Happy new year!

It is already 2012 in some parts of the world and it is slowly getting to that time where we are...

2011 was full of changes for Journalhome, I have, (and in fact I am still busy doing it), re-written a lot of of the engine.
I know it was fustrating for some of you as everything did not always work as expected... I am aware that there are still some issues with some templates.

2012 should bring some visual changes, new templates, (a-la Wordpress), finally a new front page, (this one is 7 years old I think)!

So, I hope you have a wonderful and prosperous new year, filled with all your wishes.
If you are driving, be safe on the roads!

Happy and prosperous 2012 to all!

FFMG

08h44 - 12/31/2011 - comments {0} - post comment - trackbacks {0}

Big Google update

Since the 16th of June I have seen a big jump in our traffic, this is mainly because Google has made some changes in the way it returns search results, we will never know how they work things out exactly, but basically they punish low quality websites, or sites that offer duplicate contents. It seems that they have come up with a way of knowing what is a good or bad website.

In our little corner of the web, what this means is that if you copy content in your blog from other sources you better add about 50% 'new', quality content, otherwise Google will punish you, (by that I mean they will make your blog fairly hard, if not imposible, to be found).

For JournalHome as a whole, this is not really bad news as most of the content is unique, I go around and remove all spam/duplicate contents anyway, (thanks for those of you who report sites to me from time to time).

Below is a graph of Journalhome traffic over the past 6 months.

The yellow line is the 1st of January when I started removing all the spam accounts and doing some general clean-up.
The red line is around the time of the first Google 'Panda', we saw a small jump in traffic but that was short lived, but there was still an increase in traffic.
The green line is from the 16th of June when Google Panda 2.2 was released.

You can see a general increase in traffic, I will try and give an update in the next few months so we can see if we were able to maintain a positive .

How can you improve traffic to your blog?

Content, content, content, Google accounts for a large part of our traffic, (Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo, together, are not far behind), so we cannot ignore their rules. And their most important rules are:

1. Update your contents on a regular basis.
2. Quality content, it does not matter what your favourite topic is, as long as it is quality people will come to your blog.
3. Don't copy from other websites! Ever!

If you do those two points, traffic to your site should follow quickly...

12h52 - 6/28/2011 - comments {0} - post comment

Download Adobe Reader (X or 9.4) without the moronic DLM

When you want to get the latest Adobe reader, (adobe X), it insists on installing some download manager, supposedly to make you think that your bowser has been incapable of downloading files until now.

But I suspect that in reality Adobe want to push some thirdparty software onto your machine that you never asked for in the first place, (they are pushing the Mcafee antivirus as well as the Google Chrome browser hard).

So, to get it without installing some other software onto your machine, go here, http://get.adobe.com/reader/enterprise/, select your operation system, your language and that's it, download the reader.

Adobe is for ever trying to update something, compared to other big software companies it does not feel me with a world of confidence to have that many updates coming over the wire all the time.

08h14 - 6/13/2011 - comments {0} - post comment

Link your blog to your twitter/facebook accounts

If you already have an account here at JournalHome and would like to link your twitter account it is very simple.

1. Log into your JournalHome account using your JournalHome user name and password.
2. Click on the twitter button to log in.
3. Log in to your twitter account.
4. Twitter will redirect you to JournalHome, as you are already logged in your twitter account will automatically be linked.

The same applies to Facebook.

1. Log into your JournalHome account using your JournalHome user name and password.
2. Click on the Facebook button to log in.
3. Log in to your Facebook account.
4. Facebook will redirect you to JournalHome, as you are already logged in your Facebook account will automatically be linked.

Let me know if you have any issues.

16h54 - 4/21/2011 - comments {0} - post comment

New user area

I have updated/redesigned the user area, ('cause I was never really happy with the way it was done originally).

Now you have your dashboard with your general settings followed by your blog(s) settings.

Hopefully this will make it a bit easier to navigate and manage your entries/posts.

As always, let me know if you have any issues or if you think I should re-order things a little differently.

19h06 - 4/19/2011 - comments {0} - post comment

Retweet me

I created a new plugin to allow the users to re-tweet your entries you can either have the button placed before or after your entries or you can add the button manually in your posts, simply you can use the tag [retweet] to insert the code anywhere you fancy.

Talking of tags, I also fixed a small issue with the tag, (by that I mean it wasn't working properly ).

So head over to your plugin page and activate the retweet me button to add even more social interaction.

03h44 - 2/12/2011 - comments {0} - post comment

Connect with Facebook

Following from my previous post you can now log in Journalhome using your Fracebook account.

