Dave Kellam

I decided to buy Mint for eightface in the wee hours of the morning last night. It’s been out for awhile now, so I’m sure the post title is clever and original. For those living under rocks or those who don’t care about websites, it’s essentially a statistics package that allows you to see who is visiting your site.

Dreamhost includes Analog on all hosted domains, so it’s easy enough to get a rough daily statistics breakdown. It might not be enough, depends what your needs are though — the scope of analog is fairly broad and it’s a little on the cryptic side but it suits most people fine. If you’re one of the new-age blog freaks that lives on the 0-day edge and lusts after technorati and the like, Mint is right up your alley.

Like most web-apps these days, Mint is extensible with a plugin and api structure. If you offer up any files on your site, it’s probably worth getting the Pepper plugin download counter, which does pretty much what it says. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, check out the Pepper forum for more.

I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a number of different web projects and helping people move, so this site has been neglected a little bit. At some point, I need to clean up my mess of a stylesheet. I’ve also been meaning to overhaul flickrRSS for awhile. Hopefully, it’ll come up in the next little while. Marc has been messing around with the flickr api, it’s provided some inspiration to redo my plugin. Ideally, it needs to stay really simple — flickrRSS just works for most people as a simple badge.

I’ve also realized that it’s September. I don’t know how that happened or when summer disappeared. Regardless, I’ve been trying to enjoy the last vestiges of warmth and sunlight outdoors before the wonderful Canadian winter is upon us.

While I’m off on a personal entry, I’ll take this moment to endorse a few different objects for consumption: The Shield, Rome, Weeds, March of Penguins, The Editors, The Cribs. Three television shows, a movie and two bands. That will be all for now.

Technorati is sluggish — been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always managed to find a few links that others services haven’t. To be fair, other services produce results that Technorati doesn’t, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Kottke wrote about it, so everyone else needs to weigh in (it’s kind of fun using the service to track people bitching about it).

One of the site’s core problems is bloat. You think it would be obvious that size doesn’t matter when it comes to indexing weblogs. Quality, not quantity. Take a look at Technorati, they whip out their big numbers and slap ’em down on the top of the page. Over 16.1 millions blogs and 1.4 billion posts indexed. Pretty impressive eh? I bet that earns them all an extra glance at all the cool nerd parties.

Now, let’s try to come up with a solution that reduces the number of sites in the index, speeds up searches and returns more valuable results. Sounds like a bit of a tough one. So, lets take a look at a diagram (actually a screen capture, but diagram sounds better). Do you see any big problems? Maybe BlogSpot? Five of the last seven are AdWords abuse/spam sites. I’m not sure how valuable 16.1 million weblogs are when you have crap like this around.

Don’t get me wrong, I have friends that use BlogSpot, it’s a nice easy way to get started online and maintain a simple weblog. Something has to change though. I’m sure Google is aware of the problem, it’s probably screwing up their index too.

How do we fix it? Technically, it’s a problem on Google’s end — they own Blogger and should do something about so many fake sign-ups. In the short-term, Technorati could remove BlogSpot from the index, it’s a bit of a blanket solution but it could help speed things up . Although, it probably wouldn’t help them in terms of Google buying out the service. On the other hand, Yahoo might appreciate the damage to its rival. It doesn’t even have to be a full-out ban on whatever.blogspot addresses, maybe just have a holding period or a number of links to their site from non-BlogSpot addresses.

This Cringely article mostly deals with Google and the possibility of the company being at an apex (although without much substance or willingness to go out on a limb). He goes on to explain the Google is doing their own thing and probably not looking to be a Microsoft killer, instead pointing at Apple as the likely culprit. The kicker of an idea is at the end:

Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version — OS 10.4 — on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?

It wouldn’t kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn’t hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple’s store.

That could be fun. The idea sounds plausible but it probably won’t happen. Then again, Apple switching to Intel was never supposed to happen either. I could see Apple releasing an older version of os x that runs on any Intel hardware and making /home/user directories easily portable on the iPod.

