Yacoblog - My Blog

Happy Birthday Blog

Fri, 21 May 2010 05:00:00 -0600

My blog turns 8 years old today. Wow! That seems like a long time, but I know there are other people out there that started blogs a while before me. I remember when I first started hearing about the term "blog". I ignored it for a few months, and then finally decided to go figure out what "blog" means. I remember thinking that "blog" is a dumb term for what basically seemed like a web journal. The rest is history. :) I am not a prolific blogger, but I'm not apologizing for that. The way I see it, this is my blog and I don't owe anybody anything for it. If I only post once a month, I'm just hurting myself. So you'll never see me post one of those, "Man...I haven't been posting very often here. Sorry guys!" posts. It is what it is. I post when I want to say something, and when I don't, I don't post. So I generally don't want to say anything. :) As I always do on my blog anniversary, I'll post some stats*:

Total Number of Entries:	438
First Entry:	05/21/02
Total Comments:	1244
Average Comments Per Entry:	2.84
Total Views:	919467
Average Views Per Entry:	2099.24

Top 10 posts, by page view

JavaScript URL variables	40329
JavaScript isNumeric function	35882
Obtaining Affected rows from SQL Query	18666
Top 10 Crazy Eclipse Plugins	11811
Mozilla's answer to Adobe AIR	6622
Speed up page loads, defer your JavaScript	6271
Comet: Server Push to Browser	6171
ColdFusion dynamic variable names	6056
What does your name mean?	5930
Deselect all items in a Select List	5923

*My blog originally was on Blogger (before they were bought by Google). I lost all of the stats from my blog when I converted to BlogCFC. I can't remember when that was exactly, but I think these stats cover at least 4 years, maybe 5 or 6.

7 year blogger

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0600

My first blog entry was 7 years ago today. I am very proud of that fact, but I am not proud of the frequency of my posts over the years. I just did the math, and I have averaged 5 posts a month. Not horrible, but not as many as I would have liked. Oh well. When I first started blogging I had grandiose ideals that I was starting what would eventually become a very popular news site. I mostly blogged about current tech news stories. I was not a ColdFusion programmer back then, so I was not blogging about that yet (while that is my most prolific topic today, however). As I do every blog anniversary post, here are some stats for the curious:

I have been blogging for 2554 days.
I have had 1130 comments (actually more than that because I lost a lot when I converted from Blogger a few years ago).
I have had 663790 blog views.
I have averaged 1596 views per entry.

That last statistic is very surprising. I think it is because I have a few entries that have received a lot of google traffic over the years. For example, these two entries have had about 28,000 views each since they were posted: JavaScript isNumeric function, JavaScript URL variables. So it's not that I have very popular entries, but rather that those few popular entries throw off the average.

Upgraded to BlogCFC 5.9

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 11:09:00 -0600

In record time, I've already got my blog upgraded. Ray just barely release version 5.9 last night. But I had some time today, and I really wanted some of the new features in this release, like the threaded pinging when you post a new entry. So here we are. Thanks Ray!

5 years of blogging

Mon, 21 May 2007 09:39:00 -0600

Today marks five years since my very first blog entry, about the openning of Google labs. I originally started blogging with Google's Blogger (wasn't owned by Google back then), and have since moved to Ray Camden's BlogCFC. ColdFusion has been my most common topic, followed by Microsoft (not usually nice things to say about them). I have been a fairly light blogger, only 315 entries over five years. I always say that I'm going to blog more, but I find I go in spurts. In the end, I guess it doesn't matter because it's my blog, and I only want to blog when I have something interesting to say. My most viewed post was JavaScript isNumeric function, followed by Obtaining Affected rows from SQL Query.

4 years of blogging

Sun, 21 May 2006 00:00:00 -0600

Today marks my 4 year anniversary of blogging. My first post was May 21st, 2002 about the launch of Google Labs. Here are some stats for the truly bored: Total posts: 221 Average posts per day: 0.43 Total comments: 157 That last one is off, though, because I lost all my previous comments when I moved to BlogCFC last October. I definitely blog a lot more today than I did the first couple of years. Back then it was about 1-2 posts a month, and these days it's 1-3 posts a week.

