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The ones I read first in my long blogroll
I have a long list of blogs/websites (233 feeds at this moment) to read in my Bloglines account. I don't have the time to read all of them nowadays (I used to), so I'm finding myself skimming through a select few blogs. Weirdly, even though bloggers like Scoble make very interesting posts, I tend to not read them because he's just too damn prolific and I don't have the time to read all the posts. Hmm... Interesting... I was just about to check whether there was a way to keep a post unread in Bloglines and there is (there's a "Keep New" checkbox at the bottom of every feed item). Well, maybe this will get me reading Scoble again.
As I was saying, I don't read every feed I subscribe to nowadays. (By the way, Bloglines only keeps 200 entries per feed before it stops keeping track of new ones.) What I do now is go through the list from top to bottom and check out the ones that I seem to be more interested in. It's interesting to see a pattern. I tend to give feeds with too many unread items a miss, resulting in a vicious cycle of them never getting read. Feeds with 30 new items a day, these I also tend to not read. I also read too many Mozilla-related blogs. Here's my list of "To Read" blogs (arranged in no particular order) whenever I'm short on time or just too plain lazy to read everything:
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Jon Hicks' hicksdesign
One of my favorite designers who also happens to be a mean programmer (at least from what I can tell from Jon's hacking of Textpattern, which powers his blog and portfolio). -
Bernie Zimmermann
Mozilla blogger and Firefox GrayModern Theme author -
Chris Pederick
Chris Pederick is the author of the Web Developer Tools Firefox extension, among other cool projects. -
Forever Geek
Which I contribute to, but I'm on hiatus now. -
Gadgetopia
Lots of neat posts and links on technology -
Gentoo Linux News
Not a blog, but I love Gentoo! -
Gravatar blog
I think Gravatars are pretty sweet, this keeps me in the loop of what Tom Werner's up to. -
Life At Ngee Ann
This is a fellow Singaporean's blog, quite humorous. "Ngee Ann" refers to Ngee Ann polytechnic, a local academic institution. -
life in mono
Fellow Singaporean Adrianna's a cool techie Mac evangelist. -
adot's notblog*
Asa Dotzler's blog. Mozilla stuff is always interesting. -
cheeaunblog
Author of the famous Phoenity theme, who happens to live in Penang where I some relatives stay. Maybe we can meet up when I go there, huh, Chee Aun? -
Neil's World
Neil Turner blogs stuff that I would blog myself if I could. Well, mostly. Mozilla and tech blog. -
Photo Matt
Matthew Mullenweg's the lead developer of WordPress, and turned 21 not long ago. -
philwilson.org
Phil Wilson blogs mostly on Firefox and the Semantic Web. -
vantan.org: The Daily Weblog
Fellow Singaporean Vanessa Tan is a "devoted Netizen" who works in an environment unfriendly to Firefox. -
The Burning Edge
Used to follow this religiously, but a little less now because of more infrequent posts and also because much of the work now is bug fixing since the Aviary branch landing.
Not too many A-list bloggers in that list, but that's probably because people like Simon Willison and Doug Bowman have been posting less of late. Give these blogs/sites a visit or two and let me know if you know of any related blog that I can add to my feed aggregator (yes, I'm still interested in more despite an unread list of hundreds).
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Jon Hicks' hicksdesign
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World of Warcraft servers are always up, apparently
When you have a server status page that doesn't work, and which tauntingly indicates that all servers are up even when they clearly aren't, you have to wonder whether it's a marketing tool for Blizzard, or just plain laziness in fixing a clearly broken script. Check out the World of Warcraft Realm status page - I've never seen a realm (i.e. a server) indicated as being down when it actually is down.
Right now, all servers are down because of weekly maintenance that goes on for 4 hours. And guess what? The server status pages indicates that ALL servers are up, alive and bursting with players killing goretusk boars and pygmy venom web spiders. I'm not whining about the downtime, but I am whining about the perenially broken server status page!
This page seems to be far more accurate in providing realm status.
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Another one switches to WordPress
Ben Milleare switches to WordPress. Don't you just love the way his Gravatars are set up? :P
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Full disclosure (of useless Web statistics), Dec 2004
How fun, starting a new year with a bland post on Web statistics.
December 2004 was a record month for this blog, with record highs in visits, pages and bandwidth. I exceeded my monthly transfer limit of 20GB by just a little bit as well.
Getting an average of 4.7K visits per day, or 10K pages per day.
Thanks to the "Homer Simpson uses tabbed browsing" post, transfer spiked to almost 3GB on Dec 15.
Top referrers included SpreadFirefox.com and Bloglines. There was a referrer spammer (brushed out in the screenshot) which made it to the top 10 before I caught it and blocked it.
Here's how referrers are blocked (with .htaccess), for those who are still looking for a solution. What these 2 rewrite rules do is to, respectively, rewrite the listed IP addresses, and rewrite the referrers with the following strings in them, back to the client's IP. This works extremely well, and I know because I've had my server (a VPS) brought to its knees from constant referrer spamming. The hit rates from these spammers were so high that it practically became a DOS attack. Since I've implemented these rewrite rules, all has been peaceful and I can finally see uptimes of more than 3 days (believe it or not, the VPS did go down that often).
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.26 [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.24
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} texasholdem [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example2\.com
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]The referrer spammers are still going at it (though they don’t appear in AWStats) - I can see them hitting me when I check my server-status page (see the mod_status module).
I don't think I'll need to upgrade my hosting plan yet, since the bandwidth spike was a one time thing caused by the crazy Homer Simpson entry.
And here's the top 10 browsers as requested. Unsurprising that Firefox tops the list.
Well, here's to a better year ahead for everyone. For myself, I look forward to having a good time at my new job, (finally) getting published, finding religion, and finally getting a move on in life. I'm not one for "Happy New Year"s and new year resolutions though. So blah, have fun.
Look me up in the Cenarius server if any of you are playing World of Warcraft - my main character's Lucita (gnome rogue).
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Seen elsewhere: Life without Firefox...
A poem on Life without Firefox, by Vanessa Tan, who has lost Firefox to her organization's software policy.
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