chuggnutt.com

I just flipped the switch on the new design for the site, and very surprisingly, things mostly went off without a hitch.

There's still some unfinished things I need to, uh, finish, and I haven't ported the design over to all the pages in the site yet... so you'll still see the old green layout pop up from time to time, depending on where you go. And I'll be fine tuning over the next couple of days too. A good rule of thumb is, expect it to be broken... til I fix it.

The main point of the redesign is to focus on the primary experience: reading the stuff I write. Without all the unnecessary crap elements getting in the way. There's some of the advertising stuff going on too, because I'm not that pure.

Assuming you're not just reading this in your favorite RSS reader, and are actually visiting the site, tell me what you think.

My goodness, I've certainly been neglecting this site. Most of my blogging energy has focused on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, but I've also been neglecting other areas of this site—the projects page in particular needed cleaning up, and I needed to catch up on PHP code fixes for my HTML2Text class and Word Stemmer class that people had sent me over the past year or so.

So I spent some time yesterday doing just that. There's really not much to see if you're simply here for the blogging portion of the site, but in case you were here looking for my PHP code or were one of the people who were nice enough to email me fixes for the bugs, I've gotten that stuff updated (and thanks to the suggesters).

In the meantime I'll see what I can do about the writing portion of the site—ie, the blog. I certainly have no intention of retiring it but that's sure what appears to be happening... so no no, not gonna happen, I shall start making more effort to write regularly here again. And perhaps tweak the site design around a bit. I mean, it's only been...

...holy hell, it's been five years? How on earth did I let that anniversary pass by without comment or celebration or something? Back on April 22nd, this was...

Whoa.

Yes, it's that introspective time again. Since I've done these for the last two years already, I thought it would be interesting to put it all together in a table format to compare years.

I did this same thing last January, and thought it was good fodder for looking back on 2006: my favorite posts over the last year. I noticed that I wrote less here as I stepped up my writing on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, and I wonder: if quantity went down, did quality go up? :)

• Mouse fire!
• NYTimes on Bend (late review)
• 10 ways Dick Cheney can kill you
• Anagram map of Downtown Bend
• Smoke alarm batteries
• Blogday, Earth Day, and a lawn rant
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Introduction
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Water in the Desert
• The Dirty Screech (mostly for that photo I found...)
• The truth about vampires
• These Santas are so wrong

Yes, it was exactly four years ago today that I started this blog. I don't have much to say right now, I just wanted to mark the occasion.

Though I should probably do something special for it. The first part of my day will be hauling manure around, topdressing the yard, so I guess I'll have to come up with something better for later. ;)

I never did get any comments on my poll the other day...

Is this thing on? :)

Since I'm tired of waiting on Simone for a new site design :), I thought I'd start playing around with it myself. It's just high time things got refreshed around here. So, I thought I'd run my early attempts by everyone, and ask a few questions.

The big change is converting the site to a stylesheet-driven design rather than a table-based one. I also want the clutter reduced, and to remove unnecessary features.

You can see a bit of what I'm doing on the project page and the archive page. So far the primary changes you'll see are on the sidebar, I haven't really re-worked the header much yet (but I will).

So, the questions:

• What do you think of the new design elements?
• Should I keep or drop the calendar at the top of the sidebar?
• I'm thinking of changing the header to some sort of revolving photo background. Thoughts?
• Any features I don't have that people would like to see?
• General comments/ideas?

Don't pull any punches, either. I can take it! :)

It's time for another edition of the Chuggnutt Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Google and since I did one last year. Interesting stuff, if you're into blogs and stats and such. On to it!

• Number of blog entries: 244. Last year: 306.
• Approximate total number of words: 39,810. Last year: 45,537
• Average words per blog entry: 163.2. Last year: 148.8
  
  It only looks like I wrote less than last year, but you know what? I was also writing on The Brew Site. I'm doing a Zeitgeist post over there too, but the quick numbers are 222 posts and 38,371 words... which combined, yields 466 posts and 78,181 words. Surpassed!
  
