Recently in Blogging Category

According to Google Analytics, the following are my most popular posts. Funnily enough, the post to Manually Remove Google Desktop had twice the number of hits to the Absoblogginlutely! home page.

1. Manually removing Google Desktop
2. Absoblogginlutely!
3. Unknown error 0x80040600 - Outlook corrupt emails in deleted items.
4. Clientdiag for troubleshooting WSUS
5. Fixing vpmsece.dll errors in outlook (Symantec AV plugin problems). Interestingly I posted this in 2003!
6. Audible to mp3 (how to conversion)
7. Backup Exec jobs won't run but go to queued.
8. Spell Check not working in Word. Word hides the option in a very strange location.
9. Svchost crash with 0x745f2780. Need to install a hotfix from Microsoft.
10. Error 0x80096001 when trying to run Windows Updates

85% of my traffic came from search engines - 75% in total from Google. This shows I have great Google ranking but not many people stick around :-(

I run a small site with only 61,000 unique visitors 2000 of whom are suprisingly on dialup, 45% of users use dsl or cable - no surprise there really.  Internet explorer accounts for 68% of users which I think is pretty large for a technical site. The 8 users who visited more than 200 times in the past year really need to learn the benefit of RSS feeds - if that is you and you need some help then let me know. 53% of users are in the USA, 13% in the UK.

Finally, as all good statistics are not complete with some sort of a graphic here is a map of visitors from the world - there are very few locations that haven't visited - Madagascar was one that I could actually recognise from the map.

Happy New Year everyone - I hope you all had a good evening. This is a quick post to announce my new blog, Absoblogginlutely! - IRL (IRL stands for In Real Life) and this will continue my no techie posts. I have had several users say that my main blog is too technical but they would still like to keep up to date with the news so feel free to head on over. I have been working on some of the content and posts over the Christmas break, but you'd be surprised as there doesn't look like there is actually much there at the moment but the About Me page and the Contact Me page will make an appearance on this blog eventually.
There will be some cross posted content where appropriate, but this blog will focus on more of the Tech content and IRL will contain other things. This year I also intend to work on my photography skills and related content to that will be on IRL.

Liz wrote a post on why do givers not ask to be paid, something that I've been wondering this last week or so. I've received lots of thankyou emails and comments over the years on this blog from users who have been helped from the posts on this blog. I've also read other blogs where people have mentioned that they have made some money from donations on their website/application purely by having a donation button on there. After all if you don't make it easy for users to donate or even ask them, then it's unlikely they will.
Therefore I've been considering putting something like a paypal donation button on the blog posts so that if a post has helped someone then maybe they would like to donate. If it's possible I'd like to only put it on pages where users have been referred by Google or other search engines. This way regular users who read the blog via the web wouldn't get the donate button, rss readers wouldn't get it, but those who I've really helped by providing answers would get the button on the page.
I've previously not put something like this on the website as it has always been my personal record of solutions that I have come across in my daily life and I like to help other people - getting the thank you emails and comments make my day (and they still do).
So what do you the readers think of this idea? Do you think I'm selling out or do you think it is a good idea? How many of you click the adverts on this blog already? (Some already do as I make a little money from adsense but not much).

Kristen got a book out of the library, No one cares what you had for lunch, which has 100 ideas to use when you get bloggers cramp and can't think of anything to write about on your blog. Ideas range from "Find the objects of your affection" and talk about it to "Blow your budget" - what would you spend 10 million dollars on? Ironically I opened the pages at random and the topic was "Dig in" - what makes your mouth water - talk about your perfect meal......

I've been invited to join the Friends In Tech team as a blogger which was a nice offer and an honour to take up. I'll still be posting over here but will have some content on their site too now.
My first post was about the firefox upgrade to 1.5.06 and an easy way to get extensions to work afterwards.
Mike McBride was also invited to post and his first post is about having an appreciation folder in your email client.

If you read either of our blogs you will probably be interested in some of the other Friends in Tech blogs and their podcasts.

The Blogroll is back. Not sure why it got confused but after removing it, copying the code into a test.php which worked fine and then copying the code back into the MT template, it's all worked fine again.
It's great as there are a couple of blogspot blogs that don't seem to have an RSS feed, but I can get notification that they have been updated via this mechanism - it also enables Kristen to read the blogs without an rss reader too.

Not sure how long it has been going on, but it looks like blogrolling is having some funnies with the links. For some reason blogrolling sends the html with single quotes around the parameters in the a tag. Something is escaping the single quotes with backslashes so the urls get broken. Anyone else noticed this and know when it started happening?

