Comments (2)

By Les Scammell, March 31, 2008 1:49 pm

I have kept my link with BlogRush alive despite reading many of the negative comments from different blogs. I agree with what has been written by the masses, namely, that BlogRush has been a huge disappointment when it comes to delivering traffic.

My main reason for keeping it was simply because it provided another set of quick statistics. I like graphs and BlogRush’ statistical graphs appealed to me.

In recent weeks I have started to notice an increase in traffic. It is only small although a statistician would have a field day. I went from having two or three his per post to currently receiving anything up to ten hits.

Now I know that in the big picture, ten hits is nothing. But then if you are only getting 100 hits per day, 10 hits represents 10% (like a said, a statistician would have a field day). The obvious result could be, seven post per week, an extra 70 visitors. Not quite. I think I would be lucky to get 40.

However, given that all I have to do is have the widget on my sidebar, an extra 40 visitors per week for no work is not something I am going to quickly reject. As I said earlier, the traffic is slowly growing.

I am not sure why traffic is improving. I know they have a new feed system in place which I am sure is helping. It could also be that with many dropping out there is less competition so my posts are appearing more often. It may be, that like a fine wine, BlogRush is just maturing slowly. Whatever the reason, I am happy to accept the extra traffic. I think if you were able to filter out some posts then the service would be far better.

If you have rejected BlogRush in the past, it may be time to revisit. Then again, that means more competition for the post spots. On second thoughts, if you have rejected it, or you are not really interested in it, then don’t bother. Leave the ad spots available for me. If you are interested, click on the BlogRush widget and check it out – yes they do have an affiliate program – you get paid in traffic credits not cash.

In the meantime, I feel my header could use a slight work over again. It seems having my ugly mug up there is driving people away. Strange it should be driving them wild with excitement, well my lady visitors at least. Perhaps I should get a fine piece of art work placed there. Perhaps I should ask the art trustee George Lindemann jr for some advice.

Comments (10)

By Les Scammell, March 30, 2008 3:02 pm

I have ventured into the latest WordPress 2.5 upgrade with a little trepidation. There is always this underlying fear of losing all that has been done on my sites. I have a distrust of backups particularly when it comes to upgrades.

However I decided it had to be done at some stage and putting it off would not get the job done so I selected one of my lesser sights, one that I have only just started in the last month, and gave it the upgrade. The end result. It was very easy. A breeze in fact.

My first piece of advice is to use a good FTP client. They make the transfer files easy and quick. Here is a basic summary of what you need to do to upgrade. The information is also available from WordPress.org.

1. deactivate all plugins,
2. download the upgrade package and extract it on your desktop,
3. delete the admin and includes folders from your sites – this is where a good FTP client comes in handy,
4. upload the new admin and includes folders to your site,
5. leave the content folder intact – just copy the new files from the wp-content folder on your desktop to the wp-content folder on your site,
6. if you need them – copy the classic and default themes across – I always keep the default theme in place in case of emergency,
7. copy the files from the root directory of the upgrade folder to the WP root directory on your site,
8. you can manually find the upgrade file and run that, or simply load your site and upgrade the database from there,
9. reactivate your plugins – try one at time testing the site after each has been activated,
10. done.

It couldn’t be easier. It took me about 30 minutes to complete the upgrade, but then again I have a very slow broadband connection.

What do I like about the new WordPress

It looks sleek and looks new. It seems to be a little quicker as well. The plugins can be updated through the plugins menu so for me that will probably mean I can remove the onestep install plugin – one less plugin to stress the system.

What don’t I like – I will get back to you on that. The look and feel is fairly good but with all change comes a little settling period. If there is one I don’t like straight away it would have to be the widget interface. To me, the important area is the current widget installation area. For some reason that has been shunted off to the right with the center of the screen devoted to the widgets available. To me that is a little back to front – I want to see clearly what is currently installed, particularly if I am going in to edit a text box.

Otherwise, installation is quick and smooth. The new interface feels good and it is certainly a little faster. From the end users point of view, there is no change (which is how it should be), a visitor would not know if you had upgraded or not. If I comes across any major issues you will be the first to know. If you have been holding back, don’t – it is pretty drama free.

