Life without the Internet

For the past week, (and a bit), my Internet at home has been disconnected. There was a small misunderstanding between the wife and I and that resulted in the account been canceled, (personally, I blame the wife).

Needless to say I am like a drug addict on week-end, unable to check my emails, visit my favourite forums, nothing! I find myself looking after the garden or doing tasks I have neglected many years ago.

When I get to work I do my usual sweep of Spam Blogs that were created overnight and check a few emails, but it's not the same.

As you can see on the homepage, JournalHome is still supposed to move to a new server, in fact I have already purchased a brand new web server. But as I cannot do the move we just have to wait where we are for the time been.

So please bear with me while I wait to be reconnected, I am still around and I still reply to emails when I can, just not as fast :)

3:09 PM - 5/13/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Election day in Africa

As some of you might night know it is election day in Zimbabwe, everybody expects Robert Mugabe to steal the election. They even have dead people still on the voters roll or an 'extra' 3 million ballot papers than there are voters in the country.

Everybody knows that the elections will not be free and fair, here in South Africa everybody you talk to tells you that the rampant crime and unemployment is partly due to the catastrophic collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, (I think the inflation is still running at 100 000%).

But the really scary and alarming thing about it is the fact that the South African government still claims that everything in Zimbabwe is 'free and fair'.
They don't seem to think to mind the extra ballot papers, the dead on the voters roll, I was watching sky news and they are saying the same, why is South Africa praising the election process that everybody can see is flawed. I mean, even the previous president of Zimbabwe, (then Rhodesia), is on the voters roll, he died last year!

10:23 AM - 3/29/2008 - comments {2} - post comment

Moving to a bigger server... again

8:52 AM - 3/19/2008 - comments {2} - post comment

Load shedding in South Africa

Those of you who don't know, there has been quite a bit of load shedding going on in South Africa.
To cut a long story short South Africa has been running out of power since 1994, (they felt that building new power stations was not needed), so 13 years latter there isn't enough power anymore.

Seen that it takes 5 to 10 years to build a new power station I wouldn't expect much economic growth from them for the next couple of years. They even went as far as closing most of their mines, (in case you wondered why the price of gold went thru the roof).

I know it is easy to blame the power company, (Eskom), but in fact the government explicitly told them not to build new stations.

So now we enjoy daily power outages of between 1 to 2 hours, the mines have been ordered to run at 80%. As this is going to last a few years I can only imagine that it will get worse and worse.

1:23 PM - 2/1/2008 - comments {5} - post comment

Lost contact with America for a while.

I was busy doing some normal maintenance on JournalHome for a while when I lost contact with the servers.
Apparently two undersea cables, (called SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG, I am told), were damaged, I was unable to do anything with the server for about 8 hours.
Hopefully this did not affect most of you.

In other news, my current contract has been extended, (yesterday was my last day), I was supposed to return to the UK in June after a bit of traveling around, but we will now stay here until at least December.
Truth be told, I don't mind staying for a while longer, but I am not looking forward to returning to Europe in winter. As you can imagine I have been very busy trying to finish my current project on time, (we didn't), so now things should relax a bit.

10:29 AM - 2/1/2008 - comments {1} - post comment

Small update

Over the past few weeks I have been very busy at my real work but that doesn't mean I didn't keep an eye on JournalHome, I have deleted over 50 spam accounts :), sometimes it makes you wonder why they even bother.
But you can help me by reporting as many blogs as you can, I will investigate all of them.

I have also been busy developing the next generation of JournalHome, this is a complete rewrite of the current version and will hopefully be a lot more flexible than the current version, (one of the nice thing is that it will allow you to use wordpress templates).

But I will have more on that in the next year.

That's it really, just to let you know that I am still around and still working in the background.

Drop me a line if you see anything wrong or if you have any question.

10:58 AM - 12/21/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

So close, yet so far...

Last night England played South Africa in the Final of the rugby world cup. And South Africa won it. Honestly I don't think that England ever really had a chance against the South Africans. But it would have been so nice :).

Yesterday the whole of South Africa came to a stand still, the shops closed early, the road were quiet.
For those of you who don't know rugby, it is like the Super Bowl week-end, or the soccer finals, (well, almost like soccer).

In other news, I have been been very busy at work, my contract is coming to an end soon(ish). So I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would have liked to JournalHome.

But I still patrolling as much as I can, I still delete around 10 accounts a day. I have no idea why they keep coming back, surely they can see that it is not working. But I gave up trying to understand spammers a looong time ago.
Please remember to report any sites you think is not a 'real' blog.

I am fixing a few bugs that were sent to me, but like I said, I am very busy at the moment, but I will get to it, I promise.

8:57 AM - 10/21/2007 - comments {2} - post comment

Add the BlogRush Plugin to JournalHome

I added the BlogRush to the slow growing list of plugins. You can see what it does on my own blog, it list 5 'related' blogs and my blog is placed on other peoples blog. So their visitor might come and see my blog, in other word it is another way of getting more visitors.

There is a big divide when it comes to blog rush, some say that it is the 'next big thing' while others cannot complain enough. the recurring theme is that your title must be extremely interesting for other users to click on it, (and visit it), otherwise your click through rate will be pathetic.
The other problem is the very limited number of categories, they never quite match your blog.
I myself could not find a valid category, so I had to put 'news' as a category.

Lastly they are still in beta, so a lot of things might change soon, so now you will notice that they have no other colors, (in fact no options are available).

As with everything on JournalHome, it is really up to you to decide what you want to do. I myself am not sure it really will help as much as they claim. People will abuse it and the 'real' users will loose out. But what do I know.

5:28 PM - 9/20/2007 - comments {1} - post comment

FeedBurner RSS vs JournalHome RSS

I created a new plugin, (well to be fair I converted an existing one), to enable you to redirect all your RSS feeds from JournalHome to FeedBurner.
They offer you a bunch of stats like the number of registered users and so on.

As a small example if you go and see my own RSS you will be redirected to the Feedburner of JournalHome.

On the subject of Syndication, I have made some small changes to the RSS/Atom pages of JournalHome to make them even more compliant to their respective standards.

So now all you need to do is activate the FeedBurner plugin, (be sure to create an account with them first), and enter that value on the plugin page.

Feedburner will ask you to choose the Feed you are going to use. Be sure to choose the one that applies to your weblog, (and not the one that applies to the entire website).

Also remember that you must have RSS enabled in your weblog settings.

1:38 PM - 9/19/2007 - comments {1} - post comment

Import wordpress blogs.

8:30 AM - 9/16/2007 - comments {3} - post comment

At work today and the 2007 rugby world cup

I have been quite busy lately at my 'real' job and now I have to work on a Saturday to catch up with some work.

Unfortunately the company chose Saturday, (been a quiet day), to do some renovation about 10 meters away from my little cubical. If I wasn't happy to be here in the first place I am now. But I guess I cannot blame them either.

I also watched the rugby world cup opening game last night, it is hosted in France. I must admit that I have never seen such a odd ceremony, there was no theme to it, the people were running around, (I guess you could say they were dancing). I am not much of an artist so I should not complain, but I'd like to believe that I am also not too stupid, and if I did not understand the message they were trying to bring across then I guess it was a failure.

The opening game itself was a shocker, France should have won the game, (been the hosts and all), but, well, they didn't.
The referee was bad, but at least he was equally bad for both sides. I think he made some crucial mistakes that might have cost France the game in the end, (but what do I know?).

I am going out to some dinner/drinks with the wife's friends tonight. They are more like work colleagues of hers, so those kind of dinners can be quite boring, (especially for me as I wont know anybody).

Those of you who, (like me), use the Windows Live Writer, they have released a new version of the writer. 

6:58 AM - 9/8/2007 - comments {2} - post comment

Happy Blog day!!

I was looking at the twitter site, (the twitter plugin is down BTW), and I saw a notice that apparently today is blogday. If you use your imagination you can see 3108 could look like blog, (if the '8' is dropped a little).

They claim that it is the third one, but I must admit that I never heard of it until now.

So happy blog day.

FFMG

1:09 PM - 8/31/2007 - comments {4} - post comment

Compressed pages, for faster surfing...Part Deux

11:17 AM - 8/23/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

Compressed pages, for faster surfing...

5:31 PM - 8/22/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

Little known facts about me...

As some of you know I am currently on a long term contract overseas, (down South).
But I still miss England, (god save the queen, tea, football and stuff...), so every chance I get I watch my favorite programs, (no, not Eastender or Coronation street!).

But I am also a nerd, so... I watch BBC 'click', and one of the reports they had this week was about....Twitter.com. And, to quote the bbc, "...They started with nothing 18 months ago but now the founders of Twitter have made their start-up the talk of the town..."

Apparently you just type a few words and, like a text message it appears on your website. And like a SMS message it cannot be more than 140 characters.

And seen that Journalhome.com is at the cutting edge of technology, (yes, yes, it is), I added a Plugin for Twitter.
So now you can go to your plugin page and have Twitter added to your blog in less than 2 clicks.

Those of you who really care, my twitter page is  http://twitter.com/JournalHome.

Let me know how that works.

My little collection of plugins is starting to grow. Now on JournalHome you can...

• twitter.com
• Finetune.com
• Add Socialize buttons, (23 different ones so far).
• MyBlogLog
• Project Playlist
• Google Adsense
• Write on walls, (trust me, you can).
• Snap.com
• And a few others that I have probably forgotten...

As the official Guinea pig I am running out of space on my site to show them all, (and I am not a big fan of all of them). So I might have to either create a 'Demo' blog or point to various blogs that use those Plugins.

FFMG

10:53 AM - 8/6/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

Those of you that use adsense.

6:44 AM - 8/2/2007 - comments {2} - post comment

Plugin Project Playlist

I had a request for another play list type of embedded player so, here is is, (below the MyBlogLog and FineTune).

Project playlist is another great player that is apparently better, (but, it is not for me to decide).
Personally I prefer the way the play list is easier to access and you can play random music.

On the down side, it does not play on my work computer, (blocked by WebSense or something).

As usual, the actual playlist is not mine, I picked something directly off the Project Playlist website. I also left the FineTune plugin running, just to show what can be done. If you are really bored, you can play both of them at the same time :).

Anyway, to change the settings, log into your blog and choose the plugins option. Once there choose to update the Project Playlist plugin. Everything should be self explanatory and easy enough to follow.

Let me know if you see something wrong.

If you can think of another type of plugin you would like me to create, please let me know, and I will try my best to add it.

FFMG

7:51 PM - 7/31/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

Plugin - MyBlogLog

1. Create an account with MyBlogLog.com
2. Get your number from the settings page, (it is not obvious at first but you must dig around a bit).
3. Go to the Pluggins pag and activate that plugin, (this is where you will enter your MyBlogLog details).
4. Go to your blog and it should all be there.
5. If your template does not have plugins tag (<Plugin:prelink>...</Plugin>) then send me a PM or simply choose a template that has plugin tags.

3:19 PM - 7/27/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

Plugin - Finetune

I added a finetune plugin for all of you to use.

If you don't know about finetune, I suggest you head over to their sites and register.
You will need to choose 45 songs and then you can embed, (that's putting it in your blog to you and I).

Your template must have <Plugin:prelink>...</Plugin> or <Plugin:postlink>...</Plugin> tag for the plugins to work.
Most of you should have it, but this is not a well know tag and not everybody uses it.

1. First go to the plugins menu.
2. The choose the Finetune plugin.
3. Insert your play list ID, you can either enter the whole the pinst number or simply paste the embeded that they provide. (click on the image to make it bigger).
4. You can get the number embeded value directly from the finetune site, choose a play list and press the 'embed playlist' button. that will give you the code you need.
   Simply paste that code in the box above.
5. I have added my own playlist on my template so you can see what it is supposed to look like. I will update it later as I chose the playlist of another user on finetune , but that was purely to give you an idea.
   

Let me know if you have any problems/questions.

FFMG

8:06 PM - 7/26/2007 - comments {0} - post comment

I won't do that again in a hurry!

Ok, so the move to the new server did not go as smoothly as I was hoping, the hosting company made me all kind of promises that they did not keep. But in the end if was my fault, I should have been more careful and I should have done my homework better. I think next time I'll employ someone to do it for me, ('cause if there is a next time then I will buy a new server!). 

Of course, no data was lost, (and in any case I still have the old server), and everything has been moved across.

As far as I can tell JournalHome was down for at least 24 hours and there are still some small tweaking problems that can cause the display be messed up.
The main problem is that some service providers, (more precisely name servers), are still trying to connect to the old site and that makes everything look kind of ugly, this was to be expected as the IP address was changed.

Please let me know if you experience any problems, I am running a batch of tests to make sure that everything is still ok. But there is nothing like the human eye to tell me if something is bad.

So, sorry the transfer caused the site to go down for so long. Hopefully this is for the better and in a couple of days it will be nothing more than a bad memory :)

10:43 AM - 7/23/2007 - comments {5} - post comment

My Twitter...

Still no luck with my Internet, this is costing a fortune!! 12 mins ago
Digesting sundry Reddit feeds through AideRSS: http://aiderss.com. Relevance: what a concept! 7 hrs, 48 mins ago
This seafood gumbo is an ocean of flavor. Bless you, constantly-irked-looking fish counter dude at Whole Foods. 9 hrs, 22 mins ago
Two sicktweets in a row! Feel better, @emilychang and @fibbery! 11 hrs, 31 mins ago
I swear I just saw the eyes on @rentzsch's wolf icon glow red for a second there. 11 hrs, 31 mins ago
God knows I've been taking a lot of El Perro Del Mar MP3s without giving back. Happy to be seeing her on Sunday at Bimbo's. 13 hrs, 1 min ago
Babysitting a cache corruption. Hang tight. 13 hrs, 16 mins ago
nmotlani: How do you remove the default option to Automatically Add Administrators to Private projects? 15 hrs, 45 mins ago
Cookies from @lisey at the Twoffice! Those Torrezezezez are good people. 16 hrs, 17 mins ago
Monkey Thai with the GitHub doodz. 18 hrs, 5 mins ago
More ...