I signed up for a beta invite to cocomment this morning and got an invite code a couple of hours later. Unfortunately it doesn't work in MovableType (yet) but it does work in Wordpress and blogger. I'll start using this to track most of my blog posts on the web when possible. I did find that the default installation of redirectremover extension screwed up the bookmarklet (and also screwed up my url123.com bookmarklet too) so disabling that made it all work properly.

Blogging has hit the mainstream when an ad at the cinema advertises mycoke.com where you can have a blog (and do other stuff) on the coke site. I was quite amazed that this was shown on an ad, but then again the film we went to see was a sci-fi one, Aeon Flux, so I guess Sci Fi people enjoy blogging?
The film was pretty good with some nice special effects although there were a couple of moments where it dragged on and I almost fell asleep! It is similar to the matrix but not as cliched and thankfully they didn't do that bullet stop motion thing.

A couple of my workmates have been pointed towards this blog when they need technical data that I've come across in the past. We were also discussing the need to let other techs know when our tools subdirectory is updated with new content (such as the mbsa visio plugin mentioned in the previous directory). I mentioned that a blog was needed and we thought that we could use one of the notes blog templates that is out there. We then thought that it would be a good idea to use the blogging facility within sharepoint as we do not have much experience with the software and this would give us real world experience in using sharepoint AND having an internal (and possibly an external) blog at the same time. Hopefully this will get approved next week and we can start to use it. Now I just need to find a RSS reader for Lotus Notes to read peoples updates. (We were originally going to use the KnowledgeBase discussion template within Notes but that doesn't notify us whenever there is new content like it is supposed to do)

Tomorrow (Fri) is Absoblogginlutely's second birthday so we gave it a birthday cake

The Brother in law,Dave, is in the background. We then discovered that pumpkins are made of magnets

(No we weren't drunk when we took these photo's and it was actually Katies birthday yesterday - hence the "cake")

It's taken them long enough, but google now have a dedicated blog search which seems to be pretty uptodate. It didn't take them long to index the content of Absoblogginlutely at all. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before this gets added to the main google site (shame this isn't an option for it to be added with their personalisation features) and also to see if they add other features similar to feedster. If they keep it like it is at present then they will do well - Feedster seems to be bogged down with all the features they keep adding but (in my experience) are very slow to fix problems with claiming feeds etc.
Thanks to John Hesch for the headsup

Following on from my earlier install of Uniform Server, I thought I'd check to see that wordpress can be installed on the server (which it can).
Extended entry has my dummies guide to installing on Uniform which is not much different to the installation at Installing Wordpress official site but may help someone.

This blog is now listed on Blogdigger

I took the blogging survey at MIT which took a couple of minutes to do - should be interesting to see what the results are like when they are online (and stable)

I was reading another one of my reads this morning, 2guys2cities when I saw that the post on backup strategy was written by Mike McBride. Is that what you were *really* doing whilst you were pretending to be on holiday Mike? I've come across several blogs where people have had guests in to say something - normally whilst they are away on holiday or something. I wonder if there is a market for babysitmyblog.com :-)

Blogdigger can show recent posts by zipcode with mine highlighted with the link. The first post is one by Mike - way to go! Mine is nowhere to be seen though (yet). It has some new feeds that I've not come across, including one for OCLC and also has a feature to ignore a particular blogger if you don't want their results. Maybe I should start another category for this.. Now posted to a category called geoblogging.
Thanks to Research Buzz for the information on this one (a worthy subscribe if you are interested in the latest goings on in the search engine world (and not just google)

Google Maps for my old location with the local blogs is pretty neat. My Dublin, Ohio location has some new blogs I've not read but doesn't have this blog on it - yet!

I've now set up this blog to notify technorati once it has been updated. I actually thought this ad been done automatically but as a recent ping to Neil never showed up I guess that wasn't the case.

An alternative to Geourl.org has been launched and you can add your site at the homepage at geourl.infoby using the form which then provides you with a link like blogs near Absoblogginlutely via mike@zed1

Google announced yesterday that they will not consider links in a webpage if surrounded by a nofollow tag. The upshot of this is that comments can be surrounded by the nofollow tag and google will not consider these links in pageranking. When I first read this it sounded a great solution to the commentspam problem. If everyone follows this solution, then there will be little point in doing the spam and hopefully it will stop - but therein lies the problem - everyone needs to follow it. Scoble reports that already MSN and yahoo have announced they will also use this tag. Also interesting that they've done this in a couple of days/hours as opposed to having to use a committee to do it.
It will be something that I'll be looking at putting in my MT implementation soon (details from their news page on how to do this) - when I get some time!

