Category: Blogging

Free Video for All

Everyone seems to be on a hurry to make video sharing the trendy thing to do, making photo sharing the thing of the past. Revver has a huge library of videos that makes killing time a much easier task on lazy Friday afternoons.

Revver’s competitor, YouTube offers a similar service. Both companies received millions of dollars from venture capitals for making video sharing the new “Flickr” (now a Yahoo company).

There are a number of other smaller operations doing exactly the same thing. OurMedia, vimeo and DailyMotion are all part of this online video “revolution”.

Of course, what’s a revolution without the bloggers taking on the multi-million dollar seeded companies. Blip.tv is a blog that features tons of videos. Even more interesting, VlogMap shows a geographic map of where various different vlogs are using Google Maps.

Speaking of Google, the monster search machine recently debuted its video search feature. And a search war is never complete without Yahoo video search and MSN Video. One word on MSN Video: damn Microsoft has to make an online app that requires a Windows-only plugin to be installed. Get with the party, Microsoft.

While researching on various video search and sharing sites, I found an independent cable network “Current.tv“. Apparently Google has a hand in the venture since the network broadcasts “Google Current” as part of its programming. Former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore chairs this hip start up.

It’s interesting to note that not only is Google dominating the online battle, the company is diversifying into chatting, broadcast programming and a supporter of the open source movement.

Hit Me, Baby

Ever since I installed shortstat on my site, the concrete statistics I am seeing of my site are just amazing. I am averaging about 1000 hits on a daily basis (of which 200 are unique visitors).

A good majority of the visits were from referrals or searches of “Steve Jobs” and his speech at Stanford. I guess my site continues to rank pretty high for having that speech available. I knew I was getting a lot of traffice, but 1000 hits a day was beyond my expectation.

Another interesting fact I discovered was that visitors from Japan and Korea are on the very top of the “hit list” for Steve Jobs’ speech. It’s pretty embarrassing to know that Japanese and Koreans are more aware of Steve Jobs than the Taiwanese… They are probably just too busy dealing with all the political mess on the island.

Shortstat - hits

Shortstat -countries

Blog Spammers

Boy, was I glad that I turned on the spam moderation feature that came with WordPress earlier this month. A couple of other morons kept posting more spam links to their sites. When I went to the WordPress control panel to see if any “potential” spam comments were awaiting for moderation, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw “96”. God damn it, spammers.

Blog Spammers

Google Maps Maniac

When I started noticing useful implementation of the Google Maps, I compiling the links into a master list, not knowing why the list would ever be useful to anybody… until I found another maniac crazier than me… a whole blog dedicated to collecting and commenting on various Google Maps related whatever.

I lose. The Google Maps whore wins.

WordPress UI Improvements

Following changes were made to the blog… some may be noticeable to readers…

1. Updated the colors of active/hover/visited links in CSS. I think the new colors fit the New York skyline picture from POV of Brooklyn heights (a.k.a. DUMBO) rather nicely. But I’d love to take any suggestions on ideas to improve the look and feel.

2. Moved “Archives” to the top nav bar. The process wasn’t as easy as pasting the “display archives” PHP code in the nav page. I had to make a new and modified “archives.php” template to fit “pages.php” layout in it because standard “pages.php” does not allow PHP codes to be inserted directly into the text field (in fear of hackers, I am guessing).

3. Some moron kept spamming the comments with a link to his mortgage, home loan and refinancing sites. It’s similar to what some other moron did to his online poker and casino sites. So I just banned those keywords (and his IP address) from the URL in the comments so that they’d have to be approved by me to be posted. This makes it easier for me to batch delete them on one go. God, I hate jackasses.

4. Added “Get Recent Comments” plugin. But it didn’t really work right “out of the box”. I had to modify it by following this tip to get it to work. Now it works like a champ.

5. Put a brownish tint to the border graphics.

RSS Subscriptions to WiredAtom

Just out of curiosity, I pulled the access log from the server to see how many people subscribed to RSS feed to my blog. I was surprised at the result — a whopping 1,400 RSS feeds were served just in the past 4 days alone. I could probably write a shell script to weed out the duplicates to see how many of those feeds are from unique visitors, but I think I am content with just that. I remember pulling the same log and found only 2 feeds a couple of months back.

I hope my thoughts, ideas and day-to-day news are entertaining.

On related news, the Steve Jobs Stanford speech download is still popular. It seems like the downloads have been growing quite rapidly. There are almost 1,000 downloads in the past 4 days. I should do a tally and update the “total downloads” figure on that site. Besides, the page is totally ready for a make-over. Maybe I’ll do that when my homework from SCAD isn’t quite as crazy in a few weeks.

Blog Interface Update

I added a header with navigation to kind of unify all the misc links I thought were better served as top navigation elements. So I consolidated them. I also commented out “Pages” section on the sidebar.php since it looked kind of annoying. But basically, those pages are exactly the same as what’s on the top nav anyway.

Trixie Update — A Site for Geeky Dads

When I called Brian in Austria yesterday, Birgit was home instead. So we started chatting about the latest baby news and life in general (around the baby, of course). She mentioned a very cool “daddy” site for the geek in all of us daddies — Trixie Update.

I blame Birgit for not telling me about the site sooner. The site is full of data this dad collected of his daughter on almost everything imaginable — patterns on diaper changes, nap times… etc. It’s a fairly complete data on his daughter. The articles are articulate and funny and his images of Trixie are also very very nice.

Even though I know Murdza might find the site cool (as did I), I just don’t see he’s dorky enough to maintain a site like that.

There’s one very cool feature he has on his site I must mention openly: The author has a feature on the photos of his daughter that takes you back to exactly one year ago of the same date. You can really see how Trixie’s grown when looking at the photos in succession like that. Here’s an example. Simply click on the “One Year Ago Today” link on the upper right hand corner of the page. Awesome!

Speaking of “phone calls” over long distance, Skype is your friend.