Here’s a chunk of code for WordPress that will display a custom message on posts older than a certain date. You might ask, “Why would I need such a thing?” And I’d say you probably don’t but if the post is older than 60 days and not a monthly archive, the person has likely arrived via search engine or permalink.

So, who cares if someone is arriving via search engine? Well, they probably won’t stick around after you’ve given them their tidbit of information. However, you could direct them towards your site’s main page, some other content or even display some AdWords or other advertising (thus avoiding a hit to your loyal readers).

It’s a relatively straight-forward chunk of php code. You’ll probably want to put it in your post template, sandwiched between the function that displays content and the one that displays comments.

<?php 
	$entry_datetime = abs(strtotime($post->post_date)); 
	$time_since = time() - $entry_datetime;   
	$days_since = 60;
	if ($time_since > $days_since * 86400) :
?> 		
 <div class="message-age">
  ## Modify this message
  <p>This entry is more than 60 days old.</p>
 </div>
<?php endif; ?>

This code is GPLd, do whatever you want with it. You could have it display a different message for a post that’s a year old or two years old.

If there’s interest, I can turn this into a simple WordPress plugin but it doesn’t seem overly necessary.

Popped down to Montreal this weekend and stayed a night at Phil’s place. Didn’t get up to much, but I took a few photos Sunday afternoon. It’s still annoying not to have an lcd screen on my camera, I’ll get something new eventually. Here’s the full photo set on flickr.

It’s really hard to start writing about Vogue for Men, then again some organizations can write an entire article. There should be more than a few obvious jokes to work with, but the project on a whole just seems like another addition to the already massive pool of magazines. It may survive, it may not. I can’t see myself buying it.

I’m guessing that they’re trying to pull in an audience of modern, fashion-conscious men (you get a slap in the head for allowing meterosexual into your brain). I’m also going to go out on a limb and guess that they spent a lot of money photographing George Clooney and gave a five-year old some licorice to design the cover for them.

Look at it. I mean really look at it. Try to tell me that cover isn’t seven different shades of ugly — from the logo, to the use of four hundred different fonts. For a magazine that’s pimping style, it’s hard to figure out how this cover escaped into the wild.

It seems like you can’t turn around on the internet these days without running into the phrase “Web 2.0”. Some of the chatter is positive, some is negative — I’ll weigh in with the latter group. Why did they let this one leave the brainstorming session? Web 2.0 sounds like a bad Microsoft concept or at the very least an immature product. Then again, why stop at Web 2.0? It seems sort of minimalist. We should really go all-out and call it eXtreme Web 2005 Mega Enterprise Edition.

There are a lot of smart people around making a lot of smart things, but they need to stop pimping the phrase. I don’t think anyone can really step back and say, “Yup, sure looks like a point upgrade happened sometime around April. What do you think Frank?” That said, it’s mostly a marketing endeavor — people work well with acronyms and buzzwords. Take AJAX, there’s been some backlash related to branding a technology that’s been around for years, but it’s given everyone a common point to rally around.

Inventing buzz words is cool, I understand the need — but Web 2.0? We can do better. Why not come up with a term like AJAX that actually describes the underlying paradigm shift? How about Dynamic and Fluid Technologies (DAFT) or Dynamic User-Dependant Environment (DUDE) or Fluid Interactive Services Hub (FISH)? I could go on.

The whole web 2.0 thing is a semantic argument and kind of a pissy little thing to bring up, but no one in the “Web 2.0” crowd actually reads this site, so it doesn’t matter.

Back from the camping trip to Charleston Lake. We had great weather and and a great place to camp at an interior site. We canoed in — definitely a lot easier than hiking with the gear. It was relaxing to spend a few days outdoors.

The only problems on the trip were the raccoon and my camera batteries dying. The broken lcd on my camera is brilliant white and sucks up the juice if I forget to turn it off (easy enough to do in bright light), so I only really have photos from the first day. Alanah managed to conserve her battery for the whole trip and got some great shots out of the canoe. For more, take a look at my photoset or Alanah’s on flickr.

