Tag: Blogging Posts

Well, I imagine by now many of the early morning shift people are in full swing. It seems like so long ago I wrote my first entry, and here I am at number 28. It sure is getting difficult finding content on short notice, but I’m managing to stay ahead of the curve somehow. My Blogathon Setup Rebecca did a quick tally on her blog, and I think between all the participants we are up to around $500 so far. That number doesn’t include people who have gone directly to their charity’s website and donated directly, so ultimately the number will be a bit higher. In terms of people on this blog, we’ve raised about $210 $260 so far. My goal was to hit $1000, which may be unrealistic, but given that we still have another 20 entries to go, I’m hoping that number can still go up quite a […]

I read this interesting article today that basically said that most people in the United States were only 11 days away from financial ruin. That is, if they were to lose their jobs tomorrow, they only have enough money to last for about 11 days: More than a third of adults could survive financially for only 11 days if they were to lose their job or be too ill to work, according to a survey. The finding gives a worrying insight into the lives of millions who are living on a financial tightrope. Researchers looked at how much people spend every month and how much they have in savings. It found a massive gap between the two, which means most would be crippled by a sudden change in their circumstances. I’m actually not surprised about that statistic, and in fact, my financial situation isn’t that much better. In terms of […]

San Francisco is without a doubt one of my favourite cities in the world. It’s situated right on the Pacific Ocean, nestled snugly between Marin Country and Oakland. While Napa Valley is usually extremely hot, San Francisco boasts a fairly moderate climate, with sunshine occurring on most days of the year. In August, there’s going to be a WordCamp session down in San Francisco. Given that I’m a huge WordPress advocate, and that I love the Bay Area, I registered today and made the quick, impromptu decision to attend. Flights out of Vancouver are around $400, but are only around $250 return out of Seattle. So I think I’ll try and grab a late night flight on Friday and spend the weekend down in San Francisco. Lloyd Budd is also heading down, so undoubtedly I’ll run into him during the event. Of course, Matt Mullenweg will be there too, and […]

Thanks to everyone who has pledged so far. I’m currently up to $140, which will ultimately go to the Union Gospel Mission. I’d like to hit at least $1000, so if you want to sponsor, please head on over and contribute. I’ll keep everyone updated during the event. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for my blogathon posts. Tonight at 10pm I start blogathon, a 24 hour blogging marathon that will hopefully bring some exposure to the charity of my choice, the United Gospel Mission. The Union Gospel Mission is a charity in Vancouver that helps people in need: Union Gospel Mission has been providing hope for the hungry, hurting and homeless since 1940. With 12 facilities placed between downtown Vancouver and the city of Mission, UGM is ideally positioned to help those who need it the most. Employing a full-time staff of approximately 130 and relying on […]

Yes, sports fans, it’s been twelve days since I decided to move my hosting back onto my living room floor. So far, it’s been 12 days of pure bliss, of heavenly visions filled with bunny rabbits and endless fields of sunshine and happiness, where kids run forever. But seriously, things have been going rather great. I haven’t had a single hiccup, and get complete SQL backups emailed to me twice a day, just in case something were to ever go wrong. All my data is backed up with RAID 5 storage (and will email me whenever a drive starts to get old, thanks to hourly SMART diagnostics), so unless my apartment explodes, everything should be ok. I’ve noticed the guys are Media Temple hitting my site from time to time, so I’m hoping they can figure out their problems soon. I still have a hosting account there, and wouldn’t mind […]

Well, it was an interesting day in the blogosphere, one that I’m thankful is over. Tonight I was sitting at home debating drinking myself into a coma when Rebecca pinged me online and said I should come over for wine. I was pretty comfy in my flannel pants and briefly debated staying at home. But since I really needed a few drinks, I decided to head over as I was, flannel pants and all. So for the last few hours I’ve been sitting on Rebecca and John’s couch in my flannel pants with a big-ass afghan draped over me. It was pretty much exactly what I needed tonight (although I’m looking forward to a nice long shower when I get back home). If you poke around the site a bit more, you’ll see a few more changes I hacked out tonight. The recent comments are back, although I’ve scaled them […]

As most of you know, there are several popular methods for obtaining statistics for your blog. While Google Analytics is probably the most comprehensive one I know (with the added benefit of being free), it is limited somewhat by the fact the the statistics are not real-time. For most practical purposes, that limitation isn’t a big deal, but it’s sometimes nice to be able to see what’s going on within your website in real time. On the recommendation of a friend, I splurged the $30 to finally see what Mint was all about. If you haven’t heard of it, Mint is a commercial statistics package with a pile of open-source plugins (called “Peppers” in Mint terminology). On my system, I have Peppers that display WordPress comments, downloads, most popular posts, and bandwidth. If you’re into podcasting, there are even Peppers for that. I’ve been using it for the past two […]

As you can see, my little advertising experiment with Commission Junction is pretty failtastic. Which is strange, because the ads are fairly targeted based on a few specific, popular pages of mine. I’m not a big fan of advertising to tell you the truth — I ripped Google Adsense off here a few months ago. To me, it’s worth $10 a month or whatever not to have them pollute my main page. I was testing a new concept though with more targeted ads that I choose, but so far it’s not working. Is anyone here actually making money with your blog (i.e, enough at least to pay for hosting)?

I’ve been dabbling with a new caching engine for WordPress over the last few weeks. While WP-Cache does a pretty decent job, it falls short in a few areas, and it’s something I’ve been trying to fix. In particular, here’s what I don’t like about it: It relies on the entire WordPress engine to do it’s caching It doesn’t make use of proper HTTP caching headers The problem with the first item is that even if you have a cache hit, the entire WordPress PHP core is parsed and partially executed. What that means is the caching system will always be limited by how fast the PHP parser is on the host machine, and how bloated the WordPress code-base is. The second item is a little more subtle. If you request a page from a website using WP-Cache and it registers as a cache hit, basically WP-Cache reads a file […]

So I’m currently at my mom’s place looking at her new computer. While checking out her new monitor, she spilled the goods: Mom: “Hey, you know that blog entry about people getting to your blog by googling duanestorey.com” Me: “Yah” Mom: “Don’t tell anyone, but it was us.. That’s what we do” So there you have it. My mom needs a few lessons in how to browse the web. I still love her though. Even though it means I might be adopted.