I have been keeping a track of advertising on Head Rambles.
Just out of interest, I plotted earnings against the ISEQ Index of Irish shares over the same period.
Quite a remarkable correlation?
The only problem is that as shares fall, advertising rises.
Shares are rising.
I just hope the correlation doesn’t hold true for too long?
I like messing around with software, trying new ideas and pushing it a bit beyond the limits.
I saw an interesting idea the other day for people who have Woopra Analytics in their sites, and Google Earth installed. It’s a very neat integration of the two.
Essentially, all you have to do is add a Network Link to Google earth in the format http://localhost:9565/yoursite.com, obviously entering the appropriate site name. Give it a low refresh rate (five to ten seconds) and sit back.
The effect is quite mesmerising.
As visitors arrive on your site, so little pegs appear on Google Earth, giving the visitor’s identity and their location.
The above snapshot shows three simultaneous visitors, where two are overlapping.
Needless to say, the location is actually the location of the ISP, so for example Grandad appears as a Dublin location, which is incorrect, but is near enough on a world scale.
As an application, it is not really of much value.
But it’s a lot of fun to watch in a busy period!
So the dust seems to have settled on a rather tricky day yesterday.
It started with a cautionary email to warn me that Head Rambles was receiving a lot of traffic and that this was interfering with other sites on the shared webspace. I had been meaning to move it to its own area anyway so this came as no surprise.
Head Rambles is effectively hosted on three servers – mail, web and database. The move was simply a matter of moving the files on the web server to a new area.
Simple?
No.
Copying across the files should have worked, as all references to the database should retain their integrity, which they did. However, Word Press and its ancillary plug-ins isn’t quite so flexible. It transpired that there were quite a few references in the database tables to absolute paths.
A typical entry in a record could be something along the lines of the following:
/usr/local/pxm/vhosts/115124/webspace/httpdocs/headrambles/wp-content/
However, moving the site files from webspace 115124 to webspace 120566 could have implications for the site, as the record would then have to read
/usr/local/pxm/vhosts/120566/webspace/httpdocs/headrambles/wp-content/
That aside, the site should have functioned normally, with maybe a loss of functionality in a couple of plug-ins.
It didn’t.
For some reason, the site refused to function in its new home. It was slow, to put it mildly, and while I was desperately trying to find the cause of this, I got another mail from the people in Blacknight.
I must point out here, that I had been trying to sort the problem out on my own. Blacknight had obviously been monitoring both Twitter (where there were a few caustic comments about the site being down) and the site itself, as they then stepped in and moved the whole site to a new server.
Anyway, the site ran perfectly in its new location (apart from the few changes that had to be made to the database), and we never did discover the cause of the original problem.
I cannot sing the prises of Blacknight highly enough. They saw a problem. They solved it. As they are a large company, they presumably have a fairly healthy workload, yet they dropped all to help a client in trouble, even though I had not wanted to bother them.
So – a huge thanks to Niall, Nils and especially Paul. And of course to Michele for running the best hosting company in the business.
Sadly, this site has become somewhat neglected of late.
This is due to a number of factors. The old health hasn’t been the best and I am still involved in trying to wind up my company. I thought the latter would be a straightforward matter of informing my clients, and then putting a lock on the door. Life isn’t that simple, apparently.
The main site at Head Rambles is doing quite well at the moment. In these stringent times, it is becoming more and more of a lifeline to support the ailing income, so it has to be nurtured with great care and attention.
One aspect of blogs [like Grandad, I hate that word with a vengeance] that has me baffled is the RSS business.
After nearly three years fo running Head Rambles and nine years of running my own web based business, you would think I would be up to speed on all aspects, but I’m not.
What confuses me is the concept of Reach vs Subscribers.
Yesterday, for example, HR had 472 subscribers. That should be self-evident in its meaning and I assume it to indicate that 472 people have subscribed to the feed from the site? Maybe I’m wrong?
The one that confuses me though is ‘Reach’. Yesterday, HR had a ‘reach’ of 131. What the hell does that mean? Is it that of the 472 subscribers, 131 actually used the link? Does it mean that 341 didn’t click the link, because they were out shopping or were dead or something?
