The Grand Downtime

As you all had probably noticed the server was down for a looong time – about 18 hours. It all started as minor hardware upgrade, that didn’t went right, that was turned into major software upgrade. The server is currently running Fedora Linux Core 4. Not everything is fixed and reconfigured, so, please stay with me for the time being. I am trying to fix everything as fast as I can. Yes, that includes your hosted websites.

I will let you know when I’m done so that you could check if everything is back to normal. I will also provide some more details about what went wrong and how I worked around it.

So long for now…

Geostamping

In an attempt to promote Cyprus on the Web, as well as draw some additional traffic to my blog, I’ve installed the Geo plugin for WordPress. All my entries from now will be properly stamped with geographic coordinates.

Since I don’t travel a lot, and even don’t have a GPS device yet, most of my entries will carry a generic Limassol coordinates (latitude: 34.67500, longitude: 33.03333). At times when I will be posting from places other than Limassol, I will adjust the coordinates accordingly.

Statistics refreshed

I’ve installed a couple of statistical plugins.

  • SearchHistory. It lets me see the history of searches that were done on this site. The results are available only to me via the Administrator interface, but I thought I’d let you know.
  • Counterize. This is yet another counter of visitors. Again, mostly this is for myself, but you can see a short summary, which I added to the Statistics page.

Now I know all about you…

New category: Memories

Recently, I have read an interesting post in someone’s blog (don’t remember who now) about the routine. The author was saying that there is plenty of interesting stuff going on in an average person’s life. Everyone has ineresting stories to tell. Everyone can remember at least a couple of funny episode’s from own life.

The strange thing though, that author continued, is that most people pay attention only to routine stuff. And they blog about routine. Wake up, brush teeth, breakfast, go to work, get bored, go for lunch, return and get bored again, go home, watch TV, go to bed – that sort of thing. If I remember correctly, he was speaking particularly about Live Journals, but what he said holds equally true to any other blogging community out there.

When I read that post at first I just nodded my head in agreement and forgot about the whole deal. Few days later I started thinking about it. Yes, it is true that most people blog about routine. Am I one of them? Probably. What can I do to improve the situation? Well, it is difficult to spot interesting stuff as it happens (although I try and thus blog a lot). But it is pretty easy to tell something that happened before. Interesting episodes from the past are crystal clear. Why not tell them? Heh, no good reason.

Therefor I am adding yet another category called ‘Memories’ (in ‘Personal’) where I will post stories from the days that are long gone. I’ve had surely lots of fun in my life. I will try to tell the stories. At least, this way they won’t drown in my memory one day…

del.icio.us link dumps

I was thinking about the ways of integrating my Delicious bookmarks with my blog lately. I didn’t want to syncronize my bookmarks into WordPress links. And I didn’t want to create an RSS link list either. I had it before and it didn’t prove useful. Finally, I think the best way to integrate the two is in the form of daily link dumps, which will be regular posts featuring a list of bookmarks I made during the day. This way it will be simple, static, and automatic.

I didn’t have to spend a lot of time looking for (or, dare I to mention, write) the appropriate script. The one was available here. With small modifications I guess it will do the job.

Let me know if the dumps will get too annoying and I will switch them to private posts.

Update: You can get my version of the script by clicking on yadd.php. My changes are as follows:

  • Added WordPress post statut configuration variable. Originally, the script was publishing post. With the configuration variable it is easy to make script create drafts or private posts.
  • Integrated the patch by Zach Paine which prevents the creation of empty posts on those days when no links were posted to Delicious .
  • Made the Extended field to be only printed when it is non-empty.
  • Added optional tag linking. The variable $tag_link is about 10 lines below the rest of configuration because I didn’t bother to spend any more time on the script. Set the variable to 'yes' for the script to link tags. Otherwise it will leave them in plain text which was the original behavior.