Above: traffic to the spare cycles home page during the Tour of California. The decline over time I believe reflects the NorCal bias in my traffic as the NorCal stages were first in the race.

Here's a quick run-down of stats with my post-Flickr move. I thought I'd share as others have contemplated similar and might appreciate seeing the results of another's experiment. As a quick summary, I decided to move my professional cycling photography off Flickr prior to the Tour of California, my big event of the year. My galleries are a mixture of homebrew Python code to upload images and MovableType templates to display them.

My conclusion: moving off of Flickr was the right thing to do. There is a bit of apples and oranges: I photographed the Tour of California a lot more this year and there is carry over from my previous year's coverage. At the very least, though, I was able to significantly improve traffic despite my move off Flickr.

Traffic to the Spare Cycles homepage was up ~500%, visitors stuck around longer, my most popular ToC 2008 photo already has more views than my post popular 2007 photo*, my teaser ToC photos on Flickr have far less views than my kwc.org photos, and none of this counts the thousands of hotlink hits I got from embedded images on other sites. The embeds also made it easier to find my photos on other sites as those sites linked to kwc.org instead of Flickr. The only negative I could find is that there are far fewer comments, which I miss and reflect on the strong community of Flickr.

Purely on the goal of making it possible for more people to see my photos, I'm happy with my choice. As a bit of advice to others contemplating the same, I highly recommend the ability to embed images as this made it far easier for people I was working with to use my images.

* caveat: discounting a glitch Flickr had that gave bogus views to a sequence of my 2007 photos

I've been a bit lazy in transitioning to MT4 -- I've been happy with the site and haven't really wanted to tackle any possible upgrade issues. But the iMT plugin -- MovableType for the iPhone -- is pretty darn appealing. I'm also testing whether or not I can move some of my Flickr content back onto this site, so it's best to start at the leading edge.

Update: the fancy new interface of MT4 is definitely causing some bugs... (the textbox in the entry didn't load, the page is jumping up and down because I clicked on a menu, etc...)

The infinite spiral of redesign. I'm not happy with the tag pages or the front page sidebar yet, but all in good time (or never).

If all goes well, the oft-delayed redesign should be ready to go tomorrow. I'm testing it here (the top navigation header is just a placeholder right now). I surveyed a bunch of different blogs out there and drew up all sorts of elaborate designs, but a quick-and-clean design I did in a couple of minutes in Photoshop won me over. This is my first design that is specifically geared towards Flickr photos: the main content matches the 500-pixel-wide Flickr medium images and the side column matches the small images. The new design also does away with all the AJAX-y stuff, aligns the site with the kwc.org frontpage, adds a footer, and makes use of the MovableType 3.x sidebar for more contextual content. There will be some more tweaks as I go along (such as what to put in the right column on the front page), but the basics are in place.

I'm a little amused by the fact that the design is close to the default MovableType 2.x templates, given that the point of this is to update things to MovableType 3.x. The plethora of MovableType 2.x blogs back in the day made the Georgia font uncool, but now that everything has moved towards sans-serif fonts I feel that I can go back and reclaim that territory.

• Scott Morse cyclist sketch
• MythBusters Episode 78: Ninja Myths - Walking on Water, Catching a Sword, Catching an Arrow

New version up at http://kwc.org/, old version if you're curious.

I had to see how the logo design would work on my actual site, which somehow led to me doing a complete mockup redesign of my front page. This is all just photoshop and I'll need to redo the text and reshoot the top photo if I actually use this. I couldn't make up my mind on the logo to use, so the extended entry has the dot-less/drop-less version for comparison.

I dreamt this up in the morning before work. I've always found 'kwc' typographically unbalanced and awkward: the 'k' and the 'w' clash. This is one quick attempt to bring balance back.

update: some alternatives

Some of you may have noticed that kwc.org was offline today. This was inopportune seeing as I was 400 miles away and in the midst of posting lots of cycling coverage.

