Well, it’s been 11 months since my 500th post, and 18 since the inaugural post. Clearly it’s taken me almost twice as long to get the last 500 out as did the first 500. But hopefully everyone feels like my quality has improved.

I would like to once again thank ALL of my loyal readers. I never would have guessed that I’d be getting 15-20,000 page views per day a year ago, or that I’d have thousands of regular readers, but I can tell you that I really appreciate the fact that you all keep coming back.

As I’ve stated before, I’ll continue to give all of my advertising revenues to charity, or return them to the reader community in the form of member contests.

After a year and a half, and 1,000 articles, there is just one favor I’d like to ask of you all. Nothing pleases me more than seeing the subscriber count grow, so if you could help me spread the word to just a couple of friends or co-workers by suggesting they subscribe, I sure would appreciate it. And if you have any suggestions for ways I could improve things around here please don’t be shy about dropping a comment to let me know.

Thanks again!

Well, maybe not yet… but it could be if you help! :-)

You know, about two months ago when I got nominated very, very late in the game for the Blogger’s Choice awards you guys all came together with a bunch of votes in a period of only a few days. The problem was, the voting had been open for an entire year, but we were only in on it the last week of the year.

Well, I just found out that the 8th Annual Weblog Awards are accepting submissions up until Jan 11, so if any of you guys want to see One Man’s Blog in the running now would be the time to do some submitting. (Shameless plug duly noted.) After the 11th they are going to narrow down the submissions and pick just a few that will be open for voting for some period of time thereafter. It sure would be something if OMB somehow scored a major upset and made it onto the list!

Now I know that with 70 million + blogs out there we’ve got like a one in a million chance, but as Lloyd said in Dumb and Dumber…

“What you’re telling me is, we’ve got a chance!”

As far as I can tell, the categories most befitting this blog would be “Best American Weblog”, “Best-Kept Secret Weblog”, or the elusive “Weblog of the Year” – of which I’m certain we have no chance at winning. But heck, I guess this is really about mobilizing your reader base as much as actual blog quality, so in the end doesn’t that really mean this is a vote about YOU, my dear readers, and not me?

So, if you can spare like 3 minutes to throw a vote my way in return for the 950 posts I’ve put out in the last year and a half I would really appreciate the gesture!

If you don’t have time, it’s no big deal really! I just appreciate the fact that you guys keep reading and commenting on my crazy ramblings day after day. In the last year I’ve gone from around 100 to 1000 regular subscribers (as reported by Feedburner), and an average day around One Man’s Blog means at least 10,000 readers – so again… Thanks!!!

Folks, a while back I had turned on the full e-mail feed so that you guys could read the entire articles without having to click through to the site. Unfortunately when I upgraded to the most recent version of WordPress it changed the way the feeds are handled and turned off the full e-mails.

Well, good news! I found a plugin called Full Text Feed and hopefully that is going to take care of the issue. So, please help me keep an eye on things as from now on those of you getting e-mail updates or subscribing via RSS should be able to read the whole thing.

By the way, I also found another plugin called Dual Feeds which might be more appropriate for some folks.

I recently completed the upgrade to WordPress 2.3 and thought it was about time I gave some credit where credit is due. So, the following is a complete list of all of the plugins that are in use here on OMB.

Perhaps others will find these plugins of use as well, but more importantly I want to thank the hard work of all the developers that make OMB what it is.
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Well, I know you guys normally notice this before I do, but I was filtering through the spam here on OMB with FireFox when I noticed the SearchStatus bar was reporting we’re back up to a PR7. It’s not quite the PR8 we used to know and love, but it’s better than the downright insulting PR4 we suffered with for a couple of weeks.

Anyhoo, now my previous rant seems a little silly. But I do wonder if someone saw it and corrected things (mostly) as a result? It’s impossible to know what to do to appease the Google Gods. I’ll just keep sending random offerings of frankincense and myrrh.

Donncha O’Caoimh, one of WordPress’ lead developers spent the last few weeks working on a brand new plugin called WP Super Cache which is, without a doubt, the biggest advance in WordPress performance in years. (Please Digg it fast!)