  
• Total visitors: 633,110. This is unfiltered, so it includes bots, spiders, RSS readers, etc. Last year: 242,433
• Average visitors per day: 1,734. Last year: 687
• Total real visitors (approximate): 430,505. This is the actual number, with most of the bots and such filtered out.
• Average real visitors per day: 1,179
  
  This year I made the attempt to show actual visitors to the site, not just the automated stuff out there. To that end I filtered out anything identifying itself as a spider, known RSS feed slurpers/readers, bots, crawlers, and non-browser agents. I didn't get everything out, but this is a pretty decent snapshot. Note this doesn't speak to unique visitors; the stat package I'm using doesn't classify that and I'm not using Sitemeter or anything that supposedly tracks unique visitors. I imagine a good part of the total visitors are repeat visits, so I won't hazard a guess as to how many unique hits are there.
  
  
• The most active month was October, by a long shot, because of the Burger King mask post—people were hammering this post looking for a Burger King Halloween costume. Not surprisingly, this post has also garnered the most comments: 673
• There were three days on which traffic spiked considerably: April 30, with 9,152 visitors; July 20, with 7,575 visitors; and August 18, with 8,915 visitors. Unsurprisingly, those appear to be times when I was FARKed—that is, someone linked to one of my pictures from the FARK forums.
• Ten most popular blog entries:
  1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
  2. Houston's glass public toilet: 9,610
  3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
  4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
  5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
  6. Leonard Nimoy's Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
  7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
  8. Central Oregon's biggest baby?: 3,821
  9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
  10. Never ending fall: 3,017
• Total number of comments (not counting spam): 1,556
• Most popular searches on this site:
  • burger king: 34
  • burger king mask [variants]: 24
  • i want to buy the burger king mask: 5
  • Beaubien [variants]: 28
  • z21: 27
  • ktvz: 8
  • html2text: 24
  • trump: 10 (plus 3 variants)
  • donald trump: 6
  • donald trump bend: 3
  • donald trump bend oregon rumor: 3
  • (Total Trump related: 25)
  • fantastic 4 cash card [variants]: 14
  • fantastic 4 [variants]: 16
  • bend oregon [variant]: 14
  • bend: 12
  • php: 12
  • blog: 12
  • amazon: 11
  • lovecraft: 10
• Ten most popular search engine searches landing here:
  1. burger king mask: 5,295
  2. boba fett: 3,086
  3. pdb reader: 1,972
  4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
  5. darth maul: 1,534
  6. kermit the frog: 1,376
  7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
  8. www.amazon.com/burgerking: 1,210
  9. super walmart: 973
  10. palm reader: 877
• Top five search engines:
  1. Google: 72,180
  2. Yahoo: 20,629
  3. MSN: 4,042
  4. AskJeeves: 1,259
  5. AOL Search: 1,061
• Here's the approximate breakdown of browsers and agents, gleaned from the full numbers:
  • Internet Explorer: 61% of all traffic
  • Mozilla/Netscape browsers (Firefox mostly, I think): 23%
  • Opera: 1%
  • RSS readers/agents: 2%
  • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
  • Other stuff (random bots, feed readers, crawlers, obscure browsers): 4.8%
• Among real visitors, some surprises in country of origin (I'm not listing all country stats here; suffice to say, the U.S. and Canada are the top two):
  • China: 13,221 visitors
  • Malaysia: 1,930
  • Uruguay: 1,371
  • Sweden: 912
  • Saudi Arabia: 899
  • Greece: 524
  • Iran: 450
  I'm surprised I'm that popular in China.

Being inspired by Chris's post about the same, I decided I'd list my favorite/best posts for 2005. These aren't the most popular ones (I'll cover those later), but the ones I personally think are the best.

I'm not ranking them, though, other than in the date in which they appeared.

• Bandage Man
• Globe
• Things about Bend that I miss
• Things about Bend that I like
• Our local Jedi
• My semi-annual TV rant
• Pimp name
• Hard drinkin'
• Bandon cheese woes
• 4 8 15 16 23 42 (my long rambling post on Lost)
• Haunted Bend
• Tarding down literature

You may or may not have noticed that I've turned off comments on posts older than three months. I wasn't getting tons of spam comments (spamments?)—I suspect my filtering was working well enough—but I was certainly getting tired of the ones that were coming through. Since they were almost invariably on old posts, I finally bit the bullet and took care of the problem.

