Category: Site

(Just testing out the WP upgrade.)

Holy, mackerel! Not sure what’s changed, but suddenly, I’m getting about 50 spam comments per day here at NfGCW. Thank God for automated anti-spam tools, but sheesh what a waste of bandwidth!

Isn’t it time for these guys to give up on comment spam? Does it ever actually get through on anyone’s blog any more?

If you notice, any random behavior on any of the Great Castle Wilson sites, please let me know. I am doing some er… odd things to my machine (like upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5), in order to get some new software running on it.

More details once I get it all going…

Take a look at this chart (sorry about the size, that what it takes to get it to fit):

That’s the breakdown of the browser hits on my server over the last five days. Now given that I know *I* use Safari to visit the site, I find it interesting that Firefox (65%) is way ahead of Safari (26%), and IE is getting only 4% (best case just over 8%, even if all the “Unknowns” were IE). I wouldn’t bet the farm on the veracity of this data, and certainly wouldn’t attempt to generalize this further, but it’s still interesting.

I have never worried about who wanders around my website before. It’s not topical enough for most people to be interested, and I just assumed I didn’t get much traffic.

For grins last night, I decided I would start running some traffic measurements on the server. There weren’t many surprises, except for the number of hits that I get from the various crawlers out there (Google, Yahoo, MSNBot, etc.).

One thing that I did find odd though, was that last night, between 10:00 and 11:30, I had three separate, theoretically non-bot, IPs hit on the photo gallery site. I almost never update that site, and almost all of the content is password protected anyway. One of them was probably me, since I was clicking around while testing the web stats software, but who were the other two? Weird.

Apparently, I’ve been picked up by the Planet OTI feed aggregator.

To any new readers this drags in: Welcome.

I must say though, this is a personal blog, and I expect most people will find that it has an extremely poor s2n ratio for anyone who isn’t one of my relatives, or otherwise interested in my home life. 🙂

In any case, I welcome comments from one and all. Akismet is my friend, but I do have moderation-on-first-post turned on, so there may be a delay before your words show up.

I finally figured out that the RSS feed for my wiki had stopped working. After some digging, I realized that it was caused by my last upgrade of the wiki software, where they had renamed the file containing the rss code which, of course, was referenced by name in my initialization file.

Anyway, if anyone was crazy enough to be tracking that feed, it should be working again. If you want to check it out, here’s the link.

In case anyone cares, I upgraded Great Castle Wiki to the latest version of PmWiki and gave it a shiny new look based on the abitmodern skin.

Because we all know: style is everything. 😉

Ok, so I have finally figured out how CSS works.

As a test, I bashed the main Great Castle Wilson site to use CSS for all structure and formatting instead of the old code, which was a bunch of nested tables and embedded text attributes. The new version of the site is quite similar to the old one, with a small number of “upgrades” to the appearance, such as rollovers in the nav bar.

What they say about how using CSS reduces the size of the files is true, even for small pages. The old index.html file was 4,068 bytes. The new index.html+style.css files together are only 3,121 bytes.

Anyway, for reference, the old index.html file can be found here.

1. Power down; remove power cord
2. Lift case open lever on back panel; remove side panel and plastic insert
3. Insert drive in bay; flip lever to hold in place
4. Attach the SATA cables that are already conveniently placed next to where they should mount on drive
5. Replace insert and side panel (and push down case open lever)
6. Replace power cord; power up
7. When mac asks you if you want to initialize the drive, say yes
8. When Disk Utility opens, select drive; click on partition tab; click on partition button

That’s it.

On a separate note, the current sweet spot for HDs is 250Gig, 16Meg ram cache, 7200rpm for $100.00. Unbelievable.