Posts filed under 'Blog News'
OK, I just worked it out (I Hope!). When I disabled the nedstat/webstats4u code by “commenting it out” in the footer template, the popups disappeared in my browser. Unfortunately, it would appear that Internet Explorer doesn’t understand HTML comments and tries to render them instead. It finally occured to me when I saw “–>” appearing next to the webstats4u icon in IE, that I had been so excited about getting rid of the popups that I only commented out that section of code, and forgot to remove it.
This appears to be a rendering bug (or feature) of Internet Explorer, that the standard “< --" and "-->” comment code is not treated as a comment, and instead treated as renderable code, which is why the popups continued to appear in Internet Explorer.
It should now be fixed (although a hard refresh using CTRL-F5 of the samuelgordonstewart.com homepage should force it). Again sorry about the inconvenience, I just never counted on that basic staple of usefulness being ignored by a browser.
Hopefully Internet Explorer will understand comments in version 7, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.
Samuel
February 24th, 2006 at 11:44pm
I have finally gone to the webstats4u (not to be confused with the good people at webstat.com) site and removed my account. I have also sent them an email outlining the reasons I have left, mainly the recent popup fiasco.
Reason for account cancellation
Dear Sir/Madam,
I have now deleted my Webstats4u account and wish to inform you why I made that decision. I have been mildly satisfied with your service for the time I have been using it, however I stopped using it as my primary stats generator a while back when I realised that it is unable to keep long term statistics for search keywords or visited pages, I found the services from webstat.com much more appealing. I did, however, continue using your service as it provided me with a useful set of short term statistics.
The reason I have decided to leave you is the popup advertising which you recently started to use. It has been my policy for a very long time to never serve popup advertising to my visitors, so you can imagine my horror when I discovered that my website was generating popups. After a little bit of troubleshooting I came to the conclusion that it was your service which was annoying my visitors and myself with ads. I understand that you are perfectly within your rights to do this, but I am quite disappointed that you decided to. I have now removed my account and have no intention of ever returning.
I would not be surprised to find many others leaving your service if I were you. Popup advertising is the bane of Internet advertising, as are those slide in flash ads which I understand you make use of as well. May I suggest, for your companies sake, that you consider other forms of advertising, such as replacing your stats counter button with an ad, I’m sure many webmasters would thank you.
Thanks for the memories, both good and bad, it is unfortunate that our working relationship had to come to an end like this, but that’s life, and I think we’ve both learnt a lesson.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
https://samuelgordonstewart.com
Naturally I will keep you up to date on the replies, if any.
Samuel
February 22nd, 2006 at 06:11am
As was expected, John Kerr’s show was inundated with jolly people wishing John a happy 64th birthday. John kicked off the show with The Beatles’ “When I’m 64”.
Unfortunately the Southern Cross Network suffered from technical difficulties during the show, starting sometime a bit before 1:30am, where strange digital artifact noises could be heard instead of programming, with the occasional recognisable quarter second of programming. At one stage the problem was that bad that the satellite feed started issuing random news pulses (which had the effect of local stations playing their news intro three or four times in the space of a few minutes). Eventually the feed died completely at about 1:50am, which prompted emergency tapes to swing into action, including 2CC’s infamous emergency tape.
An ad break, followed by two music returns and “Down Memory Lane”, 2CC’s collection of vintage music featuring the alphabet song. From the bits I remember of this song, I think I have the correct version quoted below.
Anyway, the 2UE and 4BC webstreams didn’t want to work for me, so I decided to record my phone conversation with John Kerr straight off the phone line. I made the call around 2:15, set up the recording about 2:30, and eventually chatted with John just after the 3am news, by which time the Southern Cross feed had resumed normal operations and John was on in Canberra again, none the less, I had the phone line recording going, so I stuck with it.
Click here to listen to my conversation with John Kerr where I wish him a happy birthday.