Donncha has not only improved the existing ubiquitous WP-Cache system for users that are logged in (bug fixes, added plugin capabilities, etc), he’s literally invented a new methodology for static caching of documents for visitors which renders at least a 2-3X performance improvement over WP-Cache.
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Thanks once again to my good friend Roy Kaldung for yet again saving our ass and keeping One Man’s Blog alive and kicking!

Several of you guys sent me e-mails today notifying me that OMB was down for much of the day. Unfortunately I was tied up for most of the day, but when I did get free I spent a few hours trying to determine what the problem was. Of course, I wasn’t making much progress…

Well, bright and early in Germany (like 6 am mind you!) Roy went to check on the OMB server, then IM’ed me when he noticed it was having issues. After about an hour of heavy duty trouble shooting he finally figured out that the culprit was actually the Dragon Design Sitemap Generator plugin I was using on the site.
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Hey, for all of you that have been trying to access the site today, sorry it’s been down for hours. :-( I hadn’t noticed because for the last couple of weeks I’ve been on a super-secret mission. Perhaps I’ll tell you guys what I’ve been up to in the next week or two…

Anyway, the server is obviously back up now, but I’m working on the root cause of why these things are happening. You know, all I want is a freakin server that will just stay up and running all the time! All I do is run this little blog, so why is that so hard to accomplish?!? The site is waaaayy too busy for a managed Virtual Private Server, and even though I bought a ginormous dedicated server that sucker is once again struggling to keep up with demand.

Grrr…

You know, I don’t think I could be any more disappointed in Google than I am today.

And that is a shame because I’m normally a big fan. I mean, just look… I’ve got an entire category dedicated to Google Tools with 50 posts in it! But the problem is, today Google decided to penalize a whole boatload of sites for some reason or another, and in the process they dropped OMB from a PR7 to PR5. And just in the last few weeks it had already moved from a PR8 to PR7.

I just don’t understand this at all. I know Matt Cutts, and have spoken with him and we’ve e-mailed one another several times on the topic of Google PageRank, and even I just have no idea why in the hell this happened.
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You know, I’ve had it completely with BlogRush. As far as I’m concerned John Reese can go get bent. Why? Well, this is a service that was so poorly rolled out that after I announced it right here on OMB I had to modify my post within 1 day. That is the ONLY time I’ve had to do that in over 850 posts.

Well, a few days ago John Reese sends this e-mail out to the world explaining that he knows there were some serious problems with the initial launch and that they are making a bunch of changes to clean up the site, and so on, and so forth.

So, like a sucker I thought I’d give them one more chance to redeem themselves and put the widget back in the sidebar. Within a very short period of time I was already noticing that there were porn links appearing in my sidebar, so I removed the widget.

Now, flash forward to today – when I don’t even have the widget on my site- and I get the following notice telling me that my content “did not pass our Quality Review criteria”. HA!
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“You like me… You really like me!”

Ok. I received word that one of my “biggest fans” has nominated One Man’s Blog for a Blogger’s Choice Award! In fact, OMB was nominated as the Best Blog of All Time! I don’t know about all that… but thank you very much for the nomination.

Funny thing is, there are only a few hundred votes for the other blogs which are nominated (it’s not that huge of a contest I guess), so it is theoretically possible that if ALL of my subscribers were to take a minute to go over there and vote I could actually win (”…he wrote, while laughing at the thought this would happen…”).

Of course, to make matters worse, it looks like the voting – which has been going on all year – ends in a little over a week!

Sooo, if you are operating under the delusion that you’d like to see me crowned “King of the World” or something like that, then mosey on over and load up the votes! But remember, you’ve only got about a week to get ‘er done.

Lately I’ve noticed some sneaky bastard(s) Spammer has been posing as regular commentors and trying to post comments with their names, but using an alternate URL. A couple of you have noticed and caught this as well, and I would encourage everyone to help me keep an eye out for this kind of thing in the future.