New Ubuntu Wallpaper
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Was just playing around in Photoshop and this wallpaper was the result. Just thought I would share.
Ubuntu at Night 1920x1200 Wallpaper
Thanks for Visiting
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After upgrading the site I decided to spend a little time actually tracking visitors to the site, which I have not really done in the past. So I signed up for Google Analytics installed the small blob of JS code and let it go.
The amount of data Google Analytics let’s you track in an easy way is pretty amazing. You can see entrance and exit pages, which links on a page were clicked on and a whole host of other things. It’s a huge step up from the standard Webalizer I used to use, which basically just shows how many visitors you have.
Anyway, I was actually quite surprised how many people visit the site (apart from me debugging 
) and just wanted say thanks for coming and I will try to post some more useful stuff soon.
I was also quite interested how many hits very old posts were getting. A lot of hits were going to “node/36″ which is a 404 now and linked to an old wallpaper I posted while playing around with Photoshop. It showed me how important old content can be when moving a site. If nothing else it can act as a gateway to get people into the rest of the site.
Just because I forgot about something I did a few years ago does not mean Google forgot about it. I just wish all the CMS systems will settle on a standard URL format so it would be easier to migrate to new systems and map old URLs onto you new system.
What is Pubsubhubsub?
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After watching TWIg (This Week in Google) Episode 1 about a week ago found out about Pubsubhubsub. It sounded interesting because it seems like this protocol or something like it is going to be important to Google Wave in the future. I have not had a chance to play with Google Wave yet, but from what I saw its goal is to do everything in real time, including interactions with websites, blogs, forums and comments.
With the current polling syndication system this is impossible to do without polling every website you are interested in multiple times a second. Pubsubhubsub is building on the current syndication spec and adding push notifications to it, thus allowing real time updates from any enabled site with a syndicated feed. In this post I am going to go over a little more of what I have learnt about PSHS and what it does and how to enable it with WordPress.
FriendFeed Bought by Facebook
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Wow pretty big news for a Monday, it seems that Facebook has bought FriendFeed outright. Noone is sure exactly what this means for Friendfeed right now, but it is pretty big news.
I actually only started using FriendFeed on Saturday, but just from a few hours of use I was quite impressed by what it lets you do. The whole site feels very “instant” unlike many other sites that rely on RSS feeds, or even Twitter requires refreshing and polling every minute or so.
The biggest thing I am worried about though, it that FriendFeed seems to be a bit of a testing playground for developing social technology. For example, in my earlier post about Google Wave tech they are the first site to use the Pubsubhubbub to get instant updates from RSS feeds. If FriendFeed goes away it seems like the tech savy crowd it currently has, and the more bleeding edge environment might go away.
What I Hope Happens
Hopefully Facebook will be smart about this, they should leave the FriendFeed website alone and allow the team to continue development there. They should just try to focus on integrating some of the more real-time stuff into Facebook like the instant comments and great aggregation features of FriendFeed.
It just seems like it would be a mistake to dismantle the FriendFeed community when it is such a good place for development to continue and new technology to emerge.
Also, by keeping FriendFeed separate hopefully we will not be subjected to all the questionable ToS agreements Facebook comes up with.
This could be a great thing for everyone, it could mean that Facebook is finally opening up a little. Lets hope it works out like that.
The Google Wave is Here?!
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I was just listening to This Week in Google episode two and they were discussing PubSubHubBub which is a Google Code project implementing push notifications on the web. The basic idea is that instead of having multiple clients poll your website feeds for new posts you site will push the content out immediately when you post it. So for example if I have this enable on my site when I hit the publish button my post is stored on the server, and simultaneously a ping is sent to Pubsubhubbub (terrible name fyi) with the new content. That is then pushed to anyone who is subscribed to the feed.