Now, the alphabet song, proudly played by 2CC whenever the emergency tape plays for more than 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
A – You’re adorable
B – You’re so beautiful
C – You’re a cutie full of charm
D – You’re a darling
E – You’re exciting
and F – You’re a feather in my arms
G – You look good to me
H – You’re so heavenly
I – You’re the one I idolize
J – We’re like Jack and Jill
K – You’re so kissable
L – Is the lovelight in your eyes
M, N, O, P – I can go on all day
Q, R, S, T – alphabetically speaking
You’re OK
and U – Made my life complete
V – You’re so very sweet
W, X, Y, Z – it’s fun to wander through the alphabet with you
To tell you what you mean to me
A – You’re adorable
B – You’re so beautiful
C – You’re a cutie full of charm
D – You’re a darling
E – You’re exciting
and F – You’re a feather in my arms
G – You look good to me
H – You’re so heavenly
I – You’re the one I idolize
J – We’re like Jack and Jill
K – You’re so kissable
L – Is the lovelight in your eyes
M, N, O, P – I can go on all day
Q, R, S, T – alphabetically speaking
You’re OK
and U – Made my life complete
V – You’re so very sweet
W, X, Y, Z – it’s fun to wander through the alphabet with you
Although it seems a silly thing to do
I L-O-V-E Y-O-U
I M N love with U!
Samuel
February 19th, 2006 at 03:59am
By now you will all have noticed annoying popups (or your browser constantly telling you it had blocked them). I noticed them too, but just thought it was my computer containing spyware or adware. It wasn’t until I had the same issues on another PC running Linux that I realised this was really coming from my site. I had previously suspected this, but dismissed that theory when I found no reference to the popups in any HTML.
After spotting these popups on the Linux PC, I went to the WordPress theme editor page and disabled Google Ads and Nedstat (now known as Webstats4u or some such nonsense)…the ads stopped. I enabled Google Ads again as I doubted Google would risk the bad PR from having popups…still no popups.
I was hardly surprised the following in the Webstats4u Terms of Service
When you use these free services, you agree to allow WMS to display advertising, including third party advertising, through the Products and Services. WMS reserves the right to modify the Products and Services from time to time, for any reason, and without notice, including the right to terminate the Products and Services or to change the nature, style, or form of advertisements displayed through the Products and Services.
Up until now, they have only had the advertising on their own website, now that it has changed, they have lost me for life.
I sincerely apoligise to everyone for this incident.
Please note that this is NOT webstat (the service I base the monthly stats on) that I am talking about here, but another stat service that has been with this site virtually from day 1. Their service isn’t great, and doesn’t keep stats for very long, I only kept using them because they provided interesting and detailed recent stats. With no regret, they have now been pulled off the site, and will not be returning.
(Update: Thanks to Tiepo and John B1_B5 for their assistance in troubleshooting this problem. It turns out that some browsers and ISPs have a stale cache containing the popup code, see the comments for instructions on fixing this problem)
Samuel
February 18th, 2006 at 03:46pm
I noticed this rather unusual entry in the search keywords list for Wednesday February 1:
smoothwallsamuel@gmail.com password
At the time I didn’t think much of it, despite the fact that someone landed on my website three times by searching for it, however upon checking my hotmail account (I check it monthly, just to see if an old contact has sent me an email for some reason…I usually just find spam) today, I found the following email from Google:
From :
Sent : Wednesday, 1 February 2006 12:05:38 PM
To : smoothwallsamuel@hotmail.com
Subject : Google Password Assistance
To initiate the process for resetting the password for your
smoothwallsamuel@gmail.com Google Account, visit the link below
[Link removed by Samuel for obvious reasons]
If clicking the link above does not work, copy and paste the URL in a
new browser window instead.
Thank you for using Google.
For questions or concerns regarding your account, please visit the
Google Accounts FAQ at
http://www.google.com/help/faq_accounts.html.
This is a post-only mailing. Replies to this message are not monitored
or answered.
My hotmail account is listed as my secondary account for Gmail, as it was the address which my Gmail invitation was sent to.
So what does all this mean? Basically it means that somebody wanted to gain access to my Gmail account, they foolishly thought that my password would be on a website somewhere, and then thought they would be able to change my password by clicking links on the Gmail website.
Just so you know, the webserver logs for that period of time, as well as the email from Google accounts, will be forwarded to Google’s abuse team. Whether they do anything about it is something I don’t know, but be warned, further attempts at gaining access to my email will result in law enforcement officers being brought in.
You have been warned!
Now back to normal blog operations.
Samuel
February 7th, 2006 at 04:55pm
Once again it is time to take our monthly look at the Blog View Stats, and once again Webstat stopped counting somewhere on January 30 as the site exceeded 20,000 page views for the month. I have made a couple changes to the stats, the usual file stats remain, but no longer take Samuel’s Persiflage into account, that has it’s own category now. I have also noticed the bandwidth stats provided by my webhosting company and will be including them on a monthly basis.
The Webstat reports for January can be found here
There were 20,002+ page views in January, up from 14,499 in December, and 5,299+ visitors, up from 3,743 in December.
