It should come as no suprise to anyone, but entries this week are going to be slow given that I am visiting family for Thanksgiving. The feed, at least, is fixed thanks to a prod by Darrell Norton. I’ve had a lot of problems with FreeTextBox not translating my particular style of writing into valid XHTML, so my feed keeps getting broken by me incorrectly fixing up the HTML. Anyway, when I get back and get some time, I’ll look into solutions, but for now…
Cory was nice enough to point out that my Ask a Language Designer page was broken. You could type in stuff, but when you clicked “Send,” nothing happened. The problem was that in the last blog software upgrade, I somehow managed to delete the “Handles Send.Click” clause from the handler for the button, so nothing was getting sent. It should be fixed now. The way to tell is that if you submit a question and you aren’t take back to the main page by clicking the Send button, then it’s broken. You can always send me mail at paul@panopticoncentral.net if you ever run into problems with the blog. Thanks again to Cory!
As a result, anything that’s been submitted over the past month or so was lost. Please don’t think I was ignoring you, and please resubmit your question!
While I was fixing that, I also made a few minor changes. I stole an intersting idea by Clemens and added a small image bug to the entries in my main RSS and comment RSS feeds. The immediate result is that you’ll get lots of updated entries, but over time I hope I can get a better idea what people read and are interested in. All reporting on the image bugs is an aggregate report (i.e. hit counts) and no other information that that is logged. Feel free to leave comments on this if there are any concerns or problems.
Looks like I’m starting to get comment spam just like everyone else. For those of you subscribed to my comments feed, please bear with me until I get a chance to implement some simple spam blocking. I’ll work on it this weekend.
Sorry for those of you trying to unsuccessfully get through to Panopticon Central yesterday… Something screwy happened with my network. The server appeared to be running just fine, but it couldn’t see anything else on the LAN and the LAN couldn’t see it. So, of course, the WAN couldn’t see it either… Rebooting the server didn’t help, but rebooting the hub and the router did, so who knows?
I’ve made some minor modifications to my blog software again. Hopefully, nobody will notice, but if something stops working, please let me know…
As you may remember, two months ago I moved from the old BlogX codebase to some custom software that I wrote based on BlogX. When I did that, the RSS feed for my site moved to http://www.panopticoncentral.net/rss.aspx, and I put a permanent redirect at the old URL. Well, the time has come to drop the old URL, so if for some reason you still haven’t moved over, please do so ASAP. It’s going to stop working in the next few days. You’ve been warned!
…I did not call Scoble a loser. He, uh, just… uh, “failed to win.” Yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket…
…and it looks like a dark horse candidate has taken the crown. Looking at my referrer log for the month, so far the counts are approximately:
Scoble – 388
Don – 457
Raymond – 984
So, yes, Raymond has managed to kick everyone’s behinds by a convincing margin in just a few days. To be fair, it might be that the humorous bug reports he linked to were more enticing to browsers, but who knows? This is hardly scientific…
Eric Lippert has started a new blog, and I think I’m suffering from some low-grade PTSD… Before I started working on Visual Basic .NET, I spent a year and a half in purgator… I mean, working on OLE Automation. (I’d moved over to OLEAut from Access because I wanted to work on language technologies and I figured OLE Automation was where it was at. I think a few weeks after I moved over, I had this meeting with some guy named Brian Harry about this weird project he was starting to write some new metadata engine…) Eric’s extended fantasias on BSTRs and such are giving me some severe flashbacks to COM. It reminds me why I really do think .NET is a big step forward.
After I mentioned that Don Box had sent some traffic my way, Scoble decided to make it a competition. Well, the initial results are in and so far it looks like… a tie! I can’t tell exactly because my weblog analyzer aggregates referrals on a monthly basis, so I don’t have a day-by-day breakdown of referrals, but I think both Don and Scoble ended up with about 140 referrals on the first day their respective entries were up. I’ll report back more next week when there’s been a chance for the referrals to die off and reach a steady state. (Although I’m guessing Scoble’s referrals may die off faster because his entries recede into the background faster given his fast posting pace…)
I guess when I someday write a “how to drive traffic to your site” entry, I’ll have to be sure to have an entry that says “start a competition between two well-known webloggers over referrals.” (Although in fairness, I don’t know whether Don has really taken up the challenge…)