Happy Valentines Day Jan
Love you,
Mike
XXX
GeoURL Re-launched
It looks like Daniel Schaller has re-launched the old GeoURL service. I say ‘re-launched’ but to be accurate he didn’t launch it in the first place. That was Joshua Schachter, who is extremely busy with the very wonderful del.icio.us at the moment.
The original GeoURL.org has been down for renovations
for over 9 months now. Daniel decided to do something about that and thus GeoURL.info was born.
The service seems to be off to a slow start; just 108 sign-ups in a month. I’ve signed up to the new service now and updated my links in the left column. If you want to do the same be aware that the find my neighbours url has a slightly different format. You now have to provide your lat and long in the URL rather than just your registered site name. Here is mine: find my neighbours. I’ve set the distance quite high for now as there are so few on it.
Update: Daniel has implemented the old way of querying; by using your site url. See his comment.
UPA North
I went to the inaugural meeting of the Usability Professionals Association – North of England (UPA North) tonight.
It was a great meeting. Andy Swartz and David Hawdale organized and presided. There was a detailed demo of eye tracking technologies from Ian James of EyeTracker and some good discussion from a group of interesting people.
I caught up with some old friends and met a bunch of new people.
As David pointed out, the people who attended had quite a diverse cross-section of job titles and skills, with different interests and from different fields. It illustrated just how all embracing the concept of usability is. There are a lot of people who have a legitimate interest in making their products more usable.
We hope to have another get together soon. I’m looking forward to it.
Mountain Bike For Sale
I’m selling my Specialized Hardrock mountain bike on eBay. With my new job I don’t get to ride it at all. In fact I’ve done less than 20 miles on it. 🙁
It’s a fantastic bike. It’s a Hardrock Sport with disc brakes and front suspension. If you’re interested in bidding go see the eBay listing.
Update: The bike is now sold.
Damn Lies!
Wow, my page counter, which has been going about 4 months less than this blog has just passed two million!
That count includes bots and refreshes, whereas the real counter is a count of real visitors.
The stats counter, which has been going a year less, stands at almost 170,000. I seem to be running at about 370 to 450 real live visitors a day. Most of them (76%) are still running Internet Explorer, but that’s a long way down from previous months, with Mozilla/Firefox and Netscape taking up another 22% of the total. Interestingly the various flavours of Windows account for just over 90% of my visitors, with Mac OS X (3.8%) and Linux (2.6%) making up the only other sizeable chunks.
In all of these I don’t count myself, of course: all of the machines/browsers I use have cookies to exclude my own visits from the stats.
Google is the top search engine with over 71% of search hits, followed at a distance by Yahoo! (16.1%) and MSN (8.4%). AOL (2.4%) heads the rest of the pack (22 different search engines identified).
“chester bennington”, “mike” and “s club 8” are the most popular search terms bringing people to here.
*Yawn* even I’m bored now, so I’ll stop…
New Home
Well, we’re all aboard and settled in to the new server now. It is much, much faster than the last place. I’m not constrained space wise either.
I still have some tweaks to do, e.g. I haven’t set up any cron jobs yet. But everything is hunky-dory so far.
I think it’s about time I redecorated, so to speak!
Moving
I have set in motion the move of zed1.com to another server. DNS takes a while to propagate, so you may find this site disappears for a while…
It should all be sorted in the next few hours and then hopefully things will be a little faster again.
Update If you have trouble connecting to the site, you could try http://zed1.co.uk which will remain pointing at the old server until I’m sure everything has transferred.
Further Update: If you are reading this update, then you made it to the new server!
Email Problems
It looks like some of my email was down for a few hours this afternoon. If you sent anything to a zed1.com email address anytime in the last 9 or 10 hours it most probably went missing. Please send it again if it was important. If it was spam don’t bother 🙂
I think I will be moving my hosting in the next couple of weeks. This loss of email (and it appears nothing bounced, everything was lost) is the final straw. I’ve been very happy with my hosting for several years now, but recently things have gone down hill rapidly. The shared server is over shared, out of disk space, and the processes regularly grind to a halt. Customer service response time has to be measured in days at the moment.