But kwc.org is back now and it is no longer on my home DSL. I am now serving it on AN Hosting. AN Hosting uses the atrocious cpanel UI, but it happens to be really inexpensive and they promise good uptime. We shall see. It can't be any worse than my DSL line, which was finally being maxed out by recent increases in traffic.

Things may be a little unstable until I get all the right permissions and configurations and whatnot in place.

Yesterday's Slashdotting only brought in about 4-5x the normal daily traffic. As it turns out, I was actually getting hit by a one-two punch: two days ago was a big traffic spike due to a Obi-Wan Kenobi Valentine's image I posted from Something Awful (people were loading a 150K category archive page).

Looking at the number of visits:

08 Feb 2007 3832
13 Feb 2007 4782
14 Feb 2007 7946

15 Feb 2007 18078

18,000+ isn't that terrible in comparison to the normal 3,000-4,000 daily visits. It certainly would have been much higher had my server not been burning toast.

Yesterday was actually a good day from a bandwidth perspective (300-450MB is normal).

08 Feb 2007 412.45 MB
13 Feb 2007 658.47 MB
14 Feb 2007 946.67 MB
15 Feb 2007 457.37 MB

NOTE: The heavy bandwidth on the 13th and 14th was due to the Valentine's traffic.

# of pages and # of hits was only about 2x normal.

So, from a traffic perspective, it wasn't really the DSL line that was at issue. My Apache server (for whatever reason) wasn't able to handle the # of requests coming in. I blame Windows/Microsoft, as always (not my lack of skills in configuring an Apache conf file ;) ). Looking at my network utilization graph, the Apache server would handle the incoming requests well for a couple of minutes without fully saturating the link. Then there would be a sharp spike and the graph would flatline as the Apache server became unresponsive.

Perhaps the more interesting statistic was how I did with my Google ads. I believe I'm not allowed to share those directly, but I can make the following summarizations:

• click-through ratios went down on my blog. Slashdot traffic is not ad-friendly.
• click-through ratios on everything else went up about 3-4x.
• yesterday still was not a 'banner day' with respect to ads

One nefarious conclusion one can draw from this is that slow site = better ad sales. This makes sense: people see the ad load, but the rest of the content is slow in coming and they decide to leave.

Redesign is in the works. I've tagged ~400 past entries, slowly working my way up to all 2100+. Soon I'll redirect my efforts to actual visual designs, thus a poll.

1. Renaming 'kwc blog'. I want something shorter. I'm currently favoring "kwc'r", but other suggestions are votes for status quo are welcome.

2. Visual design. I need to update to more modern templates for administrative reasons: should I keep the same look, or should I venture into new territory? I absolutely don't like the default MovableType templates, so a new design would be anything but.

3. Architecture blog? I'm thinking of breaking out architecture-related content in order to better feature and categorize content. I have some Japan photos awaiting this decision.

Your input is much appreciated.

I've upgraded kwc.org to use MovableType 3.3 (this is a prelude to upgrade movabletypo). MT 3.3 adds two new major features in my opinion: built-in tagging and widgets. The latter should make it a lot easier for MovableTypers to maintain their blogs, as widgets allow you to update sidepanel content without having to edit your templates, which is a major pain of old MT. I haven't given that a try yet, though -- I've been busy trying to tag my old entries. So far I've tagged 100 entries. Only 2200 left to go...

This is all a prelude to a major kwc.org site redesign. I'm jealous that meta finally found the time. Mine will be more oriented towards finally bringing kwc.org into the MovableType 3.x world, as my templates were designed with the entirely different MT 2.x-isms that require many hacks to get them to do all the customized behaviors like books covers and selective ads that I like.

I forgot to note that the kwc.org frontpage got a slight redesign. I'm still looking for greater inspiration, but I wanted to make greater use of the 1600+ photos in my Flickr account.

I got a lot of traffic yesterday (to cooling a six-pack) from BoingBoing and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it would be. It was secondary traffic, mind you, in one of the "Update" link sets, but it only generated about another 1,000 visitors to the site, which didn't even double my traffic. A third-order Slashdotting -- getting a link from the Slashdot comments section -- is just as effective.