New users can just click the facebook Sign-in button and, (after allowing Journalhome to have access to some basic information), you will have an account created for you.

If you already have an account here, simply login to Journalhome as per normal, and then click the sign up with Facebook button, your FB user ID will be linked to your JournalHome user ID.

Remember that, as with Twitter, I, (Journalhome), don't have access to any of your private information. We cannot add new status updates or things like that. This is purely to make it convinient to log in using your Facebook username and password.

Please let me know if you come accross something that does not look right and I will look into it.

The main aim of the Twitter and Facebook buttons is to make connecting to JournalHome that much easier.

I might tackle Google connect next but, (as with Twitter), I want to wait a week or two to make sure that everything is working ok.

08h26 - 2/7/2011 - comments {0} - post comment

The need for speed!

I added some, (more), caching to some pages that don't change that often, I am not talking about the blog pages, but rather the stand alone pages, (like the home page for example).
It also only applies to anonymous visitors.

The pages are only cached for 5 minutes, but this will help in removing a lot of load on the database, (especially durring busy/peak times).

One of the obvious issue with this change is that it takes up to 5 minutes for your brand new entries to make it to the front page. Do you think it is a problem? Would you like to see that changed to 1 minute or less?
Other pages, like the main statistics pages, on the other hand don't really suffer from the same problem, (do we really want to have up to the minute statistic updates?)

Let me know if you see some odd display/behaviour because of that or if there is something you would like me to look at.

Thanks

Edit:  Just a quick note, because the pages are only cached for anonymous users, (users I know nothing about), you will see your posts to the home page immediately, (this is because you are not anonymous to me). Others will only see the change in 5 minutes.

Edit2: Another small issue is that the spam blogs that are 'caught' after they make it to the front page will now take 5 minutes to be removed. I will ignore this issue for now because the process is still manual, do it often takes a lot more than 5 minutes for me to see a new spam blog/post.

07h09 - 1/28/2011 - comments {2} - post comment

Latest JounrnalHome updates

Hi,

I have been doing a lot of updates in the past 2 or 3 weeks, mostly to standardise the way things work in the background.

The spam bot is working really well, I am happy with it now, my final task is to add the comments to it so I can cleanup the hundreds, (if not thousands), of spam comments that have still not been deleted. The bot is currently monitoring _new_ spam comments but the old ones still need to be verified. Sadly, some spam comments still make it out, but this is mostly because the process is still very much manual.
Once this is running properly I will automate everything a bit more. You will see that some spam blogs still make it to the front page, that's because, as I mentioned, the process of deleting accounts is still manual, so until I get around to removing them the system assumes that they are 'good' blogs.

I am glad that out of the 20 or 30 spam blogs that are created at least one or two 'real' blogs seem to appear, once I can create new plug-ins and make the whole interface more user friendly that should bring in more people. Please tell your friends to start coming back :)

Other things that have happened,

• New version of the editor, (the 'Advanced' one).
• I also moved some buttons around for the editor to, (hopefully), make it easier to use.
• More user pages now use the blog template, (edit or delete comments for example).
• Updated the album functionality to fix a few background issues.
• Fixed a whole bunch of performance issue to make the site generally a bit faster.

As always with JournalHome those issues are mostly in the background, this is still part of my big plan to move us to a better blogging software engine.
By the time I am done it should be 'trivial' to move to a new engine as it will only be a matter of moving the data across.
But to keep JournalHome.com running I have to do all this in the background.

Please remember to contact me if you find any issues, I will look into it right away! While I am looking around, also feel free to ask me for new feature, not 'things' you would like JournalHome.com to do.

19h29 - 1/18/2011 - comments {0} - post comment

Sign in with Twitter

I added yet another new plugin, you can now sign in with your twitter account, if you do not yet have an account here then you will be prompted to create an account with just one click, (we just need an email address).

That way you can simply log into JournalHome while been logged into twitter, no need to remember both passwords or anything crazy like that :), you can start blogging in less than 5 minutes.
There are no verification emails or codes to enter, if you have a valid titter account then you can use JournalHome.

The first time you sign in you will be ask, (by twitter, not me), if you want to authorise JournalHome to connect with your twitter account and that's pretty much all you need to do.
If you already have an account here but would rather use the twitter button then simply log in here and click on the tweeter button for the link to happen and everything should work splendidly.

As always, let me know if you see something that doesn't look right and I'll have a look at it.

Edit: You can now log into Journalhome using your Facebook account.

