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Tadaaa!

2008-11-29

knüll Good feeling if you can crumple an A4-sized sheet full of things to do and toss it in the bin because everything is done… and thus my new theme is finished already today! A few notes:

  • I made the theme myself. (I used the default theme as code base, but there’s not much left of it.) It’s hard to publish because there a quite a few things tailored to specifics of y blog; and including header images isn’t trivial either (besides I’m not sure about the redistribution licence of some of the photos (those I didn’t make myself))…
  • Default fonts are the “C” fonts from Microsoft – Calibri (text), Cambria (headlines), Constantia (poems etc.), Consolas (code); I don’t use Candara and Corbel here – which are included with Windows Vista and Office 2007 (and the free PowerPoint viewer) (» more info). They’re optimized for ClearType font smoothing and look quite elegant then – the first screenshot shows the “ideal” example (for those who don’t have the fonts); the second shows IE6 without smoothing and with the substitute fonts (Tahoma etc.):
    cim3 ideal cim3 IE6
  • Some rounded elements (e.g. the search box in the top right corner) need a sensible browser for this display. ;)
  • Instead of four randomly selected small header images there’s just one per month now – but larger. (With a few exceptions with additional images, such as on new year’s day.)
  • If you notice any errors – or something that looks ugly – please tell me. And I don’t mind any expressios of opinions. :)
  • Update: … and the comments now are working again (thanks for the info)… seems I tested that only in my WP2.7 beta test installation.
    :wand:

The perfect post

2008-11-22

The Holy Trinity of the Three Sevens in the combination of mind and soul with the four elements brings you this divine perfect post, the sevenhundredandseventyseventh of my blog, for your complete enlightenment.

777

Know ye, it is written:

Divide the triple bad luck twice by the elemental bad luck, so that it shall dissolve itself and the divine perfect remain.1

Like the trinity and the four elements put together result in the Seven, the perfect 777 consists of four elemental trinities based on the double Three.2

Write this following Prayer in your best handwriting on handmade paper, frame it and hang it 7.77 centimeters above the floor, lie down in front of it at a distance of 7.77 inches and loudly speak the Prayer 777 times in 7.77 hours, so that you shall find complete enlightenment and no longer need candles nor lightbulbs, now and for evermore.

This is how ye shall pray:

Our number, who art in cosmos,
Hallowed be thy prime factors.
Thy factorization come.
Thy calculation be done,
In the computer as in our heads.
Give us this day our daily enlightenment.
And forgive us our miscalculations,
As we forgive those who calculate against us.
And lead us not into division by zero,
But deliver us from the 666.
For thine is the 3, and the 7, and the 37,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

  1. (131313:13):13 = 777 [↩]
  2. 777 10 = 3333 6 [↩]

High database load from Ajax Edit Comments…

2008-11-18

… and a preliminary solution:

The WordPress plugin “Ajax Edit Comments” from The Reader Appreciation Project1 allows the commenter to edit his comment for a certain time – useful especially for typos and minor corrections. (Admins can do more.) Visitors utilize it here for about every 10th comment, by the way.

Now Pierre notified me yesterday about the high number of database queries (and that the response time could be better, too) – higher than what I always saw when logged in. (See the blue footer line.) Doing a little research, I found that it’s the aforementioned Ajax Edit Comments that uses 4 additional database queries for each comment in order to check if the visitor is allowed to edit it (unles (s)he’s logged in as admin who is always allowed to edit). That can sum up to quite a lot if there are many comments on a single post.

I quickly added a little modification to the plugin2 which check the comment age in advance without database access – in my quick tests, these modifications appear to work fine. If you too don’t see any problems – feel free to test it here or maybe later for the music quiz on 16:00 – I will, of course, send the changes to the plugin’s author, hoping they will be included in future versions. :)

  1. for WordPress 2.5 and higher – old version for 2.1–2.3.x here [↩]
  2. in both the old version I’m still using here and the new in my test environment where I’m preparing the WordPress 2.7 update [↩]

Statistical aftermath

2008-11-17

Now what are the results – as far as they concern myself – of the incredible TV muck, erm, “experiment” called “Uri Geller live – Ufos & Aliens” about which I reported more or less live?

  • Uris Aliens: WP.com-Stats A new record on Saturday that didn’t last long: WP.com-Stats counted 2826 page views (probably not 12am CET being their limit, but UTC), including 768 for the pre-report and 1120 for the live report. The best value since the start of my blog, even better than the 2549 in February – also thanks to Uri Geller.
    The visitor run continued on Sunday: 3068 total, 1126 for the pre-report and 809 for the live report. On early Sunday afternoon, the average of the last 6 months was already reached in November.
  • Almost all searchers arrived at the pre-report initially – which I expected and placed a big link there. (And of course this also contributed to the high total page views.) The pre-report was also in Google.de’s top 5 for several search word combinations, sometimes even ahead of ProSieben, the show’s TV station. :mrgreen: And the highest-placed blog.
  • Uris Aliens: Bloggerei Bloggerei.de counted on Saturday until midnight 423 unique visitors1 for the live report, which was enough for no. 12 in the top topics list; there were a total of 1295 visitors on Saturday. (Which also means that another estimated 350-400 visitors were satisfied with the pre-report. Or unsatisfied and left again. Or didn’t notice the link after all.)
    On Sunday, I temporarily reached no. 5 in the top topics and rank 28 in the top blogs list, as far as I noticed (there’s no history) – 2110 unique visitors total, about 700 for the live report.
  • Uris Aliens: Broswer-Statistik Seiten
    Uris Aliens: Broswer-Statistik Besucher     Addendum: Originally I had left out the data from browser-statistik.de in order to not overload this post with numbers, but since Jan, who operates the site, cried so heart-rendingly (“ :cry: ”), I added them now: 2751 pages accessed by 1111 visitors on Saturday, 3061 pages by 2002 visitors on Sunday. Which put me on no. 9 on the charts there.
  • Uris Aliens: whos.amung.us According to whos.amung.us, there were up to 53 online at the same time – even if that tool isn’t known for its reliability, it rather has outages (sometimes for hours) than counting too much.
  • Originally I had planned to update my report in every or every other commercial break – but when there still was none on 9pm (there apparently were rather few commercial customers), I quickly uploaded the first part (in German) anyway; after all, there were already several readers and a few comments.
  • 13 commenters wrote 35 comments during the show; more were added later on – thanks!

The ratings were surprisingly low, rather disastrous for ProSieben – here’s the top 5 of Saturday’s primetime (source: teletexts):

Station Show Viewers
aged 3+		 Marktet share Viewers
14-49 years		 Market share
Sat.1 Chronicles of Narnia (movie) 5.56 Mio. 18.9% 3.25 Mio 27.6%
RTL Das Supertalent (casting show) 5.55 Mio. 18.8% 3.09 Mio. 26.2%
ARD Musikantenstadl (“folk” music) 5.32 Mio. 17.8%
ZDF Unter Verdacht (TV movie) 4.57 Mio. 15.2%
Pro7 Uri Geller live 1.40 Mio. 4.8% 0.85 Mio. 7.3%
Rerun on Sunday morning 0.54 Mio. 6.1% 0.38 Mio. 8.6%

Now does ARD being that far ahead of Pro7 speak for the intelligence of the TV audience or against it…?

  1. 423? 42 and 23 blended together? Conspiracy!!!! [↩]