Those Sneaky Bastard Spammers!

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.

Sneaky Spammer Comments

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MASSIVE OMB Update Complete!

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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No More Ads for Regular Readers of OMB!

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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Notice Anything New About Subscriptions?

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.

OMB Breaks All Time Readership Record!

Record Stats For OMBSaturday 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!

OMB’s New Member of the Month Contest!

Sony DCRSR60 CamcorderWell, 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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One Man’s Blog 1 Year Anniversary!

John PWow, 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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Major Comments Overhaul

John P.Ok. Tonight I made some major changes to the way comments are handled on the blog.

  • Added a few ‘quicktags’ to the comment box for text formatting.
  • Added a live preview directly below the comment box.
  • Added threaded commenting. This allows people to respond directly to a previous comment and keeps responses grouped for ease of reading them.
  • Added paged commenting. This way when there are lots of comments on a page they are broken up into 10 comments per page. You can see the older posts by choosing the previous comments pages, or you can still opt to display them all at once.
  • Comments are in reverse order now, meaning most recent comment is first. Again, this should speed things up by allowing people to skip all the old comments and get right to the new ones.
  • The comment box is now resizeable if you have JavaScript enabled. This way you can make it larger if you have a particularly long post.

I’m hoping for some feedback on these changes, so please let me know what you think. Feel free to use this post as a testing ground to see how all the changes work.

John

OMB in the Top .00001% of all Blogs!

Technorati Blog TrackingWow, did you realize that there are now over 70,000,000 blogs on the Web according to Technorati? And interestingly enough they rank One Man’s Blog among the top 6,000 blogs on the net!

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for linking to articles on my site because that is what Technorati tracks, and I appreciate every single link you provide! So Thank You! (and keep em coming…)

While we’re measuring things, two other interesting measurements have been improving steadily over time as well.
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