Yes, sports fans, it's been twelve days since I decided to move my hosting back onto my living room floor. So far, it's been 12 days of pure bliss, of heavenly visions filled with bunny rabbits and endless fields of sunshine and happiness, where kids run forever. But seriously, things have been going rather great. I haven't had a single hiccup, and get complete SQL backups emailed to me twice a day, just in case something were to ever go wrong. All my data is backed up with RAID 5 storage (and will email me whenever a drive starts to get old, thanks to hourly SMART diagnostics), so unless my apartment ...

Well, it was an interesting day in the blogosphere, one that I'm thankful is over. Tonight I was sitting at home debating drinking myself into a coma when Rebecca pinged me online and said I should come over for wine. I was pretty comfy in my flannel pants and briefly debated staying at home. But since I really needed a few drinks, I decided to head over as I was, flannel pants and all. So for the last few hours I've been sitting on Rebecca and John's couch in my flannel pants with a big-ass afghan draped over me. It was pretty much exactly what I needed tonight (although I'm looking forward to ...

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 with a ...

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'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 on the host ...

So I'm currently at my mom's place looking at her new computer. While checking out her new monitor, she spilled the goods: Mom: "Hey, you know that blog entry about people getting to your blog by googling duanestorey.com" Me: "Yah" Mom: "Don't tell anyone, but it was us.. That's what we do" So there you have it. My mom needs a few lessons in how to browse the web. I still love her though. Even though it means I might be adopted. ...

Rebecca and John swung by tonight for 2.25 L of wine drinking fun. Don't shake baby. Also, my hosting account over on another server basically expired. I did my best to move everyone's websites over, but turns out that it's rather difficult to change over DNS entries for websites you don't own. I tried my best though. ...

Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I'd love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I'm collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it'll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how they compare to each other during normal wear and tear. The teaser is over for now! Stay tuned, in a few days I'll post ...

Tonight I had a few people over at my place to watch movies, drink some beer, and hack out a few techy type things. My little project for the evening was to try and media-ify my blog somehow. One of the ideas I was playing with was extracting all the media out of all my blog posts and having that in a separate player somewhere. There are other players for Wordpress (based on the popular flash FLV player) that do something similar, except with those you have to manually input a playlist or set up a special directory. A snapshot of the media player The main benefit of the way I've done it is that ...

There are a bunch of guys over at my place right now, messing around with blogs, media, podcasts, and of course, beer. Right now it's John Bollwitt, John Biehler, and Boris Mann is downstairs with the next shipment of beer. I'll update this as the day/night goes on. We all have a few projects we want to do. I'm currently moving all my websites over to Media Temple, which is basically easy but requires a bunch of grunt work to pull off. After that I'm going to attempt to make really awesome movie/mp3 player for Wordpress. John Bollwitt making scrambled eggs, photo by John Biehler Wow, the day ...

Yes, this is what I look like before I cut off your head and steal all your powers, bitches. Big thanks to Clay for misusing all our web design resources at work to make this possible. Apparently he thought the whole Star Wars thing was too retro, and came up with something better. Thanks for supporting my cause against the evil guys against me, dude. Watch out for my sword. PS - I'm commando under all that shit. Believe it. Also, tomorrow is a big nerd session at my place. John Bollwitt, Boris Mann and John Biehler are definitely swinging by to drink some beers, watch some movies, and play catch-up ...

I'm not entirely sure if this is a new feature or not, but I use analytics all the time (and if you don't, you should promptly head over and sign up for an account), and I don't remember seeing it until just a few minutes ago. It appears Google now has a new analytics section where you can track internal searches on your blog. So while Google Analytics already shows you how other people are reaching your site from Google, you can now see how people are navigating within your site based on searches within your blogging platform. To configure it, you have to go edit your website profile from the ...

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I've wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I'm pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I'm just going to describe what would happen, and we'll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology ...

So, I've been meaning to ask this question for a long time. Yesterday I had a pile of traffic, thanks to a few inbound links from some massive sites. I broke into the thousands for unique visitors, which doesn't happen that often in Duane-land. Given that only about ten people ever comment, I gotta ask, who are the rest of you guys? Nearly 50% of you are returning visitors every day, and yet you lurk in the shadows, thick as thieves I say. The lack of comments either means: I'm really boring YOU'RE really boring I'm pretty sure I am not boring all the time, which means it JUST MIGHT BE YOU! ...

I heard little bits of pieces of this last night, but just managed to read the real blog entry today. Tony Pierce is going to be leaving LAist and will be heading over to the LA Times to run all of their blogs. Congrats Tony, that's really awesome. First beer's on me out in TO bud. ...

So tonight I was trying to figure out just how in the world I was going to go about merging multiple RSS feeds together. The end result I was trying to achieve was so my RSS feed on this site would actually have my entries from duanestorey.com as well as those from matthewgood.org. I sort of assumed that feedburner would do that for me, but it turns out you can't combine your own RSS feeds using it. The solution? Yahoo Pipes. I had never heard of it, but after doing a quick search, I learned it's the tool to use. And man oh man, is it cool. You can pick and choose different source elements, filters, ...

I'm pretty beat, having spent a good portion of the day traveling again. The flight from Montreal to Vancouver, with the strong head winds, was almost six hours long - thankfully it was extremely bearable up in business class, thanks to my hot towel and my tasty meals. Despite all the perks associated with business class (and there are many), I think the main one I enjoyed is that the flight attendants and people you encounter all automatically treat you with respect. If you have a problem, they'll help you solve it. If you don't like your seat, they'll help you move. Worried about your luggage? ...

A while ago I attended a small function and snapped a pile of photos at it, putting most of them into a Flickr set so that others could view them and use them. While sitting at work today, I did a quick Google search to see if there were any other photos from the function, or any write-ups about it. After a few clicks, I came across one site, and immediately noticed that they had used a bunch of my photos in their blog entry. Unfortunately, not only did they not link back to the original photos, but they also did not mention the source at all. After looking at the image links in the HTML, it was ...

As you can see, things look a little different around here after tonight. I got tired of looking at my old theme about two days after I put it up, but just didn't feel like doing anything about it. So tonight while watching Million Dollar Baby, I decided to take a stab and making it a bit different. It's nothing fancy -- all I did is start with the default Wordpress theme and add a few things here and there. The main header is a HDR sunrise I did off my patio about a month ago. Gravatars are broken right now, but since Keira and I seem to be the only ones using them, it's not really any big hardship. ...

Photo by Kris Krug Starting at 1pm this afternoon, a group of internet enthusiasts will be gathering down at the Bryght offices for some food, drinks, Nintendo Wii and lots of fun. It's going to be a chance to mingle with like-minded people, enjoy some music, and even catch up on whatever internet-related project you currently have on the go. I'll be meeting up later tonight with Kris, Kim, Boris, Rebecca, John, and a whack of other people I haven't met yet. I think Kim even challenged me to a drinking contest, something I'm sure she'll regret tomorrow. ...