The redirects are up and the switch is complete. Webspiffy is officially closed for business. The company had a solid run of seven years and I thank all my clients for their business. The web design community is great, but for now I’m taking a break from the commercial design scene. Grad school starts up in September and I will be focusing all my energy on microbiology research.
Dreamhost server statistics
Here’s the final report from my Dreamhost logs. The web site has been running there since 2002, so this does not include 1998-2001 traffic. The drop in traffic during 2004 and 2005 corresponds to the relocation of my journal over to steinbaugh.com.
Although I’m an Arsenal fan, I have to admit that Wayne Rooney’s strike against Newcastle on Sunday was one of the most amazing goals I’ve seen in my life. He hit the ball out of the air and curved it perfectly into the upper V of the left side of the net, past the keeper. The stadium exploded with 50,000 screaming Manchester fans. Truly a sight to behold.
Recently I adopted del.icio.us and Magpie RSS to manage my bookmarks. Magpie does a great job of syndicating the bookmarks and caching them on your web server. However, when I began using the script, there was no template for del.icio.us bookmarks. With this being the case, I decided to write my own template from scratch. Here I present a Magpie RSS template that is XHTML and WCAG AAA compliant:
Recently, I’ve been getting annoyed with virtually every web page on the Internet. My pet peeve is that most sites do not properly format the title tag. The title is supposed to be a descriptive entry of the page you are visiting. The title tag should not include your site name in every page, which is notorious among blogs and news sites. The name of you site should be reflected in the URL, not in every instance of <title>. The date of the article should also not be in the title. The date is the date, not the title. If you do a keyword search by date, the page will still pull up as long as you have the date somewhere in the document. But please, keep it out of the title. Of course, unrelated keywords designed to boost PageRank will possibly get you kicked out of the search index altogether.
I admit, I used to have my name in each <title> tag on my site, but in the past few weeks I removed it for simplicity. This really streamlines the process of adding cruft-free bookmarks on del.icio.us. If you run a web site, I highly encourage you to switch your document titles over to a simplified system.
There has been research conducted by search engine optimization companies, and sites that have simple, descriptive title pages will rank higher in the index on Google.
UCLA split the series against Hawaii with a win on Friday followed by a loss on Saturday. I attended the Saturday match, where Hawaii dominated, winning in three straight games.
Om Malik broke the news this afternoon that Yahoo! is pursuing Flickr. I can’t help but think this is bad news for the Flickr community. While Yahoo!’s servers would ease the growing pains Flickr has been suffering recently — the site has been down three times in the past week — I’m afraid that Yahoo! will integrate Flickr into the rest of its cluttered portal site. Yahoo! will likely tie Flickr in with Geocities, Mail, and even its Calendar service. Of course, banner ads and likely pop-up ads will start appearing, even for the paying customers. I hope Yahoo! doesn’t up the Pro account fees or change the policy on unlimited storage. Of course, this is all just speculation at the moment, but it does make you wonder if Flickr is starting a downward spiral. I sure hope not, because I’m a big fan of the service and currently have over 2,000 photos on the site.
Lately some people around UCLA have been getting on my nerves. As you may know, it has been raining this past week in Westwood and the greater Los Angeles area. However, according to people’s reactions, you’d think we’d be stuck in the middle of the blizzard. The evening news devotes half the night’s coverage to flooding and a couple of poorly built houses that slid down a hillside. Around UCLA, people can’t stop talking about how they forgot to bring an umbrella and they got wet. In my classes, people won’t shut up about the weather. It’s just a little rain, for crying out loud! The past few days, I haven’t been using an umbrella nor have I worn a heavy jacket. It simply isn’t raining that hard. However, I always see people walking around campus with heavy duty snowboarding jackets and ponchos.
Just imagine if it snowed here one day. I think some people would implode.
I’m visiting the UK during Spring Break. I bought my plane ticket over the weekend from Expedia, which is currently offering very affordable fares. I managed to get a ticket for $580 round-trip on American. The flight to London is non stop, too! On the flight back, I have one stop but it is in New York, so no complaints. I plan on doing lots of sightseeing and clubbing. When I’m there, I definitely want to stop by Fabric and catch a live DJ set. Hopefully James Lavelle will be spinning sometime when I’m there.