If you have a burning desire to write about a past blog entry, just use the contact form. Of course, that's no guarantee that you'll get anywhere. :)

So Simone was telling me that the design here on the blog was getting stale, "too much green," things like that. Okay, I said. Come up with a new design for me, and I'll implement it.

Her eyes got big. For like, one day? she asked.

For as long as I like it, I said (or words to that effect). I'm not a designer; I came up with something I kind of liked, but if someone wants to make me a better one, I'm all for it.

So we'll see what Simone comes up with for me.

Okay, this is getting crazy: my Burger King mask post is up to 236 comments, and there's currently active discussion on where to find a Burger King mask online, and a guy named "John" is even making his own masks and selling them on eBay! In fact, I grabbed a couple of his pictures of the homemade mask—click through to see...

More...

The Burger King mask post I made back in April is insanely out of control; right now, it has 59 75 comments on it, mostly from people who want one of those masks (and one or several guys who claim to be making it, or have it for sale)! It's such great entertainment to watch the comments roll in.

I'm getting so many hits on this because of great search engine placement for "burger king mask." On Google, I'm number 5 and on Yahoo, number 3(!). Man, I wish I could plan posts like that one...

Some more on trackbacks. To my mind, they are simply another form of comment, so that's exactly how I'm treating them. You won't see a special "Trackback" down there next to the "Comments" link. Instead, they'll just be integrated with the comments in chronological order.

I think I saw Sam Ruby doing this first, and it makes much more sense to me to treat trackbacks this way.

I've finally bitten the bullet and implemented Trackback here—well, half of it, anyway. My site should now be able to handle Trackback pings from other sites. I even implemented the RDF autodiscovery crap, but added a bonus: a new meta tag like so:

<meta name="trackback.ping" content="Trackback URL for a particular entry">

So maybe I can influence client software development in some small way with this.

I haven't implemented outgoing Trackback pings yet—i.e., me pinging others' sites when I link to them. I'll get around to it at some point.

It hit the stands today—the Bend Bulletin article on bloggers that I and others were interviewed for. It's a pretty good article, and I like the layout. Of course, I'm probably biased because my picture's in it, and my earlier posts about the interview are the lead to the story...

Anyway, it's the front page of the Community Life section. In a supreme example of irony, however, you won't find the actual article about the online world of bloggers online anywhere. So I can't link to it. Maybe I'll try to get permission to republish the article online here, so it'll at least show up somewhere online. (And how many times can I work the word "online" into a paragraph?)

Oh, and a little secret: in the photo they have of me, I'm "working" on an Apple Powerbook. However, honesty compels me to reveal that not only do I not own an Apple... but I don't even own a laptop! Make of that what you will.

Following up on my interview for the Bulletin last week, today I went over to the Bulletin building to have my photo taken for the article. Actually, it was myself, Jake, and Chris from monkeyinabox all there for photos.

Very interesting. The photographer took a bunch of pictures of each of us, then put us together in several ways; I'm very curious to see how they turn out. It was certainly a new experience for me—not that big a deal, really, but still kind of cool.

I'm told this article should be appearing in the Friday edition of the Bulletin. Stay tuned!

My wife and I are heading up to Portland for the weekend, and will be back Sunday sometime. Needless to say, I'll be taking the weekend off from blogging (even though I'll probably be online Sunday night; we'll see). Have a good weekend!

I was interviewed today by a reporter writing a story on local bloggers for the Bulletin. Very interesting, kind of cool. I'm not sure what will come of it other than myself sitting there yammering on semi-coherently, but the article will apparently be published next Thursday. I'll have to pick up the paper to see.

And, the guy is interested in talking to as many bloggers as possible. Email me if you're interested.

In other related news, Jake has an angry letter to the Bulletin on his site. That rant kind of spun out of this local story situation. Worth a read.