Update: hmm, maybe I'll have to retract my "unimpressed." According to Feedburner, my subscriptions to MythBusters went from 17 to 85. 66 of subscribers are listed as Firefox Live Bookmarks, which seems odd to me, so I'll have to see if that one holds up.

I'm heading off to Japan on Friday for work + play. I've been catching up on my JapanesePod101.com lessons, which I think is an excellent language resource for those of you with iPods. You get beginner- and intermediate-level spoken courses and you also get an English/romaji/kanji/hiragana/katakana transcription if you press you press the center wheel on your iPod a couple times. I didn't even know that you could store note tracks with podcasts until they explained this feature and I've loved it ever since.

I'm hoping my RSI cools down a bit while in Japan, but for now the light blogging continues...

On a separate note, the episode guide for Myths Reopened is now up. The arrow-splitting myth was the only true revisit; the salami rocket and bullets fired underwater were variations of the original myth.

My RSI is acting up again so I'm going to try and go light with the blogging and all other forms of typed communication. I've got a tiny bit of stuff from the Alternative Press Expo (APE), some Japan WWII photo comparisons, a MythBusters episode writeup, some more Sea Otter Classic race stuff, and MagnaView Part II, all in due time. But first, taxes.

Entry 2000, "Shooting cycling photographs with a Canon Digital Rebel," was just posted over on my spare cycles blog. I think the cycling-related post is rather appropriate for entry 2000 as it was the Tour of California that seemed to throw off the guesses the most.

The winner of the contest to guess the correct post time is .... HORIZONLINE! who wins a threadless t-shirt with a guess of March 13th at 12:45:07 -- only four days off. Of the other guesses, honeyfields seems to think that I am capable of posting as fast as ln m -- puh-lease, no one but ln m can achieve such blistering rates.

You're free to accuse me of collusion, but with the regular Tour of California entries making up the bulk of February, it would have been harder to rig. If you feel like protesting, you can try to guess which Threadless t-shirt horizonline will buy and buy it first instead :).

I have no retrospective for entry 2000. Mostly this was a good excuse for me to get some entries finished or deleted from my drafts, slighly update the kwc.org frontpage, and break off two new blogs: mythbusters and cycling. I will say that 2000 entries is a lot for MovableType -- my new blogs build so much faster!

kwc.org has slowly been degrading in performance, but thanks to some Apache tuning slides and some followup with bp I think I have bought some more time. The key was turning off the AllowOverride for nearly every directory on this site. Way back when kwc.org had very little traffic, I had created an htaccess file to help me migrate from an older MovableType installation. It turns out that a large htaccess file and a sudden influx of traffic can bring your Apache to a halt.

I've wondered what the breaking point of my setup would be. I run kwc.org on my home Windows desktop over 802.11g and DSL. Eventually it was going to start showing cracks. January was the first month that this site eclipsed 50,000 visitors and there is a slight chance of breaking 60,000 this month. This isn't very large compared to other sites: Alexa ranks kwc.org somewhere between 116,013 and 383,693, which is not in the range that Alexa actually considers trackable. However, kwc.org is now serving 6KB/s on average, with much higher traffic during peak times and as much as 800MB in a single day. Anywhere between 10-20% of my DSL bandwidth is being eaten up, so I may have to get more creative in the future to keep things running. I've also noticed MovableType degrading, often failing to rebuild files on the first try. It will be a race between MT and my DSL line to see which requires attention next.

I'm aware that some might try to gain advantage by entering at the last possible moment (you know who you are :) ), which is unfair to those who boldly entered when I announced the contest. To be more fair to the prompt entries, I'm adding this addendum: starting tomorrow, all new entries will be assessed a 24-hour penalty per day, i.e. if you enter a guess tomorrow then it will be penalized 24 hours, if you enter on Thursday your guess will be penalized 48 hours, and so forth, up until the time I close entries. Today is the last day you can enter with no penalty.

