Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

Posted on 24/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas:

The Fab Four – “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”

(Yes, I know, it’s like Marmite isn’t it)

Giving up on a goal: 1000 posts

Posted on 20/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.

I need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.

This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.

I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.

I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.

WordPress 3.3

Posted on 14/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.3, it makes very little difference to those of you reading this blog, but it’s changed the world that I see as the author.

The upgrade was seamless, slick and fast.

Thanks wordpress.org

Top 30 for 2011

Posted on 13/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

I tend not to write many list posts mainly because I’m not a big fan of them.

One I have taken to doing is the occasional ‘Top’ list, and I’ve noticed others have already started the top lists for 2011, so here’s my Top 30 posts by visits in 2011:

Generally they are posts that I’ve written in the last twelve months, but there are two items on the list from 2006!

Writing Limits

Posted on 06/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

The other week I wrote about how I’d tried to change the balance of my writing so that I was Writing Less to Write More.

The challenge was to spend less time on Twitter and Facebook so that I wrote more consistently here.

The lesson I’ve learnt from this experiment is that there are limits to my writing output. I don’t have enough capacity to allow me to contribute in all of the places I’d like to, I have to be selective.

Over the last few weeks I’ve allowed myself to put the experiment in reverse and to deliberately get sucked back into Twitter and Facebook. This unsurprisingly precipitated a drop off in writing here, it wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just the way it was.

If you are a keen observer you will have noticed that I still wrote the occasional post, but nothing of any quality, or with any consideration. I wrote the easy stuff mainly in the Because it’s Friday category.

So I have a choice, I can contribute lots of little bits to all sorts of social media places, or I can contribute in a considered manner – I can’t do both. It’s a personal preference, but I think I’d rather be more considered, so it’s back to Writing Less to Write More.

Making some changes

Posted on 30/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

I’m in the process of making some changes on this site. I’ve felt for a while that it needed a bit of a facelift. I’ve been trying to stick to my principles of simplicity, but the current manifestation is perhaps a bit too minimalist even for me. It’s not finished yet.

I’ve also been experiencing some performance issues which are proving difficult to get to the bottom of.

If you are a reader of Blessings then you’ll notice that it is currently in maintenance mode. I want to resolve one set of performance issues and get to a format I like before spreading it across both sites.

Am I running slow?

Posted on 02/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

Sometimes when I go onto this site it appears to me to be running rather slow.

But I have access to a set of metrics that tell me that everyone else is getting a good performance.

Perhaps it’s just my level of patience, but it might be that all of the metrics are wrong and I’m really giving people poor performance.

Please don’t expect Google type performance from me, I only have a limited budget, but it shouldn’t feel like you are using a dial up connection all of the time (if you remember what that felt like).

Does it all look a bit slow to you?

I know that for many of you it’s an irrelevant question because you read my wittering via a reader or an email client and the performance of the actual site isn’t visible to you.

Flickr Views Pass 150,000

Posted on 04/05/2011 by Graham Chastney

I recently passed 150,000 view of my Flickr photos (I’ve actually got to 160,000 but it doesn’t seem like as big a milestone as 150,000):

I know that these aren’t huge numbers for some people, but for me it’s just another day in the ‘long tail’.

My WordPress Plug-ins – Thank You

Posted on 23/12/2010 by Graham Chastney

Christmas is a time for saying thank you, so I’d like to say just that to the people who make the WordPress Plug-ins available for use that make this site what it is.

This is the list of plug-ins I’m currently using on this site:

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget

I use this to add the various icons for sharing onto the bottom of posts and in the sidebar.

It also provides some tracking analytics for people who use it.

By The AddThis Team – Visit plugin site

Akismet

The must-have plug-in for comment spam. I’m sure this site is like many that gets a regular intake.

It’s seldom wrong at picking out the rubbish.

By Automattic – Visit plugin site

All in One SEO Pack

My preferred Search Engine Optimisation tool. I’m not that fixated with SEO but as over 40% of the visitors to this site come via search it’s important enough to care about.

By Michael Torbert - Visit plugin site

DandyID Services

I do more than blog – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. all feature in my online experience. DandyID is a great tool for creating an single point of reference for all of my presences. This plug-in makes all of those presences visible on this site.

By Neil Simon, Sara Czyzewicz, Arron Kallenberg, Dan Perron, Anthony Dimitre - Visit plugin site

FD Feedburner Plugin

I use Feedburner (now Google product) to provide the best possible feed to people that I can. Feedburner did seem to be in a bit of hiatus, but it seems to be picking up now.

This little plug-in redirects everyone to Feedburner for me, it’s one of those that you install and forget about.

It also provides another point for analytics, something that you’re never short of in the blogging world I find.

By John Watson | Visit plugin site

Flickr Photo Album

I am a big fan of Flickr and like to show off my photos on this site too. This plug-in makes everything I put onto Flickr available here too.

By Joe Tan – Visit plugin site

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics gives great insights into the what, where, who of a site. This plug-in sends all of the data from this site over to them.

By Joost de Valk – Visit plugin site

Google XML Sitemaps

Another way of making sure that you get visitors from search engines is to give them a good sitemap in the standard XML format. This plug-in creates a sitemap for me, again another set and forget plug-in.

By Arne Brachhold – Visit plugin site

MaxBlogPress Favicon

The natty little icon that you get in the browser for this site comes via this plug-in. It does a really simple thing, that’s nearly as easily done by copying a file to the right place. This is just that little bit easier.

By MaxBlogPress – Visit plugin site

Post-Plugin Library

This is a plug-in library used by a couple of the other plug-ins.

By Rob Marsh, SJ – Visit plugin site

Secure WordPress

Security is a big thing for a site that’s out there in the scary world of the internet. This is one of a couple of security plug-ins that I use, as well as some manual hardening of the site.

By jremillard – Visit plugin site

WordPress.com Stats

I’m a bit of an analytics and statistics junky. The WordPress.com stats are great to see in your dashboard. They also provide some things in a better way than Google Analytics

By Automattic – Visit plugin site

WP Security Scan

Another security tool that I use to keep this site nice and secure. I use more than one because they secure different things

By Michael Torbert – Visit plugin site

WP Super Cache

Assuming that one day this site gets inundated by a referral from a much bigger site and the traffic starts to spike this plug-in ensures that people read a cached copy of the information rather than read it out of the database each time. t’s never actually happened to me, but I’m being prepared.

By Donncha O Caoimh – Visit plugin site

Thank you everyone.

Graham Chastney

The rambling of a technologist trying to find a way through

Category Archives: Weblogs