So, I finally am using FeedBurner to start tracking my RSS subscribers. Here’s what it looks like right… now.

Not too much so far, but I’m sure once it’s had a chance to meet my subscriber’s feedreeders it will perk up some. Errr, well, we’ll see.

I have to say, I like having this feedburner url though:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Gabriel

w00t.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Done, for now.

CSS Reboot Fall 2005

Main URL: http://www.gabrielserafini.com

Other URL: http://www.serafinistudios.com

Fullname: Gabriel

Design Notes: The before was a WordPress theme based on a fairly well-customized k2, a very nice theme in and of itself that I’ve been quite happy with and had only recently launched as a redesign.

For this project, I began with a blank text file for both layout and style.

To add some color I wrote a small sidebar web art 216 color old-school web-safe color picker in Javascript. This adds not only a ton of extra, non-semantic, non-structural divs (which many would consider to be bad, but are, after all, CSS elements (hahahha)) but also a neat changing colorful small art piece that I can appreciate every time I visit the site (good).

I appreciated the opportunity to design a clean, fresh, and a art-filled new layout, to complement the technical posts about Open Source tools and my moss pictures on Flickr.

–
Gabriel

Popularity: 1% [?]

At 12:00 am or so tonight (or sometimes thereabouts) the new design for this site will go live. This is a screenshot of how the site looks right now:

Look for the new design tomorrow, and let me know what you think. I’ll update this post with the new, after screenshot once it goes live.

Here’s a screenshot of the new design:

Time for invoices.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Update:
Just to be explicitly clear, I am not now, and have never been, an email spammer, a blog comment spammer, or any other kind of spammer other than what I describe in this post. I originally created the site described here as an experiment in trying to auto-populate a supposed high-value keyword website with posts to see if it would make any money. That experiement worked, but the resulting site (which I would describe as a spam blog or splog or whatever you want to call it) was not very interesting, and I realized that it was a BAD THING to keep it around, even if it did make a whole $10.00. I appologize, I’m sorry, I don’t want the kittens to die.

This is the abbreviated version of my attempted and somewhat misguided career as a blog spammer. NOT a blog comment spammer, no way. This was all about creating a Wordpress site, then filling it with content that didn’t add really any value to the Internet.

But tonight, I shut the blog down and made this page instead:
All About Mesothelioma - Information about mesothelioma and possible treatment options.

Isn’t this still spam? Well, yes, and yes/no. I would say it is reformed spam. Maybe. It is really just aggregating entries from around the blogosphere (much like Technorati and a bunch of other sites do).

The story:
I had Wordpress auto feeding on a number of feeds. Over the course of a little over a year, the site collected over 66k posts all based on the keyword mesothelioma. This really offered nothing interesting or good to the internet, just basically your typical spam blog I guess. Then, after feeling guilty after reading about the ping server problem with spamming blogs, I turned off the ping notification. It was never my intention to harm anyone or anything. More like, see if I could make a quick buck.

Finally tonight I killed the Wordpress part of the site. It was hammering the server (although the hardware problem we had yesterday was a different issue) but churning through 66k of posts was killing mysql on our VPS. So, I made this page to go there instead. Doesn’t hit the database, just sits there, feeding on Google’s news feed and displaying Google ads.

Why mesothelioma, you ask? Just Google for “mesothelioma high value keyword” and you’ll see why. If you think you’d want to give it shot for yourself, though, you might not want to waste your time.

This is approximately what I actually made between February 12, 2004 - October 20, 2005: ~$10.00 total, based on around a total of 760 impressions and ~18 clicks. Being a little vague to try to comply with Google’s TOS for Adsense.

So. I would say, in addition to feeling much better about not having the sites up, I feel like I can say that overall, my wordpress spamming blog career did not actually amount to anything worth trying again. Will I leave this site up as-is now (basically 1 index.php page with some RSS feeds dumping into it)? Yes, mostly to see if it makes any difference now.

Anyways, the lesson that I learned and you should too: don’t spam.

God kills a kitten every time you do.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Ricardo Galli, de software libre - WP-Cache 2.0

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

Giving this a try on one of my sites that’s been eating a lot of cpu / db.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Rolling on K2 now, will be linking in the Niner Niner network header as soon as I get this site moved over to the new server. Last night it was like pulling teeth trying to get a simple db export / import to happen correctly. Gaaaaa!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Another great Niner Niner site in the making. Things are really starting to take off. Last night we had 148 writers. Today we have 160. Looking forward to seeing some collaboration and great writing!

HyperGadget - The latest gadget and electronics buzz

Welcome to HyperGadget.com - your home for the latest in cool gadget news

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Hmm, so I hadn’t set up blog this from within Flickr. Basically it allows automatic posting of pictures from flickr directly into your blog. Flippin sweet!

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This is working like a champ on Ajax blog

Chroder.com - Blog Archive - WordPress Code Highlight Plugin

WordPress Code Highlight Plugin

Post syntax highlighted code, or simply post code that is not affected by the WordPress text replacement features.

Popularity: 1% [?]

So… I was having a brutal bug with WordPress seeming to think that I was logged in when I wasn’t. I tried everything I could think of, turning off all plugins, trying different themes, looking at various database settings. Then, of course, I finally had to just Google what I was looking for. And lo and behold, the exact answer to the problem:

Logged in as . Logout — WordPress Support

Logged in as . Logout
…
try checking your user list to see if you have a blank user added somehow?

That was the answer. I had a blank user in the Users list somehow. I gave the user a user name, then demoted to level 0 so that I could delete.

And now, you can actually comment, sign in and also use the live search functionality on Ajax Blog now! :)

Popularity: 2% [?]