I create competitions out of everything, especially when there is little or no point. In this spirit I am announcing the Second Mill-entrial Guess When kwc Posts Entry 1000 (* 2), a Celebration of Ginormous Wastes of Time. bp was probably hoping for another free dinner, but I decided to be more fair to the VA watchers and redo the prizes this time around. For the best guess of the post time of the 2000th entry, I'm offering your choice of one of these <$20.00 prizes, selected for their appropriateness to recent content:

• T-shirt of your choice from Threadless
• Vitalic's OK Cowboy album
• Official MythBusters t-shirt
• TiVo Doll (18")
• 1 year Pro Account on Flickr

To enter, leave a comment here with: * your guess of the exact post date and time of the 2000th entry (down to the second) * your preferred prize * your name

I promise not to read your entries until after I've posted entry #2000 -- a filter in my GMail inbox will be keeping a tally of how many entries have been made. Do not leave entries in the comments here -- you should only comment here if you wish to complain about the prize selection.

The most important thing you need to know, of course, is that this is entry #1948.

See also: First Mill-entrial Guess When kwc Posts Entry 1000

I thought this was an interesting meme: Jeffrey Veen asks on his blog post, "So what's in your Drafts folder?" (aka "Folder of Shame"). Here you go, a sampling of my unbaked ideas:

• Redesigning kwc.org soon
• Tag
• Sony copies, changes
• More auto-captions
• 4th Rule of Robotics
• Bias in voices
• Post-Tour wrapup
• Comic-Con: T-shirt ideas
• My own crazy conspiracy theory
• Removed photos
• On airports

I sold out last May and started putting Google Adsense ads on some of the older entries on this site. For the first couple of months I only got $0.29/day. In August it jumped up to about $1.07/day and this month it's $1.29/day (the increases were due to placing ads on more pages).

At $0.29/day having ad revenue is like getting a nice birthday present once a year: it's nice, but you're not really sure it's worth the effort. Once I broke $1/day it became much easier to match the revenue to the costs of running the site: $30/month matches well with Web hosting costs or can easily fund hardware upgrades. There's no profit in it, but it feels more self-sustaining.

I didn't sell out to make a profit, so this for me is a wild success. I still find it mind-boggling that anyone would pay me any money to read my old dreck, but I'm sure I can manage a happy maniacal laugh when I deposit my first check.

Please leave a comment if you can, need to know if this works properly

July always exerts an huge blogging burden and unlike last year I wasn't able to keep up with it all. Depending on my free time I may be flooding my blog again with even more posts that make it look like I'm amazingly productive, but really this is all just backlog and backwash.

Still to come (mostly a checklist for myself): Baudolino notes, Red Mars notes, Design of Everday Things notes, Post Tour de France wrapup, GPS mapping experiment, some more Caltrain infovis, some BlogHer thoughts, some Bruce Campbell quotes, and some Tour de Comic-Con photos (though m beat me to the punch and I won't have much to add).

My computer, the one that runs kwc.org, died earlier today in a fit of hard drive badness. Initially I was going to go my traditional incremental route, but when I weighed the amount of time it would take to get everything reinstalled versus future, planned upgrades, I decided to turn this unplanned event into an opportunity to do a major rebuild.

Starting in 1998 or so, I built Version 1.0. I budgeted about $500/year for computer parts in order to keep my computer perpetually almost-top-of-the-line, but never cream of the crop. Some years I would replace the motherboard, other years brought accessories like external hard drives and LCD monitors. The only original parts after seven years of rebuilding are the computer case and the CD drive. I called this computer Karma, because I somehow figured that it was a fitting name for the incremental approach.

I'm now saying goodbye to that lineage. Much like the Windows software that runs on it, it simply acquired too much cruft to continue onward. The original case is a sentimental possession, covered with stickers, glow-in-the-dark paint, and other detritus from years past, but it lacked proper cooling, ease-of-access, and front panel inputs. The original CD drive required that I manually extend the drive tray.