With Google Wave everyone is focused on the application, and will it replace e-mail. But for me the Google Wave application is more of a technical demo than the whole architecture. If the Google Wave application fails it does not mean that Google Wave the architecture fails. The Pubsubhubbub project is a perfect example of this, we are already getting Wave functionality today without even having the Wave application. If you use Feedburner you can already enable “PingShot” which use push notifications to instantly push your posts to compatible sites. Right now very few sites support it, I believe Friend Feed is one of them. But when this sort of technology catches on it will already implement one of the biggest features of Wave which is the instantaneous updates from the web.
When this is made two-way then people will be able to instantly post comments on your posts from their consuming applications, and even collaborate on Wiki style pages from Within Wave applications.
So in short Google Wave is more of a way of doing things than one application, or even one protocol. And while it will not replace e-mail anytime soon, it will certainly change the way we do things on the web.
Short URL’s
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After installing WordPress one of the first things I wanted to do was make a custom Short URL generator for the site. However after doing a quick search for plugins I found out two modules that will do what I need. The first creates short links for all the posts on the site, the second provides a directory of links to external sites. Both modules route all the links through a custom domain I bought.
Moved to WordPress!
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If you have been reading recently then you know that I have been having a few problems configuring Drupal 6 after upgrading from version 4.7. After looking through many configuration settings, and all the modules needed to do what I wanted I could see that Drupal was too much for what I needed.
Digg.com – Sponsored Stories?!
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Digg.com has been one of my daily sites for a long time now, I really like the idea of community submitted stories and the community “Digging” the stories to promote them. This is both good and bad because the community can be full of a bunch of idiots who just keep posting the same photo of a Tiger swimming in a pool, or they can post some undiscovered gem I have never seen before. But good or bad it’s always been about the community.
Digg.com adds Sponsored Stories!
Today for the first time I seen a Sponsored story on Digg. It makes it to the front page with only 4 or 5 votes. This is too much now. We already have to put up with the flash ads popping up on each page and now companies can pay to get their stories on the front page.
It’s not there all the time, it pops up randomly when you visit. But this is not a good sign for the direction Digg is taking. I know they have to make money, but this seems like a line that they should not cross. In my mind it’s like a news paper selling articles to corporations and letting them write the material.
WordPress For the Win?
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Well after giving Drupal 6 a quick shot I decided that it is no longer for me. Drupal has always been a kitchen sink kind of system, and that’s what it’s meant to be. After looking at all the configuration options, and how many issues I ran into during a simple upgrade and updating a theme I decided it was time to look for something a little more polished. Drupal is still great for creating a large community site, but if you are just looking for a blog or a central place for all your online stuff then it’s just overkill.
So with that I decided to give WordPress a try, and initial impressions are good. I have a blog up and running, and I am currently working on getting my old posts out of Drupal (much much harder than it should be) and importing into WordPress. I found a few tutorials for the move from Drupal, but most involve direct manupulation of the database, which in my eyes is a bad idea. So instead I am writing a small script that exports some basic Drupal post data into an XML file, then use the WordPress Import modules to import the data. So far it’s working well.
WordPress just seems much more focused on what I need right now, which is basically a blog. But it also seems to offer a lot of extensibility via modules and themes. I am about 60% of the way through creating a custom theme and it all seems quite well though out. Hopefully everything will be all back together by Monday. This will teach me to stop being lazy and just make a Linux server for testing next time, I was sure I could get everything upgraded in a day or two. 
Upgraded to Drupal 6.0
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As you can see from the default theme I decided to upgrade the site to Drupal 6.0. I know that I have said in the past to never develop on your main site, but I thought what the hell. It’s not like this is a mission critical site or anything.
Anyway, I got a few database warnings when upgrading and the site is acting a little funky. I just cleared the site cache information and it seems to be working a little better. So hopefully that was it.
However I am considering clearing out all the info in the database and starting from scratch. I have over 1000 users and when I was looking at them 90% are spam users who must have got in before I disabled user accounts.
I will continue to post as I go so we can experience it together.