mashby

Well, the little contest of “Guess What’s In My SysTray” is over. Didn’t get quite as much attention as I hoped it would, but for those that did participate, they sure gave it a good shot. Since no one guessed every item and not all items were guessed, I’ve decided to award the prize of a free Gmail account to the two people who contributed the most – Raena Armitage and Merlin. Congratulations you two!

There hasn’t been quite as much interest in the contest that I started last month, so I guess it’s time to bring it to a close. The contest will end this Sunday, so if you want to guess, NOW is the time to do it.

Borrowing an idea from my friend Craig Frehole and since a snapshot of my systray was in the previous post, I thought it might be fun to have a little contest. My main workstation is running Windows XP Professional and in the image below, I have numbered all of the applications running in my System Tray (aka SysTray). The first person to come the closest to guessing all of the applications correctly will win their choice of either an XL Palm T-Shirt, or a free G-mail e-mail account.

I just upgraded the weblog software that I use for mashby.com, MovableType, to version 3.15. While I was at it, I also upgraded MT-Blacklist to the latest version and additionally installed MT-DBSL, which is a new plugin for this site.

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There’s an old saying that goes, “There’s lies, damn lies, and then statistics.” Regardless of the addage, I still like looking at them from time-to-time, especially this time of year. Maybe it’s from all my days in marketing, but I like looking at charts and graphs and comparing results from one year to the next. So this year, since I now have enough data, I put together a little presentation to see how 2004 stacked up to 2003.

In looking over all the pretty bar and line graphs, a couple of interesting things poped out at me:

Total number of page views:
» Increased by 665%

Total number of unique visitors:
» Increased by 403%

Total number of articles posted:
» Decreased by -60%

So what does all this mean? Well, this means that readership of the site in 2004 increased six-fold, but I published half as much. :s

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Just a quick note that I’ve upgraded MoveableType, the Content Management System (CMS) that this weblog uses to the latest version – 3.01D. It’s clearly still a “developer’s release” since there wasn’t a lot of handholding when it came to the upgrade instructions. You don’t have to be an expert, but if you’re not familar […]

I finally got around to delving deep into the new code for the comments portion of MoveableType 3.0 Developer Edition. The latest version of MT includes a multitude of ways in which to configure comments, including using the TypeKey authentication system. The motivation behind all of these changes in the comment system is to combat the problem of comment SPAM. Since installing MT-Blacklist I haven’t had much of a problem with SPAM, but unfortunately MT-Blacklist doesn’t work with MT 3.0. According to Jay Allen, the comment features built-in to MT 3.0 don’t warrant the need for MT-Blacklist any more. Time will tell on that one, but so far I like what I see. 🙂

But I could use some help.

Did a little housecleaning this afternoon. I consolidated the Workout log into the main weblog under the category Health And Fitness. I haven’t posted to it in a long while and if I do in the future, it will be in the main weblog anyway. I also pulled the old Webcam page into the Odds And Ends page. It just made more sense to keep the navigation as simple as possible.

There’s never enough time in the day, but there’s a few things that I’m working on for the future…

It was brought to my attention that the Contact Form was not functioning properly since a recent server upgrade. I fixed the form, so it’s now working properly. 🙂

Just a few notes regarding the weblog that I thought I would share.