There were 7,645+ views of the front page on all of its URLs.
The most popular articles were:
Google remained the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo, and MSN.
The search keywords were mostly various combinations and misspellings of my name. John Kerr and George Gibson also featured prominently. Among the odd keywords were
- candy man advert
- yearbook graduation comments
- pictures of Samuel’s dream
- spoon restuarant
- how to remove a tree crane bobcat
- clarkconnect via samuel
- photos of werewolf disease
- chkdsk completion going backwards
- dream of eating doughnuts
- powerline ubuntu
- november 2005 guess books of dickson
- clints open mind
- unfortunately samuel
- songs with the word sail
Internet Explorer was the most popular browser with 66.68% of the readership, Firefox was next with 27.27%, and by Safari on 4.31%.
Windows was the most popular Operating System with 91.59% of the readership, followed by Mac with 7.14%, and Linux with 1.16%.
Australia, The US and The UK topped the Countries, with 89.34%, 3.89% and 2.99% of the readership respectively.
The most popular files for the month were:
The top referring sites for the month were:
Samuel’s Persiflage Statistics
The RSS feed was downloaded 1661 times, up from 150 in December, and making a total of 1811.
Episode 1 (December 2005) was downloaded 291 times, up from 80 in December, and making a total of 371.
Episode 2 (January 2006) was downloaded 144 times.
Bandwidth
August 2005: 82.93MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
Samuel
February 5th, 2006 at 11:37pm
The popular Samuel In Dolgnwot series will return in March as a sunday special. The new series will start on the 5th of March and go for many weeks. Exact details of the series remain unknown at this stage, but it is expected to last 10-15 weeks.
At the time of writing, the images for the original series of Samuel In Dolgnwot have not been imported from the old blogger.com site, but can be viewed at http://goggo.dyndns.org/gallery/Samuel-In-Dolgnwot. I will import the images soon.
Samuel
January 30th, 2006 at 04:11pm
I suppose I should be greatful that people voted for me, but as I said, I don’t see the point in these blog awards, and don’t particularly care. Each and every year they manage to stuff the voting by ending it early, and they don’t seem to be willing to allow people to unnominate themselves, so all I can say is that the awards are a strange sham.
For the record, Samuel’s Blog won Best Australian Capital Territory Blog, Best Humourous Australian Blog, and Best New Australian Blog. Samuel’s Blog came second in the category of Best Overall Australian Blog.
Unfortunately, without forcing a recount and preference issues it is impossible for me to decline these awards, so thankyou for voting for me if you did, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t put much value on these awards.
For those of you who are interested, more info on the awards can be found here.
Samuel
January 27th, 2006 at 10:47am
Those of you who have been making use of the site over the last hour may have noticed that it has been displaying odd errors here and there, and at one stage was completely unusable. This is because I was upgrading the site from WordPress 1.5.2 to WordPress 2.0.
The process could have been quicker, but I decided to play it safe and go the full backup way. To do this I enabled the “site unavailable” plugin and disabled all others, and set about performing a full site backup and a full database backup. As I knew a site backup would be too large to download any time tonight I came up with a quicker way. I copied the /public_html directory to /wpbackup on the server (/public_html being the equivalent of https://samuelgordonstewart.com/ on the server) and then used the webhosting control panel to download a database backup (just over 500kb).
After this I disabled the “site unavailable” plugin (plugins need to be disabled during a wordpress upgrade) and then ran the automated updater, checked it didn’t break everything, which it didn’t, and enabled the plugins I had running previously. Thankfully WP2.0 seems to be pretty backward compatible with WP1.5.x
Among the new features in WP2.0
- A decent WYSIWYG post editor
- A major overhaul of the admin interface…I spend a fair bit of time here so it is nice to see a new look
- Inbuilt ability to import blogs from Blogger, Movable Type, Textpattern and any RSS feed (that would have saved me a lot of time and effort when I moved from blogger to WordPress in late August
- Upgrades to user management (still no ability to disable a user’s ability to leave comments though…must check the plugin repository again).
- A better file upload manager (I still prefer FTP though).
- A post preview which uses the layout of the blog to show me what the post will look like before I publish it. This is a fantastic improvement over the old version where the post preview was not formatted for the blog and was really just a very rough guide.
The really good news is that the theme I have spent a lot of time modifying to suit my needs is also compatible with WP2.0 (I think all 1.5.x themes are), which means I won’t have to spend time fixing that.
