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Category Archives: Web Technologies
Technorati Struggling?
This seems to be what I get from almost all attempts to search Technorati at the moment. Perhaps they’ve become too popular, too fast?
Firefox Colour Management
Uploading some new photos to Flickr this morning I noticed that while the colours seemed vibrant in Photoshop and iPhoto, by the time they got to Flickr they had lost that vibrancy.
Thinking the problem was the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto, or iPhoto itself (I resize the images for upload too, so there is a conversion in there), I tried re-uploading the image scaled in Photoshop. Same thing.
So, I think, perhaps it is the browser… Sure enough, firing up Safari showed the red rose with the vibrancy of the original Photoshop. I had an old version of Firefox though, so I upgraded to the latest, and also installed the latest stable Camino as well. Still the same thing in Firefox, and Camino was also rendering the same dull version.
The photo on the right is a mix of two screen captures of the same image (from the Flickr page). The top is Safari, the bottom is Firefox.
Next, search to see if anybody else is reporting this issue. I found a post on Antipixel’s blog from over two years ago commenting on the same effect. I checked his post in Firefox and Safari, and sure enough the photo he included is still dull in Firefox by comparison.
Flickr Tag & Mosaic
I’ve added a bluedonkey.org tag to all the photos in my Flickr account that have appeared on the blog (and I will tag any that appear in future the same way). Then, using the Mosaic Maker from fd’s Flickr Toys I created the square mosaic with the latest 36 photos with that tag on them.
Developing a Web Application?
Ryan Carson, creator of DropSend, has an interesting audio [mp3] presentation [pdf] about launching an enterprise web application. You can check out his blog entry at 37signals for quicker overview of the presentation.
There are more audio presentations from a CarsonWorkshops one day conference on the future of web apps. Haven’t listened to them all yet, but I’m working on it…
Thanks to John Sinteur’s posting at the Daily Irrelevant for the pointer.
Useless Site Statistics
On the second day of each month my monthly cumulative statistics report contains just one day’s information. That can sometimes reveal some interesting, but mostly useless information, so I thought I’d share some of the things that caught my eye.
Firstly, 12141 hits from 1996 unique IP addresses. Not sure how that counts as only 1477 visits; I would expect the visits count to be at least as high as the unique IP address counter since each address must have visited the site at least once) Perhaps it tracks carryover visits from the previous day, or perhaps it is just broken. The hit count does match the number of lines in the raw logfile though.
Of those 12141 hits, 2687 were direct requests and the majority of the rest came from Google’s image search. There were also almost 500 ‘hits’ referred from myspace.com (which are people linking to my images).Top of the 150 different search strings used to find something on the site were darth vader (115), hawaiian flowers (105), anakin (44) and camels (33).
The browser list, unsurprisingly, has Internet Explorer (including AOL and other special variants, and both Windows and Mac versions) being used for over 8000 of the hits (around two thirds). There are still a number of Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 users showing up, as well as IE 5.x users on Windows. Perhaps more unusual was Sony’s PlayStation Portable registering 15 hits.
Finally, in one day there were visits from 52 different countries, as well as visitors from .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil and .int, and 4830 hits that could not be matched against a known TLD.
WordPress Upgrade
I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0, and I have to say that so far I am not impressed. They have messed with the image uploader, making it impossible to control where the images are uploaded to, and what size the thumbnails are. Then they’ve made the editor smart, which just means that it doesn’t understand how to do what I want, and not provided a way to turn it off. Disappointing to say the least. At least it didn’t wreck the existing content, or the style sheet though – I guess I should be thankful for that.
Camera Store Justice
Thomas Hawk’s blog has a tale of his attempt to buy a new Canon 5D digital SLR camera from an outfit in New York called PriceRitePhoto. Seems that this particular online store is a classic bait-and-switch outfit and will get you to order, then call or email to tell you there’s a problem with your order and try to sell you more things you didn’t want.
I had a similar experience with Adorama when I tried to buy my 20D, though I did not get any of the abusive comments – just the call about the problem with the order, which was really just an attempt to sell me more things.
Interestingly, many people in the comments for Thomas’ story suggest Adorama is an OK place, and my dealings with them previously had also been good. I suspect that the trigger is certain high price, hot items that they are selling at lower than normal margins to attract people in. When I refused the extras, the order was suddenly delayed because they only had “bundles” in stock. I called their customer service the next morning and cancelled. I should add that their customer support line was excellent, and opened an hour before the sales dept. Within an hour I had the salesperson on the phone offering immediate overnight shipping if I reinstated the order; I declined and bought the camera elsewhere.
I also sent them a detailed email explaining why I cancelled the order (and it was for more than just the 20D) and that when I shop online I do so to avoid having to deal with salespeople. I hope the message got to somebody who cares, and it does seem from the other comments on Thomas’ site that they are still considered one of the better online photography stores by many others.
November Search Terms
Back in July I posted a top ten search terms for my whole site:
| 1 | 905 | 29.27% | hawaiian flowers |
| 2 | 49 | 1.58% | mexico |
| 3 | 47 | 1.52% | bayport alameda |
| 4 | 32 | 1.03% | safari |
| 5 | 31 | 1.00% | parrot |
| 6 | 29 | 0.94% | magic |
| 7 | 21 | 0.68% | beer bottles |
| 8 | 20 | 0.65% | vxworks |
| 9 | 17 | 0.55% | detention centre |
| 10 | 17 | 0.55% | generation 5 ipod |
November’s results tell a surprisingly different tale:
| 1 | 3270 | 25.49% | darth vader |
| 2 | 2301 | 17.93% | anakin |
| 3 | 1159 | 9.03% | hawaiian flowers |
| 4 | 553 | 4.31% | seahorse |
| 5 | 515 | 4.01% | camels |
| 6 | 220 | 1.71% | bears |
| 7 | 210 | 1.64% | duckling |
| 8 | 153 | 1.19% | meerkats |
| 9 | 146 | 1.14% | dragon |
| 10 | 110 | 0.86% | jedi |
The Hawaiian flowers term is still there, and at roughly the same number of people searching, but now it is third place to a strong Star Wars theme! The overall number of hits coming from search engines has risen a lot too (as has the number of hits from their crawlers in the logs).
Blue Donkey
I have been using the blue donkey logo more recently, for example he is my avatar for both the GizmoProject Forums and the Bayport Alameda Forums. So, I thought it only appropriate that he appear somewhere here on the blog. If you don’t see him in the title bar above try a full reload (normally hold down the shift key while refreshing the page).