Launch day plus two: never let a good deed go unpunished
Two of the seven re-designed regional websites my employer operates have recently gone public. I admit I was pretty excited when it happened. It looked like I could sort of see the end of this project which has extended well beyond its original end date. And people were excited to see the new, fresh look and the new functionality.
Good web content is not about writing “punchy”
And in fact, that headline breaks another cardinal rule about web writing. You’re supposed to write positively – what things are, what you will do as opposed to what they aren’t and what you won’t.
Good news. The internet won’t collapse
The Supreme Court has ruled that hyperlinking does not constitute defamation. Or more specifically, if you hyperlink to a site, you have not “published” or “broadcast” it for the purposes of determining if you’ve libeled someone.
And now the server load is back to normal
From what I could tell, it was a series of bots making repeated requests for the wordpress pages of one of my hosting clients. I hardened both the Wordpress site, Apache, and banned as many IP address ranges as could be easily identified, and now it’s back to calm, peaceful normal.
Someone or something is hammering my server
Normal load level is around 0.9 or something like that. As you can see in this picture, it’s up around 56 now. That means for every one request the server can respond to without delay, there’s 56 other waiting in the queue.
Power Workers Union caught astroturfing
I believe PWU official John Sprackett when he tells Postmedia that social media is new territory for the PWU. It’s a plausible form of denial given how bad unions are at social media.
Smell ya later MSIE
For the first time ever last week the number of Firefox visitors to my blog exceeded the number of Internet Explorer visitors. By less than three per cent admittedly, and my audience is neither statistically significant nor representative of the population of the Internet, but I take it as a sign. A sign of what? [...]
PDFs are poison, part sixty seven: “But people want to print it” if only they could
I usually tell people that unless the document is only useful in print (like say signage for a conference or a campaign) or if its conversion into HTML would take so much time that its publication would be irrelevant, PDFs have no place on websites.
Drupal why do you do this to me
So I’ve had to put off the launch of one of these regional websites I’m doing at work because I cannot figure out Views 2.0 in Drupal 6. It is a very powerful web application but it is horribly designed and the user interface is punishing to the point of being Kafkaesque.
I just unlinked LinkedIn: I don’t like the ‘pay for a peek’ bit
So I got this bulk email from LinkedIn today explaining how for a little bit of money I could see exactly who was viewing my profile and everything everyone posted about themselves on this Career/Business networking site. And it bugged me. A lot. And I closed my account.
Web hosting: how the other 90 per cent live
Lately I’ve been doing some work on other people’s websites, hosted elsewhere. It’s a bit new to me how things are done these days, so forgive me if I show my age. Most would seem to be offering web-based administration systems (Cpanel, Plesk, that sort of thing) for next to no money and on paper at least, many powerful features.
Social media vs email: your best activist tool is…
It’s not so clear to me. Numerically speaking, still email. But from the perspective of response rates, it’s not clear. It could still be email. Here’s what I mean:
Virtualization: the allure is strong
So a total geek post. I have this recurring freeze up problem that I cannot seem to track down. It presents first as some form of MySQL server failure, but it’s possible that it’s actually the web server that’s taking up too much of the server’s CPU so MySQL dies because it can’t get a word in edgewords, so to speak.
Where the comments end up
So how many of my not so numerous readers and commenters know that when they comment on Facebook, the comment automagically gets posted to my blog. Now you do. Now that you know, do you mind?
Of buckets and marshmallows
I was at a workshop on information architecture today, given by Ottawa based IA and content strategy experts Jeff Parks and Kristina Mausser, thanks to the wisdom and generosity of my employer who saw fit that I should attend.