There has to be some inheritance to carry on the proud tradition; in this case it is the memory sticks, video card, and wireless card -- all late additions -- that survived into the new case.

Karma now sits partially gutted, travelling on its way to the River Styx. If I find a couple of coins to stick on its eyes maybe it will be able to buy some memory from the ferryman and journey back to the world of the living, but for now I'm busy trying to get this puppy into Web-serving, photo-editing condition.

There also has to be a name for the new machine. I chose the name Fenix, because he just looks so happy dancing among the blue flames:

I broke the magical $10 barrier with my Google adwords today. It took about a month to reach that mark, though it took about a week of fidgeting with the ad layout to figure out what was the best placement.

I monitored mybloglog to figure out which entries to place ads on, eventually choosing about 15% of my entries to mark with ads -- this results in about a third of my incoming traffic is being served ads right now. I would get a higher percentage if I placed ads on my category archives, but I'm not willing to do that right now.

Of course, given that In-n-Out pays $10/hr starting, I would make more money flipping burgers, but experiments are experiments. If only I could start getting some of the home loan ads or trial lawyer ads, I would really be rolling in the dough.

I've placed ads on this entry if you're curious to see them (if you don't see them, click on the entry title to go to the individual entry page).

I'm jumping on the Ajax bandwagon and redesigning my site a touch. A couple weeks ago I pared down the right-column a bit, and now, with the assistance of Ajax, I've modified the "Old: Monthly | Category" menu into its now current incarnation. I plan to add in an option to load my Flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks into this page, but that is on hold until I do some server upgrades.

My overall goal is to add more content to the front page while at the same time reducing clutter.

I've sold out to The Man and have started running Google AdSense ads on various entries on this site.

I debated this for a fairly long time, trying to solve the problem, "Can I place ads on this site without you (my friends) your myself ever having to see them?" Running this site costs money, so ads would be a good way of defraying those costs. I wasn't able to come up with a satisfactory solution for several months, but what finally tipped the balance was the data that was coming in from MyBlogLog.

The stats from MyBlogLog were interesting to me, not only because they provide a better measure of traffic than my Web server stat logs, which are polluted by spammers, but they also happen to tell me the most popular entries where people are clicking on links to leave my site. In other words, in examining these stats, I can find older entries people are using to find information not on my site. This, in many ways, is my target audience for ads: people whom I don't know, who are directed to my site by a search engine, and are interested in content not on my site.

Armed with this information, I have placed ads on about 50-60 entries on this site (about 5% of the total entries). There are various rules that I used to determine these entries, and while I may violate some for convenience, they are:

• entry no longer displayed on my front page
• higher traffic relative to other entries
• unlikely to be visited by me or my friends (i.e. not journal-like, not my photos, not my notes)
• keyword friendly (e.g. 'Google', 'Microsoft', 'Backpack', 'Gehry')

I hope that these rules will create enough extra effort in adding ads to entries that the number of entries with ads continues to stay very low. For now this is an experiment, and if it fails, either due to a lack of revenue or because it does not satisfy my original criteria ("only strangers see ads") I'll pull the ads as it won't be worth maintaining.

If you're curious, here are some example pages with ads: one two three four five

Update: I'm $0.03 richer! I can quit my day job!

In the spirit of mining stats to do auto-captioning, and inspired by wombat's Googlefight model of decision making, I bring you the latest to be scraped from my server logs: kwc.org Search Keyword Fight I (roman numerals indicate the potential for future fights). Rules: each term below is given a score indicating the number of times it was used in a search query (Google/Yahoo/etc...) that ended up on kwc.org. For example:

• mit 9
• stanford 7

means that "MIT" was used in 9 search queries, and "Stanford" was used 7 times.

Round 1: Gender superiority

Hard to judge this round: man has a slight lead in the individual scoring, but Batman was a suprise third.

• man 22
• woman 16
• batman 10
• stickman 8
• manchuria 7

Women shutout the men in the team competition, and the co-ed X-Men team posted a respectable score for homo superior.

