Just to let you know, the WhyDontYou Blog will institute blog comment week from today. In a nutshell we will undertake to leave a comment (and a relevant one) to the blog posts and articles we read during this week – hopefully sharing ideas or providing a counter point to the opinions given by others with the aim of broadening discussion. Where it is not possible (or appropriate) for us to leave a comment on the blog we will consider making a post here as a response (part of me feels this is a better way of engendering discourse anyway). Please feel free to join in!
Category Archives: asides
Comments and Emails
As a prelude to the WhyDontYou Comment Week (due to start tomorrow if we have the time 🙂 ), we have taken Michael‘s advice and put in a comment subscription facility. Now, if you find a thread you like here you can post a comment and, if you want to be kept informed of the debate, you can tick the box and get notification of follow ups via email. All good fun. Part of the idea behind us commenting a lot more next week is to help encourage discussions and share opinions via the blogosphere – which, it seems to me, is part of the reason they exist.
Commenting on blogs
Now, we are as guilty of this as anyone else, but looking through the stats it seems that, on average and discounting bots, there is only one comment made out of every 250 page views on this blog. Part of the fun of blogging is getting feedback from others and learning from their ideas an opinions. To try and rectify this, WhyDontYou blog is asking everyone who visits and reads a post to leave a message — even if it is just a “You Suck” comment — and we will do our bit by beginning a “Comment Week” next week, where we will leave a comment on every post we read. Please join in and spread the word.
Outage
Sorry about the recent full blown outage we’ve suffered. To be honest, at the moment, I still have no idea what caused it. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
2.2 Upgrade Completed
As mentioned previously, we were intending to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.2. This upgrade has now been completed and everything seems to be running fine. If you encounter any problems or inconsistencies, please let us know.
Side Admin
A couple of asides for general information. First off, I have been working my way through emails lately and a few people have asked for a return to the “old” theme. While I suspect most of these people are Heather, I am sure not all are, and there are a few valid points made (apparently this theme breaks on IE6 or older, which makes up over a third of the visitors). As a result, while a bespoke theme is being worked upon, we will revert to the Fallseason theme of a few months ago. Personally, trying to settle on a “nice” theme which works for as many people seems a task which I will never, ever, manage.
Secondly, as mentioned the other day (“Not Many Posts“), there have been a few problems with Heather’s access. Virgin Media were supposed to send an engineer out today to fix it. As a sane person would have guessed, the engineer never turned up (an accident was to blame, no more details known) and now she needs to rearrange the visit. While accidents do happen, it is a shame that cost cutting measures by Virgin have meant that they had no slack in the system to work around this and it could be another week Heather goes without access. What great customer service…
Not Many Posts
Very short one. Things have been quiet here for a while (especially when you look back at January / February’s post rate!) and this is likely to remain the case for another week or so – with occasional bursts of activity 🙂
As the moment, I am on the road quite a bit (this is being sent by the wonders of a hotel WiFi link and isn’t cheap!) and, as is becoming a regular occurance, Heather’s Virgin Media cable connection has died. Virgin have assured Heather they will be out to fix it by Tuesday (she reported it on Thursday) so things may improve.
All I can say is, especially as I am looking at a new ISP, the last one I would consider is Virgin media.
Site Admin
As mentioned previously, we have added some new plugins here and it seems they have broken the theme quite badly. This leaves us with two choices, and as the theme itself has become a bit annoying (second thoughts over the sponsored links, for example), it seems it is time to try out a new theme. The last time we tried this, there were problems in the old versions of IE so I would appreciate it if people can let us know what you think of the layout of the site now.
In addition a “struggle” is ongoing (offline) against the CSS files but when it is won (and by Toutatis it will be WON), we will be moving (again) to a bespoke theme. Thank you for your patience.
New Plugins etc.
For info, there have been some new plugins activated on this site. The first changes the default setting of WordPress which adds a “rel=nofollow” tag to the URLs of people who leave comments. After following a bit of a debate on this, I fell into the camp which thought it was better to let google (et al) follow links to people who take the time comment. As a result of this, any random, pointless, comments which appear to be nothing more than link generators will be manually deleted and the IP address blacklisted. The second plug in allows you to edit your comment for a short while (3 mins) after you post it. If the comment is held in the moderation queue, you must make any edits before you refresh the page or change URL. Let me know what you think.
Undesigned Universe – Downloads
Over on Nullifidian’s blog, he has posted some links to where you can DL some good MP4s:
The Undesigned Universe is a series of three lectures (9-11 January 2007 at Princeton University) from Peter Ward, Professor of Biology and Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington.
If you haven’t already done so, go there and download them.
New Plugins, New Theme
Short, administrative, comment for now. We have added some new plugins (for example the “sphere” one you can see at the bottom of most posts) and will be trialling a new theme over the next few days. Please let us know what you think – your feedback is always welcome.
Tags untagging themselves
Blog posts here keep randomly losing their UTW tags today. We’ve got used to wierd weekend errors. We probably cause half of them ourselves. Is this the Technorati monster or something I’m doing? Any ideas, welcome.
While your at it, maybe someone can suggest how TW can get openSUSE to work in 64bit. Make command get error 2, as far as I can determine.
Unaccustomed shortage of blogs
Sorry for the slackness in posting. A combination of events, including a foreign trip, a house refurbishment and a randomly broken net connection have stopped us blogging at all until Saturday, with minimal service since then. Normal service will be resumed later in the week. (Is that a threat or a promise?)
Blog Problems
There may be a dramatic reduction in the post rate to Why Dont You… Blog for a few days. We are suffering from some pretty major hardware problems and need a bit offline time to rectify this.
Hopefully things will be sorted in the very near future though and we will still occasionally blog as the rant takes us!
Stats and Macs
Stepping away from our ranting about the crazy theistic masses and how Christianity|Islam|Judaism is the source of all evil, I have noticed an interesting tren. This year, there have been more visitors to this site who use a Mac (3.5%), then visitors who use Linux (1.1%). Shocking. Sadly, Microsoft are still head and shoulders in the lead (86.4%). Even more strange, there are more visitors who use Internet Explorer 5.0 than there are Linux users in total (1.5% vs 1.1%). Amazing. All I can say is, if you are here using Netscape Navigator (3.0%) or IE older than version 6 (an amazing 8%) then you REALLY should think about an upgrade…