The raccoon (whom we dubbed Franz) had the audacity to make an attempt on our duffel bag full of food, despite the fact that we were sitting right beside it. Not just once, but three times. The first night he managed to eat a loaf of bread by jumping off a picnic table and clawing the bag open (it was separate from the main bag due to laziness). The second night he somehow managed to abscond with another loaf of bread and some hotdog buns despite no obvious signs of tampering with the bags in the tree. We suspect Franz has invented teleportation technology. Will investigate further.

I’ve ventured off into the woods for a few days. Posting is unlikely. Be wary of comments by spam bots — they want to sell you fruit baskets and pills for various dysfunctions.

Gone camping image is courtesy of my mad skills in Paint. The ugly orangification of the the picture was courtesy of photoshop (a somewhat failed attempt at working with the shiny new colour scheme). A copy of the original is available.

There should be photos posted on tuesday or wednesday.

I’m working on a little project. I need a few people who like wine and drink at least a couple of bottles a month. It would also be helpful if you have a website, but that’s not entirely neccessary.

It’s hopefully going to be a nice easy way to keep track of the wines that you’ve been drinking. And also a way to get recommendations for new bottles to try out. Leave a comment or drop me a line if you’re interested.

This entry is about hockey — if you don’t like it, I can’t blame you. The lockout mess definitely didn’t do anything to assuage public opinion of the sport.

I grew up watching hockey, then again I’m a Canadian male, so it’s almost a given. I was an Oilers fan until they sold Gretzky in 1998 (another commercial mess), although I still followed the 1990 Messier era Stanley Cup and then jumped ship to the Maple Leafs. Remember that 92-93 conference championship? Yeah, the one with Gretzky’s “shot-on-net” that looked kind of like a high-stick in his own zone. But we’re not bitter.

The point is, there are some fond memories of the sport rattling around in my brain but I stopped following it awhile ago — sometime after the last lockout. Rapid expansion, dilution of talent and the exodus of Canadian teams probably had something to do with it. Now, you’re still reading this, so you’re probably mildly interested in hockey (that or you’re bored), so I’ll recommend reading the Idiots guide to the NHL lockout by Bill Simmons. It’s a good read, even if you’re not a hockey fan. This excerpt is the kicker:

For instance, let’s say you have a favorite diner near your house. What do we love about diners? They’re inexpensive. The food comes out fast. The coffee is always good. The chef in the kitchen has an “I hope these customers didn’t see me on ‘America’s Most Wanted’ look on his face. The gum-snapping waitress is in her 50’s, but there’s still something sexy about her, despite the smoking wrinkles and the missing left index finger. And you can kick back, read your newspaper, enjoy a decent omelet, home fries and some buttered toast, and flirt with a 53-year-old woman who was probably Patient X for Hepatitis B back in 1971. What’s better than that?

Well, imagine if they quadrupled the price at the diner, the food took three times as long, you couldn’t see the chef, all the waitresses looked like Kathy Bates, and they added so many breakfast items to the menu that you almost needed a translator to read the menu? Would you ever go there again? Of course not. And that’s what the NHL never realized until it was too late. It was the breakfast diner of professional sports leagues, nothing more. Unfortunately, it took a 301-day lockout — as well as every cable channel basically saying, “Thanks, but no thanks” — for everyone to realize this.

Simmons also does a pretty good job outlining the rule changes and blah-de-blah that have come in to effect as a result of the NHL’s new deal: salary caps, shootouts, and some trapezoid rule relating to goaltenders.

Will all of the changes improve the game and make a difference? Doubtful. The best thing they could do for the fans and the sport is dropping the ticket price. But it’s not really about the fans is it? It’s about the bottom line. That’s why I’ll probably watch a few games and why I’ll probably follow the Leafs through the playoffs (until they bow out in typical fashion) but the magic won’t be there. I’ll come back eventually, probably when I have kids and when the league decides it can operate for a few years without a lockout.