Going through the chuggnutt.com logfiles for the 6th, I noticed that there were suddenly a bunch of hits to the Oobi image I'd posted here a while back from TotalFark. Basically, someone's linked directly to the image on this server from a high-traffic site.

Now on the one hand, that's kind of cool—but on the other hand, I'm a little irritated because TotalFark is a paid subscription site that I can't access without registering first, which means I can't just go and see what they're doing with the Oobi image they're pulling from me. Does that seem fair? Their site is saving money by sucking an image down over my bandwidth, and on top of that I'd have to pay them additional money to find out why.

And before someone points out to me that it's only like 5 bucks to register and I'm therefore a cheap bastard, well, consider this: FARK's Terms of Service at the bottom of every page reads:

Text comments, audioedit submissions, and photoshopped images posted on Fark by registered users may not be reposted or broadcast without the express written permission or license from Fark.com and must attribute Fark.com as the source.

So if they won't let people use their images without their permission, then why should I? It's the principal of the thing.

Grumble... It might be time to brush up on some Apache rewrite rules...

Yeah, I'm still here. Just haven't found the time or energy to post much lately. So, quick one-off tonight with an interesting site: Lulu.com. Free self-publishing of books, which they will print on demand and ship to the purchaser. Sort of the CafePress of publishing.

Still continuing to settle in to the new house. This weekend we cleared out the storage unit, and it never ceases to amaze me just how much stuff we've managed to accumulate over the years. Of course, it doesn't help that I've got a packrat personality and it's actually hard for me to get rid of stuff. But—wow. How does this happen? You're puttering around in your daily life, happily oblivious, then one day you turn around and BAM!—where did all this stuff come from? And yes, you remember getting that, and yes, those have a story, and then you realize the true culprit:

Time.

Time: you lose track of it for even a moment, and it will sneak up on you. Your kids will grow a few more inches and start school, everyone you know is suddenly older, the music you spent formative years of your life listening to is on oldies radio stations, and stuff accumulates.

And yeah, that packrat personality I mentioned, I have that. But not too badly though, not apeshit crazy like you see on TV or read about, where the old hermit guy has 30 years of newspapers tied up in his living room, or the wacko lady has 8,000 unopened boxes of toothpicks, or anything like that. No, I've got it just enough to annoy my wife. Could it ever get more serious? I doubt it.

But you know... time will tell.

Well, we're all moved in and (relatively) comfortable. Still not feeling like blogging much—after 3 days of moving and cleaning and unpacking, and the ongoing process of more unpacking and arranging and tweaking (things like hanging curtains, and towel racks), I'm just beat. So, some quick thoughts on the moving process:

• Smartest thing we did: hiring movers. Totally worth it. If/when we move again, it's the only way to go.
• Taking a day off from work was also smart.
• Going back to work feels like a vacation.

Ugh. More later.

So tomorrow we get funded and close on our new house, and take possession. Then comes the Move; we'll start hauling a load or two over tomorrow evening, and then Saturday is the big day. Fortunately, this time we've hired movers to do all the heavy lifting.

I don't expect to be online much or at all after I leave work tomorrow, at least until Sunday sometime, maybe later. If all goes according to plan, Bend Broadband should have our cable service turned on Saturday (I think), but I seriously doubt I'll be interested in going online after spending the day moving.

Thus marks the end of one chapter of our lives, and the beginning of a new one. It's not the first house we've bought, but it will be first brand new one we've lived in. Should be interesting!

I got an email from Al Fasoldt yesterday that was in response to this piece I wrote last year. He wanted to know what I was thinking when I wrote it, and basically called me on it. I remembered being harsh when I wrote it, but since it was last July I didn't remember any real details (it was on the software Hotbar, and Web tracking in general), I went back and re-read what I wrote.

Wow.

I wasn't just harsh and sarcastic, I was downright nasty. Looking back on it now, it was pretty uncalled for, and I honestly don't know why I was so rude. So, I emailed an apology to Fasoldt, and I'm doing the same publicly (since I lambasted him here in public): I apologize for being so nasty and writing that entry up the way I did.