15h29 - 12/29/2010 - comments {0} - post comment

I Like Facebook

I created a new plugin for facebook, now you can add the 'I like' button before/after all your entries.
Love it or hate it, Facebook is here to stay, and the 'I like' button give your blog a bit more exposure.

This is not an application! Journalhome will not have access to any of your facebook information, this is simplty a button that your visitors can click to indicate that they like your blog entry. And then, on their facebook profile your entry will appear.

As always, if you see anything wrong/broken simply drop me a comment here and I will look into it right away :)

F.

13h33 - 12/26/2010 - comments {0} - post comment

Unplugging twitter.

06h31 - 12/24/2010 - comments {0} - post comment

Moving things around a little.

15h15 - 12/21/2010 - comments {0} - post comment

Light at the end of the tunnel

10h00 - 4/13/2010 - comments {1} - post comment

Monkeys on the line...

Been from the UK I am not used to some of the day to day 'normal' problems here. Last week Monday I woke up to some noise on the roof, so I went to 'investigate', (by that I mean I sent the dog out so he can earn his keep as watchdog).

The dog ran out, (I suspect he had also heard the noise on the roof), and started to bark at monkeys, (turnout they were having a whale of a time on my roof), in turn they got a fright, (my dog can look mean at 5:45am), and jumped on my phone line.

To my surprise, (and no doubt to yours too), the above mentioned phone line was not designed to carry a bunch of startled monkeys. So the line broke, the Internet was no more...

In the UK, BT would have probably fixed the line the same day, but here it took 5 days for the Telkom team of one to come and fix the problem.

So, to cut a short story long, I have been without Internet for the past 5 days, so bear with me while I clear out the spam accounts and respond to the support emails.

09h21 - 1/10/2009 - comments {0} - post comment

To all the JournalSpace.com users.

First of all I am sorry to hear about what has happened, I would not wish such a server failure on anyone. But I thought I'd give you all a small background information about the way we handle the data here.

As a general rule, nothing is ever deleted, no images, no posts, not even blogs. Even the blogs that I suspend are generally not deleted.

All the data is backed up somewhere else at 3 am every single days. so if we had a major server failure, at the very worst we would be one day behind.

Anyway, welcome to all, feel free to send me a message/comment if you have any problems and/or questions. As always, I will try my very best to help in any way I can.

05h51 - 1/3/2009 - comments {1} - post comment

Please bear with us, (me)

Hi,

I had to make some changes to the server and that caused a few up and down times, (as well as a few unexpected behavior).
I am fixing all the errors as I find them and I am trying to deal with the new database load as well.
I have had some reports that the stats are simply not right, I cannot see anything wrong with the numbers yet, but I am also looking at it.

I had to get a bigger server because at times the load was getting a bit too much, (especially from 10:00 to 04:00 GMT).
This was causing some down time when there was too much activity.
I have been deleting about 10-20 bogus accounts a day so I'm afraid that the rise in activity is mainly due to them.

In any case, things should work a lot better as soon as I have fixed a few teething problems, but please, bear with me in the meantime.

Please let me know if you come across any weird and wonderful problems.

10h21 - 10/25/2008 - comments {1} - post comment

Big fan of Radio 1

In my last job in the UK I used to travel by car on the M1, at the time this was quite a novelty for me as I had always taken the tube to work. Now of course I drive everywhere, (there is no public transport to speak off).
Anyway, what I used to enjoy the most was listening to Radio 1 and Capital radio on the way, and it was not until last week that I though about trying to listen to it while at work.

I knew that they had a live Internet feed, but for some reason I just didn't think of it. Until now...

So for the past week I have been listening to the Chris Moyles breakfast show and Scott Mills, (if you missed scottcam last week you missed radio history).

Anyway, that was my little happy moment at work.

Things here are not going as strong, the political situation has become 'less than favorable', (this is my bosses polite way of saying that the country is heading the same way as most, (all?), African countries.
The wife and I are keen to say here a little longer while the financial storm that is currently hitting the US and UK calms down a bit, but I don't know how long this will last really, (my contract is fairly vague about political instability).

06h15 - 10/4/2008 - comments {1} - post comment

Moved to new server

12h02 - 7/10/2008 - comments {2} - post comment

Server move is back on track

The server move is now back on track and we should be moving to a new server, (in the UK), in the next few days.

In the past few days we had some problems with the current provider and/or some sustained IP attack.
I am investigating things on my side just to make sure. But nothing has really changed on our side so I doubt there is really a new problem.

I have reverted about 50 spam accounts a day so it is not impossible that they somehow found a way in or that they felt the urge to 'teach us a lesson'.

13h14 - 7/3/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

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