Well, I’m happy, and everything seems to be fine, I’ll keep the backups in place for a while just in case, but I would welcome any bug reports you may have. If you find a problem either leave a comment below or email by clicking on the contact link at the top of the page.
Samuel
January 25th, 2006 at 01:02am
I posted this as a comment over here, but I think it will be more useful as a general announcement. I am becoming annoyed at having to make these announcements, but please read and abide or go elsewhere.
I retain editorial control over this site, I will delete useless comments, especially when they are offtopic. What I am seeing at the moment is that a few people are taking every chance they can to leave comments on various subjects which do not correspond to the post they are attached to.
I don’t want to censor people, but useless and annoying comments will be deleted.
I’m sorry if this inconveniences you, but there is nothing stopping you from starting your own site if you want to talk about stuff which I don’t. There are plenty of free webshosts and blogging services out there for you to choose from.
For the record, I am making a financial loss from this site and my podcast. That doesn’t concern me, because the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages of the cost. What does bother me is seeing me lose control of something which I pay to maintain and dedicate a lot of time to.
One thing I have noticed about bigger blogs and forums is that they tend to have a lot of useless comments from people who couldn’t give a toss about the topic, and instead feel like posting garbage to websites. Some of the bigger forums have an advantage in that they generally have a bunch of admins and moderators who can deal with that and set the general tone of the site. I do not have that luxury, this is a one person operation, and I can’t be here 24/7 to maintain it. Therefore it is important that I set the tone when I am here, so that it carries over to when I’m not.
Sometimes I am forced to take measures that I don’t like, and have been criticised for previously, but if I don’t make these decisions then this site would spiral out of control and I would be likely to not renew the site hosting.
There are other blogs which run successfully without comments. Whilst thay might work here, I suspect it would remove a large portion of the readership. One of the key aspects of this site is the discussion, and I find a lot of it to be interesting, but I still need to retain control over it so that things run smoothly. I don’t want to lose visitors because I can’t control the comments…that would be a disaster, so I control the comments to the extent that I stop childish behaviour, and spam-like comments.
I appreciate you reading the site, and I appreciate you leaving comments, but if you cross the line in my view as site owner, then you will be forced to take action. I’m not going to ban anyone for disagreeing with me, but I will ban people who continually post rubbish.
This site is here for me to have fun, not to spend hours deleting rubbish. If you can’t deal with that, then go elsewhere.
Samuel
January 21st, 2006 at 01:31am
I wasn’t going to write anything about the blog awards and voting being open etc, especially with two websites actively campaigning on my behalf (something which I don’t endorse), but after checking what was being said in recent links to this blog, I felt compelled to share a gem of wisdom from The Teejmahal with you:
It blows my mind that there are people who actually actively CAMPAIGN for this s***? (*cough*Kitta*cough* *cough*). The hell? They mean nothing. Seriously. People read who they want to read. Insider awards don’t change that, and they never will. Vote for who you like, and if you win – hey, that’s lovely. If you don’t – hey, that’s lovely too. If you’re hung up on results like this, you’re writing for the wrong reasons. Blogger, heal thyself.
…
My advice. Use the awards for their primary purpose – to discover new blogs. There are some great new babies appearing on the scene, and fresh blood can only help the community. The photoblogs in particular are taking off, and there’s some great things happening.
TJ also had, what appears to be, a compliment for me.
The kid’s smart, a HELL of a lot more eloquent than the majority of the OMIGAWD WTF’ers in his age group, and it’ll probably be a bit of an ego boost for him. So all power to him. He’s funny looking, wears skivvies and will quite likely die a virgin, but he knows his own mind and handles ripping with dignity.
Thankfully it will only be another week and the torture of this whole blog awards process will be over. In future years I must remember to decline my nomination.
That being said, I’m not going to try and prevent you voting for me, but I think there are plenty of others who would gain much more satisfaction from winning these awards.
Samuel
January 19th, 2006 at 01:10pm
I received an interesting email from the National Library of Australia today, in it they requested permission to archive Samuel’s Blog in the PANDORA Archive, “a growing collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations.”
Whilst there is a section in PANDORA for blogs, there doesn’t appear to be a selection criteria for them, as far as I can tell the closest match is “personal sites”, which states:
Personal sites will usually only be selected if they provide information of outstanding research value unavailable elsewhere or if they are of exceptional quality or particular interest.
I must say that I am honoured by this request, and look forward to providing a resource for the future. PANDORA entries are maintained by the National Library Of Australia for future generations, which means that Samuel’s Blog will remain available to the public regardless of whether this site remains in existence or is made obsolete by changes in technology. PANDORA entries are also added to the National Library’s catalogue and the National Bibliographic Database (a database of catalogue records shared by over 1,100 Australian libraries).
