Yes, it’s that time again — Northern Voice, Canada’s awesome personal blogging conference, is kicking off this weekend down at the University Of British Columbia. I’ll be attending the whole event, starting Thursday night at the social, and finishing sometime on Saturday.
Friday is of course “MooseCamp”, an unconference where people come together and share ideas. I’ll be spearheading a discussion on WordPress plugins during one session, and will be giving a talk during PhotoCamp. PhotoCamp is organized and chaired by resident photo expert Kris Krug, and he has been organizing these ...
Yes sports fans, it’s 3:46am and yours truly is still wide awake. I’ve been lying in bed since around midnight try to sleep, but it’s just not happening. I caved in and popped a sedative a few minutes ago. I think I have to cut myself off from doing anything on the computer on Sunday nights and just read or watch movies instead. Whenever I get involved in something on my blog or some coding I’ve been meaning to do, I just have a really hard time turning my brain off when it’s time to go to sleep. Maybe I need to lay off the caffeine for a bit as well. Who knows.
Needless to say I’ll ...
There are a lot of different ways you can increase the speed of your website, even if you have relatively cheap hosting. If you’re lucky, your blogging platform already has a caching engine built in (Drupal does). If you’re unlucky, and running something like WordPress, you have to do a bit more work.
Caching makes a website more responsive because it takes an expensive operation (such as a long database query) and stores it so that next time it doesn’t have to recompute it entirely. For example, when you go to this website, normally Apache would execute PHP, parse the WordPress code, do ...
As most of you know, there are several popular methods for obtaining statistics for your blog. While Google Analytics is probably the most comprehensive one I know (with the added benefit of being free), it is limited somewhat by the fact the the statistics are not real-time. For most practical purposes, that limitation isn’t a big deal, but it’s sometimes nice to be able to see what’s going on within your website in real time.
On the recommendation of a friend, I splurged the $30 to finally see what Mint was all about. If you haven’t heard of it, Mint is a commercial statistics package ...
This has been a bit of a mystery for me over the last few months. I’ve slowly watched my technorati rating go from about 180 down to where it currently is, sitting snugly at 156 (although it was 159 yesterday). Considering it’s been climbing non-stop since last year, I’ve been a bit confused as to why it’s started to drop.
After doing some research, it appears that technorati has been busy changing things on their backend. Recently, they made it so subdomains no longer count towards main domain scores. This has hurt the rating of quite a few large blogs.
Prior to that change, technorati ...
So, it’s only been about 5 days since I started, but I thought I’d drop a quick update. As most of you know, I am a big supporter of low-carbohydrate diets, mostly because a great deal of research show they are superior for treating things like diabetes and heart disease, but also because I once lost a great deal of weight (with relative ease) by just giving up carbs.
Effectively, the last few days have really been a transition from a moderate carbohydrate to a low-carb one for me. I’ve been keeping accurate food, weight and activity logs, which should help me figure out what’s working ...
As you can see, my little advertising experiment with Commission Junction is pretty failtastic.
Which is strange, because the ads are fairly targeted based on a few specific, popular pages of mine. I’m not a big fan of advertising to tell you the truth — I ripped Google Adsense off here a few months ago. To me, it’s worth $10 a month or whatever not to have them pollute my main page. I was testing a new concept though with more targeted ads that I choose, but so far it’s not working.
Is anyone here actually making money with your blog (i.e, enough at least to pay for hosting)? ...
I love the smell of Saturday in the morning. The sleeping in, the sound of traffic that pulls me out of bed at 11am. It’s not very often I get full days to myself these days, so when I do get them, I definitely enjoy them. I’m just demolishing my second cup of coffee, and then will probably hit the open road for a few hours.
I went by the hospital last night to see my friend Clay. Clay had a quintuple bypass surgery, but is doing relatively well. As I well know, being in the hospital totally sucks, so I’m gonna swing by for a bit. Then, who knows. Maybe down to Urban Fare to get some groceries. ...