• women 34
• x-men 6
• men 0

Round 2: Warrior supreme

• samurai 50
• pirates 9
• ninjas 6

Note to Hollywood: do more samurai films (w/o Tom Cruise).

Round 3: Computer Religion

I couldn't help but notice these two fighting neck-and-neck for position among my stats:

• apple 67
• microsoft 67

Round 4: Morality

• evil 33
• hate 13
• good 9
• love 0

I'm not sure how to interpret this round. Is it my site is evil -- I do write about evil bunnies from time to time -- or is it that people who use search engines are looking for evil/hateful content?

Bonus Round

This is a search query stat fight, so we'll end the scoring with a fight between the search engines themselves:

• google 125
• yahoo 11

In order to recuperate the $1.00 I spent outsourcing my plagiarism entry, I've decided to join Boring Boring and Gakker in adding banner ads to this site to support my continued plagiarism. Fear not, this is only for the short-term, as I've contacted the makers of Bloggy, the Blogging Robot about building my own kwcBloggy -- well, not really building my own, but rather paying someone else to build one for me.

I did say that I hoped to never do this again, but as I've previously confessed, I'm a plagiariser -- I never wrote that in the first place. So for today only, I've updated kwc.org to make homage to the 20th century's greatest contribution to the Web: blinking text.

Update: There's only so much my stomach can take, but for those of you who haven't quite vomited from my nostalgic makeover, you can still get your fill.

It's been interesting to watch the top search keywords for this site evolve over time. There was a bit of pride when my top keyword was 'gollum', which was related to a photo of gollum that I had posted to one of my entries. There wasn't nearly as much pride when the Khleo generics fan club hijacked my Holes review. Befuddlement turned to slight disgust when my top keyword was 'species iii girl comic-con in box'.

In recent months, my Mythbusters posts have each taken their turns in the top keywords list. While I'm happy to see that people searching for "Archimedes Death Ray" may find something useful in my show notes, I'm a bit bothered that Scottie Chapman -- blond, tattooed, female, welding member of the build team -- has spent several months in the top spots. I would even be tempted to write a rant about this, but parakkum has already saved me the effort, pointing me to this quotable rant written by someone empathetic to this specific vexation:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the number one referrer to this here blog are search requests for "Scottie Chapman."? The number two search request is for "Scottie Chapman...nude."

While I appreciate the traffic, Sweet Jesus, people get a life!

There are no nude pictures, no pictures of the lovely and enchanting Ms. Chapman here or anywhere else of which I know. There are no pictures of Scottie Chapman here at all. Now go read a book, plant a garden, or something.

Instead of a personal rant like the one above, I can instead happily report that a force more powerful than Scottie Chapman has captured the top rankings this month: EVIL BUNNIES!. Yes, honeyfields, your evil-filled bunnies have shown that the power of the Evil Cute can defeat the Forces of Pr0n. Cute Animals and TnA may battle it out daily on the Yahoo! Image Popularity Tracker, but here, on kwc.org, "Evil Bunnies" have won the day.

Kenji informs me that my logo has been stolen by Creatas.

I'm offended that a design site, of all places, would dare to steal my copyrighted/patented/signature/unique Four-Square (tm) design for their own. I can remember back to the third grade when I first came up with the basic design, while swiftly dodging a red bouncy ball and advancing to first square. The original Four-Square (tm) logo design had more of a black-and-white feel back then, with a pavement texturing. There was further refinement during college, when the Four-Square (r) design took on more of an urban sidewalk feel, reflecting my move out of the suburbs.

So I say, round up the posse! I've been working on my side-spin and it's time to take Creatas down!

I just found out that I'm listed on the GMail site under "Press and Testimonials." How amusing. Perhaps more amusing is that if you search Google for sites linking to my GMail review, the GMail site link does not show in the results.