This is a graph of Subscribers and Reach over a period of time. As you can see, there are points where Reach [the blue line] has dropped almost through the floor. What the hell happened at those points?
Also, Subscribers seems to have a life of its own. I would assume that if ‘Subscribers’ is what I think it is, then it would vary plus or minus a few per day, as people joined or left. Yet there are occasions where it can drop by as much as 100 in a single day and recover a few days later. What is going on there?
Any ideas would be welcome……
If you have installed WordPress, you are presented with couple of themes. They are not particularly exciting, and most people want something that looks a little more individual.
There are literally thousands of free themes out there. If you are running the latest version of WordPress (and I hope you are) then downloading these themes to your site is simplicity itself. You can have a preview of the new theme and if you like what you see, you can activate it.
However, this is still not enough for most people. They want something that is individual to themselves, whether it is a personalised header graphic or an entirely new colour scheme.
Customising a WordPress theme can be quite simple. The only requirement is that you should have a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and CSS.
My own personal method of creating a scheme that I like is to browse the Web for a theme that has all the rudiments that I require. I will then set about customising it.
In the majority of cases, themes follow a similar pattern in that the basic files are common to most themes.
The main files which require moderation are usually
These are found in the folder wp-content/themes/yourtheme where ‘yourtheme’ is the name of the theme you are modifying.
Probably the most important of these is the file ‘style.css’.
Say for example, you wish to change the banner on the site.
The simplest method is to right-click on the current image. It is usually a background image so you select ‘View Background Image’ or ‘Save Background Image’, depending on your browser. One way or another, this will give you the name of the file – usually something like ‘banner.jpg’ or ‘header.jpg’.
Having retrieved the name, (you needn’t save the file or anything else), you then search through ‘style.css’ until you find a mention of that file.
For example, the top image on this site is ‘header-bg.jpg’ and it is located in the ‘images’ directory. If I search through the ‘style.css’ file (which is pretty large) I find the following:
#head {position:relative; width:990px; height:250px; margin:0 auto; text-align:left; background: url(images/top-right-bg-repeat.jpg) 90px 0px repeat-x;}
.crack {position:absolute; left:0px; top:0px; width:990px; height:51px; background: url(images/crack.jpg) 627px 0px no-repeat;}
.header {width:627px; height:250px; background: url(images/header-bg.jpg) no-repeat;}
.logo {position:absolute; left:0px; top:115px; width:627px;}
.logo h1 {font: bold 26px/120% Georgia; color:#602600; padding:0 0 10px 20px; margin-right:16px;}
I can therefore change that line to use a different file, though it should be noted that the alternative image must have dimensions of 627 pixels wide and 250 pixel high, otherwise there may be problems.
Essentially any image in the scheme can be changed this way. Of course another method is to just rename your new file to that of the existing one, and then overwrite it (So I would rename my personal file as ‘header-bg.jpg’ and overwrite the existing file).
Colours are slightly harder to change.
Colours in CSS files are invariably written in the form #112233. This is in the format Red-Green-Blue so that the 11 refers to the level of red (on a scale of 0 to 255), 22 refers to green and 33 to blue. However, it uses what’s called hexadecimal notation which means that 255 becomes FF. Without going into too much detail, counting in Hexadecimal follows the following pattern:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, 11 ….. 19, 1A, 1B … 1F, 20 …
In other words, F in Hexadecimal is 16 in denary (decimal), and 10 (in H) is 17.
So your colour should always consist of six characters ranging from 0 to 9 and A to F.
As an example of the two limits, Black is #000000, and White is #FFFFFF.
Examples of that notation will crop up throughout your ‘style.css’ and any of these can be changed to provide your desired colours. The biggest problem is determining a) the code for the number you require, and b) which bit of code refers to the colour you wish to change. Sometimes it can be obvious – in the code extract above, the font in the header (logo) is set to #602600, so changing this will change the colour of the words “The Other Fellow”.
Customising a theme initially can be a case of trial and error, but if you become familiar with a particular theme, you will soon learn which elements are which and what colour refers to what.
Initially it can be a case of pot luck, but with a bit of practice, you should soon be able to tweak your theme to the style you wish.
Good luck!