Monday, February 19, 2007
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)
Monday, February 12, 2007
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.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
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.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Well, I had been using Performancing.com’s Metrics to monitor traffic to my website as well as Google’s Analytics. Unfortunately, it appears that they are discontinuing the product. This is a little disappointing since it did a pretty decent job.
The good aspect of this is that they will be open sourcing the code. But, I don’t know what kind of form it is going to be in.
However, they have also recommended a new product from feedburner. When I have a bit more time, I will go through the process of converting over and checking it out. However, for now, I would just like to say thank you to Performancing.com for their contributions, both as a service in the past and as a code donation for the future.
I came across a problem while using my MythTV box. I decided that I would like to be able to download the mpegs onto my desktop. I have issues watching the shows using MythFrontEnd on my G4 powerbook over wireless. So, downloading the files and watching them with VLC was my next step.
So, what was the best way to download files? I set up both ftp and samba. They were both a bit hokey because I really have to rename all of the files so that they make sense. Plus, I am not sure if they are the most efficient ways to transfer files. What I really wanted to do was to browse to the file using MythWeb and then download them from there. Then I can see the descriptions, time recorded, etc. … The only problem was Apache. Most of my files are over 2GB. A one hour show generally is 2.2GB on my box. I always got an error when I tried to download a show. Unfortunately, Apache 2.0 on my Ubuntu box has 32bit issues when dealing with large files. I use Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) as my Myth box. (For a good resource on setting this up check out this page.)
The solution to my problem was a different web server called Lighttpd.
(Continued)