About Gmail - Reviews

I've added some new feeds for those that prefer consuming this site in feed form. I've been eyeing feedburner for awhile, and it seems like they've managed to keep adding improvements to what, at its heart, is a very simple idea. I've taken this as a good sign for the service, so I've finally given into the luxury of having my blog, flickr, del.icio.us accounts all aggregated into a single feed. Rather than force you all to consume every bit of content I create, I have created four separate feeds that you can subscribe to depending on your tastes:

• Blog entries, del.icio.us links, flickr photos
• Blog entries, del.icio.us links
• Blog entries only (same as before)
• Comments on this blog

My desktop may be infected with a virus, which may be the root of all my problems here. If you receive a file called "document.com" from me, or any unexpected file whatsoever, please do not open it, and, if possible, let me know that you received it.

Many apologies. This is the first time I've been infected by a virus (that I know of) and it's rather embarrassing. Of course, I blame Microsoft.

Update: To put it in the words of Han Solo, "It's not my fault!" My computers came up clean for the Beagle virus, so I'll have to explore for other reasons my Web server keeps disconnecting.

Fry's had an 80GB Western Digital USB 2.0 hard drive for only $70 after rebate. They were selling an 80GB Western Digital internal hard drive (6MB more cache) for the same exact price. Apparently if I went a week earlier I could have gotten an off-brand 160GB external drive for $80, but this will do for now. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the darn thing.

MT-Blacklist v2.0e (emergency release) is out! It's installed on kwc.org now and I will be putting it through the ropes to see how well it does. It comes just in the nick of time as it seems that the spammers have caught up to my latest attempts to foil them and have been leaving loads of spam in the past 48 hours.

I have long said I would upgrade movabletypo to MovableType 3.0 when MT-Blacklist comes out, but I will have to amend that statement slightly. The features I saw in the soon-to-be-release 3.1 are significant (no more individual archive rebuilds!), and this emergency release of MT-Blacklist will not be compatible with 3.1. So, my current thinking is that I will bite the upgrade bullet with MT 3.1.

Update: MT-Blacklist has made me aware that the same spammer has now made 200 failed attempts (and rising) to spam my blog. Surely there has to be a better use of bandwidth than 200 hits against my site in only 2 hours.

So yes, MT-Blacklist is working quite well (with some minor non-feature-related bugs).

It's been awhile since I've done a zeitgeist report for this site. In the past k-leo and gollum have ranked highly on this site's search results, though I moved the gollum image so as to lower that particular datapoint. The k-leo results remain because I find the comments on that thread so amusing that I can't bring myself to delete them.

I was inspired to do another report because I find the top result for this month so far to be really disturbing, which comes as a result of this comic-con post. As for the other results, let me state that: * the Redskins do not suck (at least, not yet) * It's sad that I've become tech support for Microsoft error messages. If I were to describe the one job in the world that you couldn't pay me enough to do, it would be Microsoft Tech Support, and yet my blog has doomed me to this terrible fate. Darn you MovableType! * which one is Andy Lau? * somehow I find Googling a Google e-mail address to be amusing.

Stan Sakai has made his way into my backpostings, as my Quick Draw Panel entry is 90% complete (awaiting collaboration with Christine).

I still haven't posted on the half of the Stephen Silver talk (see Penny Arcade) I went to, nor my notes on Alex Sinclair's coloring tutorial (mostly a Photoshop tutorial), nor the Adapting Comics to the Screen Panel (during which I got a photo of myself with Stan Lee and his autograph). I think these notes will have to wait, even in light of the fact that my short term memory is gushing out of my ears right now due to the Comic-Con being followed by an AI conference. Of these three potential entries, it's most likely that I'll transcribe the Sinclair notes, and drop the others, but we shall see (any requests?). I also have about four photos of Jude Law that may languish, as well as some bad photos of Ray Park, Kenny Baker, a giant promo robot, and someone who I think is Sienna Guillory from the upcoming Resident Evil flick. There's also this interview with JD Salinger that I'm gonna toss. Good night.

