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.

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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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.

This evening I embarked on a major journey to upgrade the WordPress installation that One Man’s Blog was running on to the latest version. This was a very big deal because it involved skipping two entire releases. We went from version 2.0 to 2.3 (never even touched 2.1 or 2.2).

I’m pleased to report that except for one brief scare in the middle, the upgrade went fairly smoothly.
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All of my regular readers need to be giving thanks to Donncha Almighty for creating the new Friends Don’t Let Friends See Adverts plugin!

Donncha told me how he was selectively filtering ads so that he didn’t show them to his regular readers, and I was so intrigued I kept asking him how to do it. Well, he went one step further and wrote a plugin to make it all that much simpler for PHP hacks like me!

So, if you aren’t seeing ads today it’s all Donncha’s doing. And he’s a regular reader here so feel free to thank him in the comments!
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So, did anyone notice that I turned on the full feed for RSS and e-mail subscriptions? Now you see the entire article in your e-mail or RSS reader.

I’d love to hear feedback about this change because I honestly don’t know if you guys wanted that or not. I’ve been told by some people that they don’t want to get long articles in their e-mail. But I’ve had other people request a full feed.

So, now that I did it I’d like to know what you think about it so I can decide if I should leave it on, or go back to just an excerpt. Here are a couple of my own observations:

• In Outlook, my e-mail update doesn’t download the pictures or videos in the post. They just look like broken links or something. That is kind of annoying.
• In Google Reader, the entire post is visible including videos and images.

That’s all I know at the moment, so please get back to me on this one.

Saturday was an eventful day for One Man’s Server… It had the unenviable task of keeping up with a record day of visitors!

In one 24 hour period over 115,000 people visited the site. The vast majority as a result of reaching the “Most Popular in 24 hours” page on Digg for people visiting the 13 Billboards post (over 2,500 Diggs so far). I’d like to pass along a special thanks to SuxMonkey for kick-starting that Digg effort. I would also like to send out a special thanks to Roy Kaldung for optimizing the heck out of the server so it can keep up with all of the demand.

I’ve also attached the MyBlogLog stats page for Saturday showing a detail of some of the top incoming and outgoing traffic (Just select the thumbnail for the full sized view). Keep in mind that these stats are not entirely accurate, but are within about 20% accuracy. The true visitor count was likely between 135,000-150,000 visitors.

So, I would just like to take a moment to once again thank all of my regular readers. I find all of this to be very exciting, and of course it wouldn’t have been possible without you!

Well, One Man’s Blog has continued to grow in every category I tend to measure, be it Technorati, Alexa, Feedburner or simply traffic stats. As a result, the advertising that I’ve placed on the site has been generating excess cash beyond what’s required to keep my dedicated servers running, and I’ve decided the best thing to do is give some back!

So, I’m happy to announce the implementation of the OMB Member of the Month Contest! Here is the deal… At the beginning of each month I’m going to announce the OMB Member of the Month winner along with the prize for the upcoming month. You can do either (or both) of the following to qualify:

1. Subscribe for e-mail updates. This makes sure that I have your e-mail so I can contact you if you win, and it allows my readers that don’t have Web sites to still have a chance at winning.
2. Create a post with at least one link back to any OMB article during the contest month. Please make sure to leave a trackback on the post you link, or drop me an e-mail, so I can keep track.

To make sure we start out with a bang, the first ever prize is going to be a Sony DCR-SR60 Hard Drive Camcorder with a retail value of $599. Great for video blogging because there is no tape! Record to hard drive, then USB it right into your computer for uploading!
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Wow, has it been a year already?!? My inaugural post came on July 23, 2006. I didn’t really have a plan about how this site was going to develop, but the growth has certainly exceeded my expectations.

By my best estimates over a million people have stopped by in the past year, and every month the number of visitors exceeds the previous month. I am so very grateful for the attention and inspiration of my regular readers and I hope that I can continue to educate, enlighten and entertain you in the year to come.
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