The entire site will be archived on an annual basis, and will be made available through the PANDORA website. This includes all articles, photos, audio, video, and even Samuel’s Persiflage.
Needless to say I am excited about this, and have granted the National Library permission to archive.
Just in case you were wondering, PANDORA is an acronym for “Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia”.
If you are reading this in the year 2050 or some other far flung future year, welcome! I hope you find this useful in some way, I am proud to be part of documented Australian history. I wonder what I’ll be doing in 2050 (I’ll be 63 years old…will I still be running this site?).
Samuel
January 18th, 2006 at 07:49pm
It would appear that somebody is posting under my name at a site that mostly contains people who dislike me. The list of posts by the person pretending to be me can be found here.
So as to not confuse the matter by posting there myself, I will reply to a couple comments here.
Firstly, if the person who is posting as me had done any research they would have discovered that I don’t like the green Action buses, and would much rather ride an orange one. Apart from which, the bus pictured is either an Irisbus or a Scania. The older orange buses (pictured below) were the ones built by Renault and fitted out by Ansair.
As correctly stated by at least one person on that site I am 18, however another numbscull then decided that I’m not old enough to drive…WRONG!!! I just chose not to learn…I have no need at this stage, buses and bicycles are just fine thankyou very much.
Unless carefully created, songs with no bass whatsoever often sound like they are missing something…that being said, the bass doesn’t have to be overpowering. I personally prefer music from the 50’s through to the early 80’s, see my Musician(s) Of The Week Award for more details.
I think that just about covers it. I’m sure there is some law against posting under someone elses name without their permission. I will be seeking legal advice on the matter.
Samuel
January 16th, 2006 at 12:05am
As you may be aware, back in the middle of December I brought you the news that this blog had been nominated for a blog award. It would appear that voting will start soon, and all the nominations have been sorted.
This blog has been nominated in the following categories:
- Best Overall Australian Blog
- Best Australian Capital Territory Blog
- Best Humourous Australian Blog
- Best Australian Personal Blog
- Best New Australian Blog
Much like the last time I wrote about this, I don’t particularly care whether you vote for me or not, and I don’t particularly care if I win an award or not. I’m not here to win awards, I’m here to do something which I enjoy doing.
None the less, I’ll keep you updated.
Samuel
January 14th, 2006 at 12:00pm
I received an email from somebody going by the name of “pintail” today, unfortunately they used the contact form with a bogus email address so I am unable to reply to some of the things they wrote, but there was one point which interested me, and might interest you.
why dont u link to blogs when they link to u, u are selfish
As you can probably tell “pintail” wasn’t very impressed with me for one reason or another, but they have made an interesting point here, so I will do my best to explain.
As I’m sure you’re aware, many blogs contain a “blogroll” or similar, linking to many other blogs which the author thinks make good reading, this is their choice, and I appreciate the links when I notice them, however I see no reason why I should have to give them a return link. If they have linked to this site in an interesting article, I might decide to link back to that article in one of my posts, of course there are also times when I won’t link back for whatever reason.
I do, however, recognise links on a monthly basis as part of my blog view stats, I generally link to the top three referring sites for the month, although this may grow to the top five. I think this is a fair way of linking back to sites which deliver readers, whilst retaining my own editorial control over who gets a special mention.
I will make a mildly unbalanced comparison here to Slashdot. For those of you who are unaware, Slashdot is an IT news/blog site with a bit of an emphasis on Open Source Software. Due to the large readership of Slashdot, a link from there has been known to overload webservers, this is known as the Slashdot Effect. Slashdot is a fairly respected site, and as such, is linked to an awful lot, imagine if Slashdot maintained a blogroll, according to Google, this would require approximately 210,000 blogroll links. There are already enough complaints and conspiracy theories surrounding the selection of stories on Slashdot, imagine how bad it would get if they had to list these 210,000 links in some order…which site goes on top? Which site on the bottom? Perhaps they could have a random link similar to my random quotes…far too hard to be bothered with.
I wouldn’t have to deal with 210,000 links on this site, but it would still be a hassle, and then what do I do if a site which I don’t like links to my site? I’m happy with my system for now, but what do you think? Is “pintail” right? Should I continue with my system? Or do you have a better suggestion? Let me know, I would love to know what you think about this.
Samuel
January 11th, 2006 at 10:36pm
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