In the mean time, my installation went smoothly, no loss of hair or turning gray (too late), no bleary eyes or cranky tantrums but plenty of relief from skin redness – don’t ask.

Comments (2)

By Les Scammell, March 29, 2008 11:38 pm

As a general rule I enjoy shopping but today was an absolute nightmare. We went out to one of the larger chain stores and did a mass of birthday shopping. That was fine – my girls will all be very happy with their birthday presents (3 birthdays in 15 days is no joke). Once we had collected all our goods it was off to the checkout and that is where the rot began.

All the checkouts were busy so I, being the clever dick that I am, decided we should try the new ’self checkout’ facility that they have installed. Talk about a crazy worthless system – no wonder there was no one waiting to use it.

First, you scan the item yourself – not a big problem except the very first item wouldn’t scan – when it did it scanned twice. That’s cool – don’t stress – just hit the cancel button – all along there is this sickly sweet female computer voice giving you advice. We hit the cancel button – ‘please wait for an attendant to verify’ – there goes the ‘self checkout’.

The attendant arrives, swipes her card and toddles off again. ‘please place your item in the bag’. Hello, I don’t want a damn bag, this item wont fit any bag any way – its too big. ‘please wait for an attendant’. Back she comes, waves her card, all cool again. We keep going. Except the damn machine doesn’t recognize when you do place your item in the checkout bag. I am sure I put things in and took them out again half a dozen times before it was happy.

Half an hour later we finally get everything scanned and its time to pay. ‘please wait for an attendant, an irregularity has been detected’ – by now I was getting a little sick of hearing the voice and was not in a good mood. ( photo credit: msmail)

The attendant arrives, ‘have you got any DVD’s or CD’s’ – yes three or four. That’s fine she does her thing and clears the machine ‘irregularity’ – I’ll give it ‘irregularity’ all right. After finally getting to pay and thinking all was fine, we start to head off out of the store only to be stopped again by ‘the attendant’.

‘BTW – you need to take your receipt and the DVD’s back to the entertainment section so they can put the DVD’s into their boxes’.

You have got to be joking.
After two hours of actually finding what we wanted to buy, it took another hour to use the ’self checkout’ facility before we could head off to the pet care center to buy a few other odds and ends. ( photo credit: beneneuman)

This has to be one of the worst cases of technology making life easier for the consumer. You can bet we will see more of this into the future as well. One ‘attendant’ can look after 6 of these machines. That is five young check out operators who wont get jobs – often first or after school jobs.

I want a human or I am not going to shop there – plain and simple.

Comments (3)

By Les Scammell, March 29, 2008 12:19 am

Spam has once again become one of my little nightmares both here at the radical blogger and at my Just 4 Families parenting blog. It seem that when I write a post that draws a decent commentary it also seems to flag the spammers to have a go.

Andy Beard wrote a little blurb on Akismet and the frustrations it creates. I have used Akismet on both sites since Christmas. It has been great at stopping the spam, nothing is getting through although I often have to go in and extract non-spam comments. I would much rather be de spamming some comments than having to manually delete 10-15 spam comments each day – and that is on a good day.

My Just 4 Families site has been badly hit lately to the point that I turned comments off. That site is a Drupal powered site rather than WordPress. I have now installed a Captcha module (simple maths) and since then I have had no spam at all. I am assuming that all this spam has been bot driven.

My question now is what do you think about Captcha? I often find the word or character based captcha to be a pain in the butt, these blurry old eyes find it hard to distinguish the characters. The math based ones are not a problem.

Do you get turned off commenting because there is a captcha installed? From my experience, the captcha has worked well to kill the spam and certainly saved me a lot of time in going in and reviewing all the spammed comments before deleting them.

In the mean time – I am going to spam myself off to the San Diego sweetwater saloon at Hard Rock for a bit of time out after this last spate of spam and consider finding a simple captcha plugin for this site. (in case you are wondering – don’t ask).