Yes, back from Portland since yesterday, but I'm finally catching up on everything—internet connectivity has been spotty at best here for some reason, so last night after not being able to connect to anything for the umpteenth time, I said, "Screw it!" and gave up.

Portland is where it's supposed to be. Bend is where I left it. Good enough.

I'll be offline all this weekend and most of Monday. We're going to Portland: the kids have another eye doctor appointment with someone new on Monday, so we're making a weekend out of it and heading up tomorrow.

I'll check my email Saturday morning but after that it's au revoir.

So yeah, I took the weekend off from blogging. Ran out of steam, I guess; I didn't even read any other blogs on Saturday, I was engrossed in finishing up Kiln People. Sometimes it's just plain nice to take a break.

I've been vastly updating the search functionality on my site. I'm still using MySQL's built-in FULLTEXT indexing to perform searches, but I've made the results page look a lot more (okay, almost exactly like) Google's. The main differences are that I'm not paginating search results (yet)—all searches limit to 10 results—and that I'm showing a relevance percentage, the first result being arbitrarily determined to be a 100% relevant.

To determine relevance, I'm relying on MySQL: a fulltext MATCH(field) AGAINST('search string') directive will return the relevance number that MySQL computes when used in the SELECT part of a query. (See MySQL Full-text Search in the online manual for detailed info on this.)

Further plans for searching that I haven't implemented yet: utilizing MySQL's IN BOOLEAN MODE parameter with searching to allow advanced things like phrase searches (with quotes), required word matching (using the plus sign), and subexpressions using parentheses. It's pretty cool stuff. Oh, and I want to be smarter about presenting excerpts: Google tries to show you content excerpts with your search terms in them, I want to be able to do the same; currently I'm just showing the first 250 or so characters of the text with HTML stripped out of it.

And since I'm developing my whole Personal Publishing System in an open process, I'll write up a detailed technical article soon on how to effectively use MySQL fulltext searching and show Google-like results. All real-world; the code will be cribbed right out of my search.php file.

Just flipped the switch on the site design I wrote about (see "Everything Old is New Again"). So far things are looking good, but there might be some bugs still lurking. And right now the changes only apply to the blog pages; I haven't reworked the ebooks page or others, yet.

And there's two new pages available: What is Syndication? and My Projects. The Syndication page is a sort-of FAQ on syndicating a site and RSS—a helper page, or primer page, as it were, to anyone who sees my RSS link and wonders what the hell that is. Consider it a draft, but I will be updating and maintaining that page, and aim to make it a good landing page for syndication/RSS questions.

I've started tinkering with the design of my site here, changing things around, making the blog pages more blog-centric, and in doing so I realize that this "redesign" is basically the same design I was using up through July of last year. How quickly we forget.

As to what I'm changing, I'm simplifying the table layout and applying more style sheet rules to clean up the underlying HTML, and I'm moving back to a two-column format, with the blog content in the left column (wider) and all the rest in the right column (narrower). After staring at the three column layout for over half a year, I've finally decided it's just too busy, and going with a more readable format is better. Hey, the two column layout with content on the left is almost a blog standard, if there is such a thing. Damn Movable Type for destroying the curve :)

I'm also restructuring the overall site architecture a bit, moving some clutter off the front page to inside pages, consolidating some stuff, adding some new pages to (hopefully) enhance overall usability. Maybe someday I'll even tinker around with an all-stylesheet layout approach; I know HTML table-based layouts are anathema to some folks out there. But right now my general philosophy is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it—but simplifying it is okay.

I've been terribly lax lately in responding to my emails that are ebook requests. I'm awfully sorry about that; I'm responding to some tonight, but if you sent me a request for an ebook and haven't heard back from me, I apologize.

Doing some further testing on the new CMS. There should be a "MORE" link below if you're viewing this from the front page. If you click on it, you'll get the extended body text and as a treat I'll throw in some of the things I'm doing behind the scenes.

More...

I'm flipping switches on my blog tonight, and going live with my new CMS I'm working on. Hopefully, all will work as planned; consider this entry a test message.