I'd just like to note, having bombed you all with 25 entries in the past two days, that I am fairly certain that I am the only blog out there that is bringing you combined coverage of:

• The San Diego Comic-Con
• The Tour de France
• The 19th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2004)

So piss off all you Democratic National Convention bloggers. No one wants your crappy thoughts on politics. The kwc-SDCC-TdF-AAAI connection is where it's at!

WARNING: the following entry is terribly boring, and unless you're interested in protecting your MT blog from spammers or XHTML-validating your Web site, I suggest that you skip this entry with only the knowledge that I am hard at work behind the scenes doing stuff that, for the most part, you won't notice.

I've been busy working on this blog, though you won't be able to notice the fruits of a lot of my efforts. If you're especially observant, you might be able to notice that I'm using a new names for the entry URLs, which is part future-proofing, and part protection from search-engine-powered spammers. I used the htaccess trick that I posted about awhile back, though I should have done it sooner, as I have a 138KB htaccess file as a result (I trimmed it down to 99KB on the presumption that certain entries weren't worth forwarding).

I've also been making other tweaks to protect this site against spammers including * changing the name of my stylesheet * changing the names of the category and monthly archive pages: * individual: <$MTEntryDate format="%Y"$>/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$>.<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html * monthly: monthly/<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y"$>/<$MTArchiveDate format="%B_%Y"$>.html * category: category/<$MTCategoryLabel dirify="1"$>.html * tweaking the comment posting mechanism to be less search-engine friendly * other small tweaks to common wording that MovableType comes pre-installed with and is really easy to search for.

Another big change is that I've been trying to make sure that my pages XHTML validate, which is actually very time intensive, as I have to fix every typo I have made over the past year across 1200+ entries. To assist in this effort, I've been using the validate HTML bookmarklet from Jesse's Bookmarklets, and I have installed Markdown (much to bp's pleasure, I'm sure), as MovableType makes it very difficult to use blockquote's that validate. I'm a bit disappointed in Markdown thus far (limited range of character formatting, limited list interpretation syntax, no width/height on images, etc...), but the ability to generate XHTML-valid output is worth having it around when I need it. I think I might switch to Textile, which has a wider range of syntax, but I'm going to give Markdown a little bit more time to sink in first.

Hoping that DSL will be setup today so that kwc.org will resume normal service and I can start work once more on the feed aggregator. Tired of the broken links and missing content and inability to use the Internet from my bed.

Update: booo, still no DSL. suck

Despite various anti-spam attempts, it appears that I will lose this battle unless I take advantage of Typekey in some way, so I had another idea. I've setup a Typekey account called 'noone' ('anonymous' was already taken, so my idea is probably far from unique). It's password is 'noone'. Clearly, some one could login and screw with the account info, but really, what's the point?

So I am updating my templates for a trial period in which I will require all comments to be registered or otherwise be moderated, but if you choose to remain anonymous, you are free to use the 'noone' account to do so. This will be the first entry that features this requirement, if you wish to test it out.

Apologies to all. Even though I have comment moderation turned off with the new MovableType, it still seems to be moderating, which means that all of your comments have been sitting in a queue. I'm working on figuring out this snafu right now.

Update: I'm still completely baffled. As of yesterday, it was allowing comments through unmoderated. Now MT 3.0 wants to moderate, even though the option has been turned off.

Update 2: I'm an idiot. Forgot to uninstall MT Blacklist, a plugin which I will miss dearly. As a bonus, you should be able to use typekey now.

I've just upgrade this site to MovableType 3.0. There is very little different about it, mostly just new tools for managing comments and trackbacks. One of the more notable additions is that MT 3.0 would allow me to setup 'registered' comments on this site, i.e. when you comment, instead of entering in a name, e-mail, and URL, you could instead enter in a login and password.

My question for you is: if I added registered comments, would this be more convenient for you?

Here are the pros/cons as I see them:

Pros:
- don't have to type in e-mail and URL if you want that information included
- I could possibly make registered comments more prominent

Cons:
- you have to login
- have to register an account at typekey.com
- your comments on this site are more easily trackable

(This is the last entry today, I promise)