Bloggar 4 has been updated with a couple of patches and is available for download although the link on that page is broken. The download page should really read http://www.bloggar.com/download

I've been accused of being too technical in my blog posts, (mainly by nontechies though). Therefore I've considered splitting this blog into a techie/work related blog and a personal blog. However would you read one or the other,both, stop reading or even start reading? Comments please.

download bloggar - the tool for easily updating your blogs.

I did a search for absoblogginlutely on MSN Search this morning and on checking the results found that another blogger has used this blogs name as a category in her blog. Not sure why there is a category called that, but I guess imitation is the best form of flattery :-)

Despite the "ooh this is a privacy problem" concern on Neil's post about putting your blog on Multimap my location (or near enough) is here.

I'm sure you've all heard that blogrolling has been brought out by Tucows, the repository of freeware and shareware. I must admit that I don't tend to use Tucows as I tend to go to the authors directly, but when they are swamped with downloads then Tucows is a handy place to head to. Anyway, with nearly everyone's blogging software providing rdf feeds, including the free blogger, is there really any need for a service like blogrolling? Ok, it provides a list on your page of which sites you read - but an opml list can do that, and it also gives a nice star or other symbol by sites that have recently updated (according to weblogs.com) but getting the news from the site direct will also give you that knowledge *including* the content.....So what else does blogrolling give us? I must admit that although I have the list on my page its not updated very often and I don't use it now to keep up to date with sites that have changed, which I used to before I had a decent RSS reader. I know Iconoblog uses blogrolling, but I'm glad he's not asked me to explain RSS usage yet :-)

I've added a new blog to my MovableType installation - Absocachinlutely which will have details on Geocaching and everything related to this. This means everything will be in one place and will not clutter up this blog as much. The blog, as usual, has a RSS Feed so it will still be easy to keep up to date with it.

Just noticed that bloggar 3.03 was also released in December, and the author is talking about version 4, which I'll be able to get on the beta as I'm a premium user (and I've now subbed to the rss feed of news so I should find out quicker.

The 2003 Blogging Survey results are in and make interesting reading even if they do focus on advertising a tad too much. I've posted a comment on the page too.

Simmons Consulting have a freebee addon,Zempt This to Internet Explorer that allows you to select text in IE (shame its ie only) and then right click and send the text through to zempt to publish.

I'm sure most of you know that blogrolling got hacked/corrupted over the weekend with every link on a blogroll pointing to Laura's site. Unfortunately there were some sad people who attacked her personally, thinking she had done it. Anyway, looking on a lot of the blogging and comments about this issue, someone pointed out MySQLinks which looks like it does the same sort of thing as Blogrolling, but you host it on your own site using mysql and php includes (I guess). Looks like it will be something I need to take a look at in the near future....

tBLOG is a new site/service that provides you with hosting for a blog. It looks similar in style to blogger/blogspot but there are no adverts that I could see and they also provide RSS 1.0 feeds of the blogs. Looking at the front page I'm not sure how professional the service is as the comment "We know banners are a bother, but at tBLOG our traffic is your traffic, so deal with it." doesn't look very encouraging for helpful responses from technical support! From what I've seen doing a quick search of the blog there are a lot of female teenagers blogging on there - a completely different circle to the usual blogs that I read.

I've been hearing loads about the PDC conference that various MS bods have been too yet nowhere, until now, have I seen what PDC stands for. It has nothing to do with Primary Domain Controllers or blogging. It actually stood for "Professional Developers Conference"

Interesting crash screen from a gotdotnet blog. Apparently the owner of this blog writes some good exchange security articles.

Interesting how the number of unique visitors has shot up over the past few months. I guess that is a good sign, unless it carries on at that rate and I have to start paying for all the bandwidth used!

I downloaded a radio show on blogging from Radio Arthur and burnt iit to cd and listened to it in the car on the way home from work last night. It was a fairly interesting radio show although the music breaks between segments of talking were a lot louder than the talkie bits so I was constantly having to fiddle with the volume control. The show started off with Rebecca Blood explaining what blogging is and progressed to two topics about why people blog. They seemed to draw the conclusion that the reason people blog is either they are teenagers and are blogging about their lack/gain of boy/girl friend and how much alchohol they drank last night, or the blogger has a political motive, sometimes with a decidely biased viewpoint. NONE of the blogs I read actually fit into either of those categories (although Neil sometimes mentions how much he drank last night :-)
Most of the blogs are either similar to diaries or are techie blogs with people either talking about the techie stuff they've been doing on their computers (although i guess the latter could be divided into political blogs with the pro/con microsoft viewpoint) ;-)

Technorati announced they are now tracking a million blogs

Just goes to show you can't believe everything on the internet as this guy claims to have modded the original research article I posted about to include some tracking information in the first three words so he could see how quickly it spread - very quickly is the answer! I think the success of the spread was mainly due to how spooky and correct it was, and unlike most research done nowadays wasn't obvious to everyone on the high street.