If the arrangements work out, I will also be visiting Ireland for a couple of days during that break. I plan on at least visiting Dublin but the itinerary has not yet been finalized. All I know currently is that I will be staying outside of London for around a week.
I’m totally psyched about this trip. I’m going to be doing a lot of flying in March, since I also have a grad school interview the weekend of March 10th in Michigan. That trip will be a blast as well. My iPod is going to get a workout next month, that’s for sure.
I noticed in my Shortstat logs that much of my referrer spam comes from a single IP address. In one instance, five domain names spawned from the same IP address, which originated from a DSL connection in Germany. Most likely, this is due to a spammer who got his hands on a zombie and used the connection as a relay to deliver spam to my server. However, it might just be a really stupid guy who didn’t even bother to cover up his steps.
In any case, I’ve also noticed that in the last few months, the spammers have been getting smarter. Most of the spam for a single domain now comes from multiple IP addresses from multiple countries. This makes banning by IP virtually impossible. Of course, you can use Apache to block referrer requests by the domain name — the method I’m currently using.
It’d be nice to see a central referrer spam blacklist develop, much like MT-Blacklist. Until that happens, I’m going to rely on filtering out the sites myself using mod_rewrite. Juju has written a Perl script to clean up existing server logs.
Note that iTunes uses Gracenote’s CDDB service, which claims to have 25 metagenres in the latest version, CDDB2. iTunes currently only has 24 metagenres, with no subgenre support. Hopefully this will be introduced in a future iTunes release. I find it a bit annoying that these metagenres differ between iTMS and the CD importer. However, I don’t think Apple is ever going to resolve this in the future because that would mean retagging millions of files in the store. Oh well.
I installed sIFR 2.0 RC 3 this morning on my weblog. I have Flash MX 2004 Professional, so creation of the .SWF file was painless. Thanks to Mike Davidson and his crew for such a great script! If you have any sIFR questions, feel free to drop me a line. I might use this in future web design projects for clients.
Google might need to start thinking about a new way to deliver ad content to Adsense affiliates. I’ve noticed a constant decline in my Adsense revenue over the last few months, and I have a feeling this is due to the adoption of Mozilla Firefox. I love Firefox personally, and use it as my everyday browser. However, I’ve noticed that you can install two methods to avoid advertisements. This includes Google Adsense text ads, which I find to be unobtrusive. If this is in fact the reason why my Adsense revenue is experiencing a steady decline, Google is going to start losing advertisers. This effect would take years since Google is so hot at the moment. However, ad delivery is the core money maker for Google.
Adblocking has had an adverse effect on a number of web sites, and needs to be used with caution. I’m a fan of blocking malicious ads and animated banner ads, but blocking Adsense is a little extreme. Nevertheless, most adblockers filter out <iframe> tags, which is how Google currently delivers advertisements. It’s possible that RSS ad delivery could be the wave of the future, or even open_base_dir PHP includes.
All I know is at the moment, this is a potential problem that must be addressed, both by webmasters and Google Adsense employees.
I signed up for Flickr on December 4th. So far, the service has been simply fantastic. Flickr Uploadr lets you upload photos in batches to the service so it’s very easy to add your complete archives to the site. I’ve already uploaded 1534 photos as of today. Flickr lets you store the full-size image to their services and also allows other users to download your high-resolution images. Flickr doesn’t currently limit how many photos you can store on its site or how much disk space you can use. They limit Pro users to 1 GB of uploading traffic a month, which is huge. When I uploaded my photo archives last month, I only hit about 50% of my quota, and that was for 1500 photos!
I think Flickr is going to run into server problems with its increasing popularity. Many users have 5 megapixel or higher cameras, which makes the files saved to the service rather large. I like saving the full-size image to their site instead of downscaled ones because my friends like to download the original, uncorrupted image. Also, Flickr announced their plans to roll out a photo printing service, so having full-sized images on their site ready to go is probably a good idea. This way, family and friends can get really nice print copies from your images. Nevertheless, if every user on the service was like me, they would take up a lot of disk space. I’m unsure as to whether Ludicorp can handle thousands of accounts that take up over a gigabyte of disk space.
Already, the service is getting overwhelmed by new customers. I love Flickr and hope that their current policy doesn’t change, but it seems to me that they’re going to have to cut back somewhere to deal with the increased popularity. Either that or Google can purchase them and customers won’t ever have to worry about disk space again.
The last version of the site.