While many of you may be out tonight doing something for Valentine’s day, just hope that you don’t hurt yourself and end up in an emergency room in New Westminster. Apparently the fire marshal was called in yesterday and was forced to clear part of the ER due to overcrowding:
The fire marshal has ordered an area of the emergency room at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster to be cleared because of overcrowding. Fraser Health Authority spokesman Michael Bernard said the fire department was called to the hospital after receiving a complaint about crowding.
“He took a look around the ...
I picked up a book the other day that I’ve been meaning to read for a few months now. It is a book by a scientific journalist named Gary Taubes entitled Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) (although after reading it, I think a more appropriate title might be something like “The People’s History Of Diet And Nutrition.”)
For those of you who follow nutritional research, you may remember Gary from a controversial article he wrote in 2002 in the New York Times called ‘What If It’s Been A Big Fat Lie?” In that article, he ...
So while many of us suffer from the end products of love, and some of us end up broken hearted, my friend Clay is the only guy I know who actually has, quite literally, a broken heart.
Photo from here.
Clay is currently down at St. Paul’s hospital getting a coronary bypass operation. Not a very enjoyable way to spend Valentine’s day. I just called down and he’s still in surgery. I’ll probably swing by later tonight if he’s out of the ICU, or more than likely tomorrow. If anyone has that stupid fish game with the hoops and the water, let me know. I’m sure Clay will swing by my blog ...
1977, in front of the House Agriculture Subcommittee of Domestic Marketing, talking about the recent recommendations by the USDA and Food and Nutrition Board towards a low-fat diet:
However tenuous that linkage, however disappointing the various intervention trials, it still seems prudent to propose to the American public that we not only maintain reasonable weights for our height, body structure and age, but also reduce our dietary fat intakes significantly, and keep cholesterol to a minimum. And, conceivably, you might conclude that it is proper for the federal government to so recommend.
On ...
I just caught this video over on Tony’s blog. I have a hard time watching confrontations like this — I don’t even know what I’d do if I were ever put in a situation with an asshole cop like that. ...
My first MRI was actually fair bit shittier than I imagined. I got to the hospital about 40 minutes before my scheduled time, and went to the Jim Pattison pavilion (like I was told). Unfortunately, there was no MRI facility in the JPP, and at that hour there wasn’t really anyone to ask. I found an information kiosk that showed a MRI lab in the Centennial Pavilion, so I hurried down there and took a seat in the waiting room.
Of course, there wasn’t anyone in the reception booth so I just sat in the corner hoping that it was the correct place. There were a few other people in the waiting room ...
There is a relatively new device called “The English Mosquito” which is being used in England to control where young people typically gather.
The device works by emitting high-frequency sounds that only young people (typically younger than 20 years of age) have the ability to hear. Because it’s fairly annoying, it causes young people to eventually leave a particular area. Human right’s groups are obviously unimpressed with the blanket use of the devices:
Aynsley-Green said about 3,500 of the devices are in use across England to split up gatherings of youth in areas such as parks and shops.
“These ...
I’ve been dabbling with a new caching engine for WordPress over the last few weeks. While WP-Cache does a pretty decent job, it falls short in a few areas, and it’s something I’ve been trying to fix. In particular, here’s what I don’t like about it:
It relies on the entire WordPress engine to do it’s caching
It doesn’t make use of proper HTTP caching headers
The problem with the first item is that even if you have a cache hit, the entire WordPress PHP core is parsed and partially executed. What that means is the caching system will always be limited by how fast the PHP parser is ...
I’ve decided to do a multipart series on how to take your WordPress installation to the next level. Most people seem to have an out-of-the-box WordPress installation, and I think they are really missing out on a few things that can really improve the quality of their blog.
The first topic I’d like to cover is search engines. Most of you know how a search engine works, but for those who don’t, here’s a really quick primer. Search engines employ little agents called “Bots” that basically roam around the internet taking snapshots of the content. Google’s little guy is called “GoogleBot”, ...
For all of you who have been waiting patiently for the new 10.5.2 update, the wait is over. 10.5.2 is now available on software update. I’m installing all 350 MB of it right now.
For all of you about to update, I salute you.
Oh, and for all you people on shitty broadband, you should know I just downloaded 352 MB in 4 minutes here. ...