Feedster are announcing 30 features, one a day are to be released. I liked the comment made that someone said ah.....features - we used to call them bugs. Worth keeping an eye on!

I know Neil zips his pages and so does Chris (as he asked if I could switch it on for helsby.net (but I think he meant absoblogginlutely.net)) but on reading up about it, there are two scary reads that talk about 2KB of data going missing, which is certainly one way of compressing the data! There is also the Browser Compatibility issue where css files could not be downloaded and Netscape 3 doesn't even see the file at all! (and i've had 38 hits from Netscape

The 3 Column version output of Firda's Firdamatic is up.

This post on a Comments feed reminded me that I didn't have a comments feed since moving from blogger. The posts from Phil look quite good and his feed certainly looks ok in Feed On Feed (my quick rss newsreader of choice). I'll try it out later on Awasu and Newzcrawler and get round to adding it to my site.

Bloglines looks like a decent web based newsreader which means its available from any pc and you don't need to mess with synchronising your feeds between computers, although an opml file helps with that (which I imported from Awasu)

Phil's post has a couple of ways to keep up with blogs that have been updated. He details using Bloglines, blo.gs, blogstreet and more....

Just taking ownership of this blog on . The blogstreet map is interesting but I've not even heard of some of the blogs on it!

In the past couple of weeks I have blogged my thoughts about two pieces of software - Awasu and Zempt. Within 24 hours I've had posts from either the writers or users of the software updating me or asking for further comments on the software. This has been due to them monitoring services such as technorati and all the other blog consolidation services. This is what you call customer service and has gave a very good impression of the product and also the ability to update any misunderstandings users of the products actually have. Maybe Microsoft should take note! On the other hand, my experience with Netgear is that I had to wait other two days for a response to my email asking for support and only when I rang them up did I get a (very satisfactory) response to my problem. Spot the difference! I guess it would probably be a lot harder for Netgear or Microsoft to monitor individual blogs and post feedback on them due to the numbers involved - after all a lot more people have Microsoft or Netgear products than Awasu for instance.

I know my parents often told me not to answer back, but when someone asks a question in the comments, where is the best place to answer?
If I posted in a new post, and someone has a question on the answer, then that would entail another post etc etc.
If I posted in an email reply then noone else would see it and maywonder why I appear to be ignoring the question (and not everyone leaves an email address)
If I posted in the comment, this might be relevant, but not everyone reads comments when looking at a site - I only read the comments when it relates to a post that I found particularly interesting - so again visitors may not see the answer and the content in the comment is certainly not as visible.

So where do you think is the best place?
And in answer to the questions posted recently - Angela, No Basil needed NO persuasion to lick the ice lolly - he needs no persuasion to eat *any* human food!
Pieter/ JR - yes it will take forever - thats why I'm considering bringing it home (and keeping it off my network until I am sure its safe!)
Kat - keep an eye on cheesebikini for blog updates and other links that he posts. Search google or use its googlealerts options for "flash mob San Antonio"
Will -hey I'm a southerner!!

Woohoo! I made it (just) into the top 100 on Popdex!

I am sure you have seen the little logos on blogs that say the page is powered by MovableType or RSS friendly etc. Well there is a Button Maker webpage which is a nice interface to the original programthat enables you to fill in the boxes and then get your own button.l The only problem I have found is thinking of some text short enough that will fit in the left hand box.

Discovered that Blogroots has a page created from other blogs that discuss blogging tools. By editing MovableTypes Categories, every time you post about a weblogging post, it automatically trackbacks to the blogpopuli page. Instructions (which are easy to follow if you are using MovableType are available at Blogroots : TrackBack How-To

Whilst looking at Firda's blog, I spotted a link to Pivot which is a free php driven blog tool which looks pretty good. I've seen some of the user pages and some of them look really good. I really like the front end to Blogged To Death, with its front page looking VERY nice. The only problem is that when you start using the site, the actual available amount of page space that is used is probably a quarter of the screen estate which is a real waste.

I may download this tool and use it at work as an online diary of what I've been doing in the office (as well as posting on this blog relevant information) but it will give me a log of what I have done and am doing.

WordPress also looks good although it needs mysql as an engine. This is good and bad - good in that its another program to get experience in and to store data in, bad in that its another thing to install on the web server. Pivot is standalone in that its a php application. Having said that I would need to install php on the server as its a MS IIS server at present.....Or I could install them on the laptop (which is probably what I will do)