogs.net. I now hold 22 domain names, 15 of which point to Aussie Blogs.
http://aussieblogs.org/...
Aussie Blogs Codefest 2004
Posted on 06. Dec, 2004
Spent the weekend coding on Aussie Blogs, except when I was getting my
ears raped on Saturday night at the Prodigy concert. I fixed lots of niggling bugs and also added
some cool features. Summary of the more interesting stuff:
- Blogger.com Australia plus major cities directories are now searched by a new bot daily for new aussie blogs and automatically added to the database.
- The entire Blogwise Australia directory is now checked for aussie blogs weekly by finder bot, not just the first page as before.
- The blo.gs listener bot is out of testing and now running permanently watching for updated aussie blogs that ping blo.gs. The bot is running on my London server.
- Improved the alternate URL matching logic to improve the chances of matching a pinging blog with the aussieblogs database.
- Added source stats for the last 48 hours to the sidebar so we can monitor where updates are coming from.
- Re-enabled the CheckerBot for non-pinging blogs. I'm in the process of switching to threading to handle where bad blogs can sometime block further execution.
- Added a awaiting review statistic to the right sidebar to show how many blog edits or additions to the aussieblogs database are waiting for human editors to check (currently 222 awaiting review!).
- The connection handling, polling frequency and efficiency of the weblogs.com and blogger.com bots has been improved.
- Migrated the aussieblogs site (and my personal site) to the new server at the MCI data centre in Sydney (there was some downtime while data was migrated and dns entries changed).
- Fixed a thread pooling bug on the new server stopping some features from working on the site.
http://aussieblogs.org/...
Aussie Blogs - belated renewed enthusiasm kicks in
Posted on 03. Dec, 2004
Looks like things aren't as grim as I had thought for aussieblogs. Weblogs.com seems to be alive again, and better still I discovered their shortChanges.xml file which shows the last 5 minutes of updates and is much nicer to poll for than there often-flakey-minimum-3-polls-per-hour-2000-entry changes.xml beast. Using shortChanges.xml also reduces the impact of losing a whole chunk of updates due to badly formed XML which has been a problem of late with weblogs.com So good old weblogs.com may have some life left in it yet.
It seems my worries about blo.gs stopping their changes.xml interface were a bit unfounded. I just implemented their alternative, and it is fantastic! Rather than downloading and parsing their changes.xml file every 30 mins, I set up a listener connected to ping.blo.gs:9999 and they stream new updates live down to me in zipped XML! I used their simple PHP 5.0 based stream_socket_listener example script and set it to kick off a special version of my Java checking bot (BloDotGsBot) each time a new update is detected by blo.gs. BloDotGsBot accepts the URL and RSS-URL as arguments and runs a fast comparison against the aussieblogs database, if it finds a match it runs off and does all the normal bot tasks that the other update tracker bots (visit site, parse meta-data, download last post, post update). It's great to just sit there and watch the stream listener kick off all these little BloDotGsBots as bloggers all over the world ping blo.gs hoping that one of those blogs will match the aussieblogs database. This approach means blogs will appear within 10 minutes of making a post. Of course, if too many people blog at the same time around the world and ping blo.gs, my bot server might run out of memory ;) .. DoS by blogging! More work required in this area obviously.
On to Technorati's Attention API, I had to change my Attention experiment a little as no matter how hard I try I can't get the Technorati API to recognise my username and MD5 hashed password! It just says bad username or password. I've emailed, but alas, no response :( .. I assume the API is just broken for me. My new bot (AttentionBot) posts a sites.opml file to Technorati which rewrites the outline elements with extra attributes including lastUpdate and sends it back to me. From there I parse this list and look for updated blogs within the last hour and process them accordingly (visit site, parse meta-data, download last post, post update). It seems to work well, although with my test data I found that Technorati was disappointingly lagging. For example it showed my weblog hadn't been updated for 18 days! I don't know how good this will be long term as a source for hourly updates, but it's the best around with the most financial backing so hopefully it'll turn out to be a good place for harvesting updates.
Anyway, as you can see, lots going on to improve update detection through a variety of methods despite my general lack of interest in keeping the tracker running. And still no Java programmers willing to kick in and help :(
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
eBay Pulse
Posted on 30. Nov, 2004
Lists the most popular and expensive items appearing in the eBay marketplace. Interesting.
http://pulse.ebay.com/...
1000 LOT INTEL P4 1U RAID RACKMOUNT SERVER 3.06 MENDAX
Posted on 16. Nov, 2004
Yes, I could really use 1,000 servers.
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/...
Bulldog Broadband
Posted on 18. Oct, 2004
4 Mbps unlimited ADSL, yummy. I think it's time to dump BT Broadband, particularly as they're introducing usage limits soon. Bulldog here I come.
UPDATE: Didn't end up going for Bulldog and now get hit up by rude aggressive commission based salesmen on the street trying desperately to flog Bulldog services, which really has turned me completely off them. Bulldog, your rude poorly informed and trained sales monkey's have lost me.
http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/...
This will be in the exam
Posted on 11. Jul, 2004
According to the referrers, presumably Aussie Blogs featured in the week 10 workshop notes for MDCM1000 New Media Technologies A at UNSW. Amusing.
http://www.student.unsw.edu.au/...
CAcert Inc: The Free Community Digital Certificate Authority
Posted on 05. Jul, 2004
Free email and server certificates. Australian too!
http://www.cacert.org/...
BT Broadband 15GB Monthly Limit :(
Posted on 05. Jul, 2004
Ah well, it was a fantastic deal while it lasted. At 2 quid a gig it still completely beats Tel$tra BigPond's ludicrous excess charge of AUD$150 per gig back home:
ebay.com.au removing reserve function for auctions
Posted on 05. Jul, 2004
Interesting, good move I reckon:
