Blogs

Haven't posted an entry in a few days , I wrote some articles instead and added some more content. While going through the logs I noticed some requests for just my images. Aww crap - someone was hot-linking to my images.

Wikipedia's definition -  for those of you who don't know

In-line linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs and bandwidth theft) is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located.

Ok I tried to be polite and sent a PM, I asked for them to change the links. The "Author" refused. I posted a comment below the articleClick here to read the rest of this Item.

 You can install my addon here Mozzilla Firefox add-ons. It is just a search addon, but how to make it and other uses for xml files are listed below

Someone asked in the Drupal forums about search and FireFox plugin creation, so I thought I would make a post about it. If anyone notices anything around the site that they find interesting or would like more info on some part of the sites development  leave a comment here or at the forum and when I have time I will write something up.

As I mentioned in earlier this site is is primarily for people to search for issues and defects other users have submitted so that they can see if a product is suitable for them. To allow this I have so far done three things.Click here to read the rest of this Item.

Update

I re-enabled anon votes, I think it has been fixed so I will give it a day or two , monitor the logs and see if there are any anomalies.

The sites traffic hasn't died out as quickly as I had thought, posting the article iPhone 3G S vs Palm Pre vs HTC Touch Pro 2   early helped. under some circumstances my page is still in the top 10 results when searching "iphone vs". The majority of the hits today were via Google and they totaled 94 two thirds for articles one third for the product listings.

I checked the Mozzilla Firefox addon stats page, and it has received 1404 downloads since it was made public, about 2 weeks now.

People don't read the descriptions for the addons - I've been getting searches for fridges, watches,washing machines, even a model of car. Because people are hesitant to use the submit form I go through the logs looking at the searches to see what people would like added.

You know you spend too much time looking at site logs when you recognize bots and even sometimes users by their IP address.

Thank you to every one who submits items via the forms, it really makes things easier.

Tomorrow I am probably going to try and write some tools to help users and the site.

The users over at the Drupal forums have been offering some good advice, but I am not sure if it is the right time to start messing with things at the moment, the site has now been live using Drupal for about 9 weeks? and I am just starting to get my legs. I don't want to mess with too much at the moment. There is still some cleaning up to do , meta data to add , things to tweak.

Oh ..here is a mistake others might learn from

The site needs 1 cookie for getting a users country so they are given the correct links.

I added some Java-script to redirect users to an info page if they were preventing cookies from being accepted, I didn't check the code properly, enabled it and even though I have that cookie I was redirected.

I clicked the browsers back button but the redirect didn't allow the history to catch the last page. I tried to browse to a different page on the site... redirected back. LOL  I managed to lock myself (and everyone else) out of my site . I couldn't even get back to fix it.

I panicked for about 2 minutes.

Then I disabled my browsers Java script , went back and fixed it..... I am a tool sometimes..

Morning... I thought , because I am now getting more traffic via Google I should explain this blog series again - a lot of new visitors for some reason end up on one of the blog pages.

The blog is detailing the sites developement from the start, I had no previous experience with web developement CSS PHP or CMS's before I began. I thought this "site diary" would be useful to other people like me who would like to build a site (they can learn from my mistakes ). In combination with the FAQ it also provides a way to make the sites function/goals etc more transparent to regular users. Most info about the site you might want is either in this blog or the FAQ.
 

OK four hours ago I said I was going to give a detailed report.....Click here to read the rest of this Item.

Just a quick update before I sleep , I'll Make a better report tomorrow detailing site ranking and large spam attempts recently. As it stands I am getting about 30- 40 visitors a day from Google, this is more than likely due to the recent phone releases.

Over the last 4 days the average number of visitors per day has been ... let me check.. 184 So the site is growing nicely.

I do expect that figure to drop dramaticly after everyone is bored of the HTC and i-Phones.

Ok tired now 2:53 am time to sleep.

Update tomorrow for the three of you who have been following the sites progress.

Quick edit : Meh something might be seriously wrong with the site it says 61 guests ??? I'll check it tomorrow.