Reverend Jim has written a pretty critical review of B2 entitled cafelog: a look at bad code. You get the feel for the article from the title. I think he could have done a little more research to be a little fairer, which would have answered a couple of his points. Whilst in essence I agree with a lot of his comments about the code design and quality, I think he neglects to mention the fact that the thing works, and works well (performance notwithstanding) for a lot of people.

Edit: 02:22 Jim has posted a second article about Cafelog/B2 cafelog: a few more thoughts. There is also a continuing comment dialog in the original story.

Woo, the monthly stats are in.
THe numbers are, of course, up on last month. Although there is some distortion (average daily hits up to 12177 from 4345) caused by some dodgy JavaScript on Thom’s blog.
But average daily visitors is up to 332, daily page views is up to 2121, and monthly bandwidth was nearly 3 Gig.
I also noticed, in the early hours of this morning, that my simple page counter had passed the 100,000 mark! That’s since 25/08/2002. Not too shabby.

Woo hoo! B2 Link Manager has made it to version 1.0!
This new release includes:

A fix to the install script.
A separate configuration file.
A cookie to remember ‘show’ filter setting when managing links.
A ratings system.
An auto-toggle category flag.
and the sort order can now be descending.

Of particular interest is the rating system which includes the ability to display images to indicate the rating of a link. And the auto-toggle category flag which forces only one link in that category to be visible, automatically toggling the others invisible. Think ‘current CD’ or ‘current mood’.

You can find a zip file and tarball at the B2 Link Manager page.

As ususal, comments, bug reports, etc to the forum topic please.

NTL Transparent Proxy Servers are a pain in the pipe!
Their load balancer went down over an hour ago, and it’s still not back! I can use any of the individual proxies, but they are very intermittent. If I get a page, then I don’t get the images, or I don’t get the CSS file. It’s really annoying!

Update: For those looking for a proxy. I have set up an experimental proxy here

Ho Ho Ho! this is funny.

There is a fantastic article over at wired called Google vs. Evil: A Losing Battle? by Josh McHugh.

The world’s biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don’t be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.

It’s a fascinating look at the politics of being a preferred reference for the majority of internet users.

Today, Internet users spend about 15 million hours a month on the site. Google.com logs more than 28 million visitors each month, nearly as many as Yahoo! and MSN. Nearly four out of five Internet searches happen on Google or on sites that license its technology.

It then goes on to muse about some of the pressures which could come to bear if Google were ever to go public.
It’s a long article (five pages) but well worth the read.

Out of curiosity, a few minutes ago, I searched on google for a sentence in a story I posted yesterday at 23:46. I’m there at number one, just under 24 hours after I posted it!
Pretty awesome for little old me!

Edit: Mind you that old chestnut earthquake in England has me down to the second page now.

Hmmm. It looks like the cafelog domain is down. As is Tidak Ada home of Michel’s Blog and the B2 forum. I’ve suspended the Recently updated B2 blogs in the side bar to avoid errors.

Update: They are both back now. Although Michel’s blog seems to have not had an entry since early November.