Jeremy’s Brain Dump

If you can see this post, then you are viewing this from my new hosting provider. I am going to give Virtual Private Servers (VPS) a try. I just need to migrate the rest of the sites over.

I have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.3. So far, so good. My feedburn widget is running correct as far as I can tell. If anyone has any problems please let me know.

Apparently, the google sitemap plugin 2.7.1 is not WP 2.3 compatible.

I have had some new ideas floating around about the website lately. I wanted to be more community centric. I would like to try and get more people to contribute information. However, blogs (in my opinion) are not the best method for this. Blogs are more like a traditional classroom setting. The blogger (teacher) writes about a topic (stands in front of the class) and gives his expertise (hopefully ) or opinion about a subject that he chooses. If anyone on the internet (students) have any questions for blogger, they are free to post them. If not, the blog post stands on its own.

… where a blog post would automatically be entered into a forum. …

A forum however, is much more like a community of learners. The site owner may choose the direction of the forum such as, which topics to talk about, appropriate language, etc. But, the users of the site can help each other through their own means of posting individual questions, opinions, and answers. Blogging is a one to many communication. Forums are a many to many communication. (Continued)

I have just come across a new theme that I plan on using for my new blog. (I am thinking about switching domains, that should be an adventure.) This theme is called Unnamed by iqwolf. It has an option to enable a feedburner feed. I thought that this was very slick.

However, there is one slight problem with his implementation. It only “captures” the feed that you burn in feedburner. So, if you pick your RSS 2.0 feed to burn, it is the only one that gets redirected to feedburner. If someone comes along with an atom reader, they will still get the Wordpress feed and you will not see that traffic in feedburner.

As I mentioned earlier, performancing.com has dropped their public use of the their metric system. So, as recommended, I switched to Feedburner’s web analysis setup. This was pretty simple as I had already registered with Feedburner to keep track of my feeds.

However, their instructions were a little off for me. It is probably the way that my template is set up. It was still extremly simple. I just replaced the old metrics code in my footer.php of my template with the new Feedburner code. Within 15 minutes, Feedburner was displaying my statistics. Obviously, this means all new information. So, everyone pretty much lost all their data from metrics. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

The format for the Feedburner system is pretty easy to interpret. There are some quirks to get used to, but that happens everytime you change or even upgrade software. Regardless it is pretty informational. Between Feedburner and Google’s Analytics, I have a pretty decent idea of my traffic.