Long time since I’ve actually blogged.
Firstly, my university has ended. Yeah!
And then, I started learning Japanese formally, it has been interesting.
I have also decided to follow up on my driving lessons.
Things have gotten less busy and I’ve finally have got the time to do a bit of consolidation of my websites.
This blog is going to be partially hosted in Amazon S3. I’ve tolerated lots of years of hot-linking, this time I’m partially disabling some images from hot-linking due to raising costs.
I just joined MyBlogLog days ago just to see how it actually works. The idea is pretty cool so I decided to keep it on my sidebar.
(Very nice. I like the black one. It didn’t look very right due to my stylesheet. My sidebar one looks correct though.)
They’ve just released a new widget for the recent visitors tool and it’s looking really good. Go to their site to fetch the new codes. I kinda found the flyout feature to be rather annoying and disabled it. MyBlogLog is a Yahoo company.
Wow, WordPress.com increases everyone’s free upload to 3GB. Matt Mullenweg makes the following announcement.
Free Space to Three Gigabytes
Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. We’re doing the same thing for free.
How are we able to do this? Over the past year we’ve developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don’t feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth. We’re ready for you.
What about the space upgrades? They’re still important. You still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies, and we’re also increasing the limits of the paid upgrades, so if you bought a 1GB upgrade before it now adds 5GB for no additional charge.
Source: WordPress.com
It’s amazing how much WordPress grew. Started an open-source project back then, WordPress grew into a commercial business while still keeping WordPress software open-source. This is what open-source should be about. Today, they offer 3GB of free space. It just shows how open-source projects can be successful.
The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of CES media credentials and caused harm to CES exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future CES events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker Media are under discussion.
What Gizmodo did was to go around with this remote control and switch off the display sets. They disrupted a Motorola presentation, some gaming event and a lot of televisions on display. This is journalism at its worst. CES did what’s right to bar them from attending future CES event.
It’s a terrible prank and caused trouble from both attendees and exhibitors. I’m kinda disappointed when I saw the video of Gizmodo staffers switching off the televisions sets with a remote. Old prank and it wasn’t funny in my opinion.
read more | digg story
[Correction: Only one staffer has been barred. Additional sanctions under discussion.]
There are many ways of reducing spam, you can download all the plugins and start activating them. But why not just shut off comments and pings for posts that have almost no chance of people commenting anyway?
In order to reduce spam, I start disallowing comments and pings for posts before 2007 that has receive comments. Since it hasn’t got any comments for so long, it’s probably a boring or personal (not mutually exclusive of course) post so I’ll just disallow comments and pings.
SQL Statement to close comments and pings:
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed' WHERE `comment_count` = 0 AND `post_date` < "2006-12-31 00:00:00"
The above SQL statement finds all the posts before 2007 with no comments and closes all the comment and ping discussion. I hope that would minimize the amount of incoming spam per day. Use the above command at your own risk, make sure you know what you are doing. You might have named the table wp_posts differently from me.
I use in on WordPress 2.3.1 (latest version).
With that SQL command, 430 of my 1663 posts have their comments and pings closed.
It's a little depressing to log in and see Akismet catch 1000s of spam per day. To date, Akismet has protected //beconfused from 142,299 spam comments. Akismet just updated their plugin too by the way.
I haven’t really been blogging till, erm, today. I sort of excused myself. I wasn’t feeling happy enough to blog I guess. These days, life got a little harder – expectations to be met; procrastinations that I am still trying to kill; and the renewed interest in the art of daydreaming.
It’s funny but today I actually felt like writing something. And the irony is that I am one hand handicapped today. I had a slight swell on my finger and the doctor had to run layers of bandages to make himself feel proud of his skills. I stared at my nicely-done bandage while listening to him accuse me of eating too much protein. I ran through with him the meals I had the past week and he went on blaming my fish, my meat, my chocolate bar (hey it’s just one) and the soya bean drink I had on Monday.
I type with one hand. I consumed the medicine with a hand. I eat my pasta with one hand. It wasn’t the best dinner experience I guess but still it felt kinda good. I hadn’t been going out much if not for school and work. My life seem to be revolving around purposes and goals that I forget to enjoy.
So when a friend asked me out for a dinner (yeah the pasta one), I accepted. Something rather ad-hoc but I just said okay. I keep telling people to plan dinners at least 2 days ahead and that I won’t want dinners to occur all of a sudden. Perhaps that’s just a mistake, I kinda miss these random insertions of my day.
Maybe things would get more exciting if life’s a little more random, a little less planned.
I was talking a little about blogging today and I was mentioning to this 2 friends how some people blog about everything – cam whoring, pictures of food, daily activities, conversations with friends and er, more cam whoring. They totally don’t understand blogging. Actually the idea of blogging, or broadcasting of thoughts, it’s sometimes just for this feeling of satisfaction, of encouragement, of someone caring about what you do.
I blog for a mixture of reasons. But one of the main reason is satisfaction. I get thrilled to see visitors and it makes me happy that the article I posted actually helped them. I used to post more personal stuff but after a while I just realized that nobody’s really interested I guess. Eventually I switched to funny stuff that I see everyday that made me smile. And I want to remember the moments that I feel happy seeing a YouTube video, angry that the world isn’t fair, proud when people find my tutorials useful.
And thus I blog. It’s hard to describe the feeling. I just concluded to them that they should try it. Try blogging for a little while, get your friends to see your blog. It’s quite a good feeling for me and it may be for you too.