Well, the one thing I wanted to do today with the blog was to update WordPress. I have Web hosting which largely allows me to run free and all that, so I don’t have WordPress automatically updating. So, anyway, after taking a look see at the online WordPress upgrade docs, I thought I may try to take the easy way out by just making backups of the WordPress files I’ve edited and use an upgrade script provided by my host which would backup the rest of the files and install the new version of WordPress.

Uh, yeah, let’s just say that didn’t work. The upgrade script timed out twice and in the process I exceeded my hosting disk quota. At that point, I had my wonderful hosting company support involved and in the ensuing hours, there were a few restores made from last night backups, some account maintenance performed which I should have done a while ago, and for a little while my email didn’t work. And after that was fixed, the blog was throwing errors presumably because the script resumed upgrading. Oops.

At this point, everything has been restored, but I haven’t yet upgraded like I had originally hoped. Apparently, I will have to do that manually.

A few neat things, in no particular order…

-Musicovery is an in beta Flash based Web site that finds music for you based on your mood. The idea is kind of neat, and of course when I was trying it out, it pulled up some electronica for me. No big surprise there. For the site to be really usable though, it has to respond faster to user clicks.

-The Amazon Xbox post from Thursday was submitted to Reddit, a social bookmarking site. The submission never quite made it to the front page, but it hung around the second page for 8 hours or so. It brought about 1200 extra visitors on a very slow Thanksgiving. It seems that Reddit works by evaluating not only the number of votes, but the rate of voting, as more positive votes in a shorter amount of time should get you ranked higher and possibly to the front page.

-TopTen Sources seems to be a human edited new media aggregator type of Web site. I’m not sure about the quality of the overall site, but my Black Friday/Cyber Monday post was linked to.

Technorati Tags: Musicovery, Reddit, TopTen Sources

Since some are speculating about shoppers habits this upcoming weekend, I’d like to chime in. Speaking as a person formerly involved in E-commerce, I can tell you that Black Friday and the upcoming Cyber Monday won’t be all that. Sure, the weekend will be good for online retailers, but these won’t be the busiest days for online retailers during the 2006 Holiday Season.

In fact, the busiest days for online retailers this year will be December 12th and 13th. The reason? Christmas is on a Monday this year, and that pushes up the last day for a package to ship via UPS Ground within the Continental US to Friday, December 15th. (You can spec out a shipment on the UPS Web site to see what I mean.) Many retailers will use the 14th as an extra day for shipping and handling and to sort out issues on their end.

The bulk of e-commerce shoppers are those who would rather not go shopping in brick and mortar stores, hence the waiting until the second week of December to shop, but who also don’t want to be bothered with expedited shipping expenses and/or waiting for a package to arrive at the last minute.

Shipping is a big deal to consumers, as we’ve seen how consumers would rather take a “free shipping” deal over a percentage off deal - even when the percentage off will help consumers save more. This shopper psychology is why sites like Amazon pull stunts like “free expedited shipping” in the last days before Christmas - they’re trying to convince folks to stick around and buy and not worry about shipping.

*Formerly as in, currently advising.

Technorati Tags: Holiday 2006, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, E-commerce, Ecommerce, Online Retailing, Online Shopping, Free Shipping

Good grief, the wind. If you haven’t seen the news reports, on the east coast we’ve had some massive rain and subsequent howling gusts of wind this weekend. I mean the kind of wind that makes it miserable to be outside. While it didn’t rain where I live, this wind is just nuts. The conditions outside seem worse today than yesterday.

There is a tree outside my window, and the top of it is leaning at a good 20 degree angle. And my lights have been flickering this morning.

One thing to look forward to — 70 degree weather on Halloween.

An all around busy week (again) nothing too bad, though. Of note:

• Rutgers Football has a bye this week
• I will regain my glory in fantasy football.
• T.O. and the rest of the Dallas team will be playing the Eagles at home. I’m hearing talk of prescription bottles and nickles.
• I am receiving requests to do another podcast, I shall look into it.
• This blog has been on the Talk Digger Most Active Conversations List.

Technorati Tags: cleverhack, fantasy football, talkdigger

as my creative energy will be rerouted to another project for the next few days.

Technorati Tags: site info

The British Web consultant group Silktide has a free Web sitescore program that will analyze a site for design, popularity and accessiblity. Interesting to see their take on Web marketing and design. Also, cleverhack isn’t that slow.

Sitescore for cleverhack.com

Technorati Tags: Web design, Web marketing, Web

Way back in 2003, (if you want to get really technical about it October 2002) I started to blog. While my very first effort was handrolled, I later switched to an early version of Movable Type and then onto WordPress in 2004. This blog began as a curiosity, a personal Web site type of project and soon blossomed into something a little more concrete. As it was, 2003 happened to be one of those years in the life where the distraction was welcomed (and better explained over a beer).

When I started the blog, I was living in Vermont and working as a computer instructor (at one point, I was even called the best teacher ever by one of my students) and freelance consultant with part time irregular hours. The blog allowed me to network professionally and to have contact with others I would have otherwise never had met and I had my share of publicity too. Because of the blog, I’ve kept in touch with old friends, met some interesting folks in real life and over email (even dated a few) and landed my last couple jobs telling my employers that I blogged. I can’t complain about my blogging experience so far.

Having gotten some referrers for a particular old post recently I thought I would aggregate some of my older photo blogging exploits.

-A 120 Minute Photoblog
-Workblogging August 2003
-For You, My Dear Loyal Readers as featured in the (in)famous blog chicks post
-Ground Zero August 2003
-At Work
-Ben & Jerry’s Blogging
-Fall Pics 2003
-Apple Picking

Technorati Tags: cleverhack, photoblogging, photoblog, egoblogging

I’m really sorry, the OK I have no idea who did it submitter posted the wrong link to FARK. (Oh and hi y’all - I read everyday but don’t post much…)

The correct link to the featured post (yes, it must be really slow on Saturday night for something like this to be accepted) is http://cleverhack.com/2006/07/05/web-20-is-making-my-head-explode/

Update: The link never made it out of Total Fark.

Technorati Tags: Fark, HAHA Fark can’t take down my Web server, Web 2.0 won’t get me a date

From the Apache logs…

Agent: Windows RSS Platform/1.0 (MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1) Oooooh someone is reading my feed via IE7.

Agent: fluffyLovesRSS/3.14159 (+http://beesbuzz.biz/) Hi Fluffy! ;-)

And then there’s this…The IP Address is from….Nigeria

Host: 196.3.62.3
/blog/archives/001229.html
Http Code: 200 Date: Jul 02 06:42:43 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 8231
Referer: http://mamma30.mamma.com/Mamma?utfout=1&qtype=0&query=spamming+script
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)

Technorati Tags: RSS, RSS Readers, IE 7, Nigeria spam

Host: 216.39.139.192

/wp-atom.php
Http Code: 200 Date: Jun 30 17:41:18 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 19232
Referer: -
Agent: Krow’s RSSEngine/0.2

This RSS crawler is so new that only a few entries appear for it in any of the big the search engines. No known details about what project or web site that it is affiliated with. The only substantial clue is that the IP address is at a hosting company in Seattle.

Technorati Tags: site logs, crawlers, RSS

I’m throwing 404s in WordPress tonight as I updated the permalink structure a few days ago and got rid of the /archives/ subdirectory.

Googlebot has been up and down my site tonight, but I’m wondering about whether to go and research a method to redirect the broken URLs with /archives/ or to just let the URLs to fade away as the site gets crawled by the search engines. If I let things be, the only problem would be incoming links to posts from the outside world - which I do not have that many. Most people just link to my home page.

Technorati Tags: site info