New poll

Fri, 05 May 2006 13:58:00 -0600

I want to know how satisfied you are with your current pay level. I was thinking about this today, because it seems the most people are not satisfied with how much money they make. But I also find that most people either aren't very honest with themselves, or they are ignorant about the job market. I've known a lot of people that don't have a degree or any certifications, and maybe lack experience, but feel they should be making the same amount as people that do have these things. Also, I've known people that don't really care how much money they make because they are very happy doing what they do for a living, and/or they are secure financially. So take a look in my left side content and vote in my new poll.

New poll

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 12:29:00 -0600

I've added a new poll to this blog. This time, I'm curious how many email addresses you currently use. I'm interested in the amount that you use, not counting those that you don't ever check. Of course, some people don't even check their primary email! ;)

New host

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:47:00 -0600

Some of you may have noticed that my site was having problems last Thursday-Friday, including cfQuickDocs. I have had reliability problems with that host before, so I decided to take the opportunity to move to a new host. I picked HostMySite, because they are one of the few hosts that do Linux ColdFusion hosting, and they were the cheapest. I am a Linux snob when it comes to web hosting, I believe that web servers are important enough that I don't trust Microsoft's security record. But that discussion is for another post. Anyway, I've been very pleased with my new host, things are faster and more reliable now. And their customer service is top notch. There were a few issues with getting my sites up and running, and they were very quick and helpful.

New Poll

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 11:17:00 -0600

A couple of months ago I built a polling system for this blog, complete with an admin interface. At the time, the best poll question I could think of was, "What's your favorite browser?". Well, I figured I didn't want to waste my efforts, so today I used my fancy polling interface to make a new poll (OK, it's not that fancy, but it's easier than having to manually edit the code like my last poll system). What method do you use to watch TV? Still cheesy, but this kind of stuff is fun for me. :)

BlogCFC 4.0

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 16:37:00 -0600

I just got through upgrading my blog to BlogCFC 4.0. It was kind of a pain because I'd made quite a few modifications to my local installation, so I had to get all those modifications into 4.0 after I'd installed it. But its worth it, this new version has some cool features. There's now a time offset for times when the webserver is in a different time zone than the blogger. He added trackbacks, del.icio.us linking, technorati link checking. He also added a login prompt to the 'New entry' screen, which shows up if you aren't logged in. This is nice for adding a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar for adding a new entry. I created this one:


javascript:void(window.open('http://www.techfeed.net/blog/editor.cfm?id=new','eWin','width=550,height=700,menubar=yes,personalbar=no,dependent=true,directories=no,status=yes,toolbar=yes,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes'));

That way I can click that bookmark at any time and it will pop open a new entry window from my blog (I use Firefox, by the way). :)

BlogCFC post preview

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 15:21:00 -0600

Another feature that Blogger has that BlogCFC doesn't have is post previews. While you are typing a post, you can click a button that shows you what your post will look like. This is useful for formatting of posts, and html and such. Well, I was able to add this feature to this blog. I used JavaScript, and duplicated some of the things that BlogCFC does when you save a post. For example, you can use <code> tags to tell BlogCFC to display a section of code as is, so the broswer doesn't try to interpret and display it. I was able to get this to work with JavaScript as well. I don't modify the origal entry though, so when you click the 'return to entry' button, everything is as you left it. The only feature that I still miss from Blogger now is the auto code buttons, like adding links, bold, italics, etc. But I'm not sure if I'll try to add those or not, it seems a bit complicated. ;)

BlogCFC autosave

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 11:38:00 -0600

I added autosave to this blog's entry page. This is a feature that Google has on blogger. I set it to autosave the contents of the form to a cookie every 10 seconds, so if the browser crashes the contents of your post will be available. You just have to click the 'restore entry' button, and it gets loaded from the cookie.

First post

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:36:00 -0600

This is not really my first blog post, but I am in the process of converting my existing blog over to BlogCFC. This is ColdFusion based blog software built by Ray Camden. There are two reasons I am doing this: 1. I love ColdFusion and would prefer to have my blog powered by it. 2. I recently switched to a new web host, one that has ColdFusion. Blogger.com will not publish to this new web host. <geek speak>Blogger passes both active/passive ftp requests through port 21, and my host only allows passive on port 21. Active has to be on a different port. They told me I would have to switch to their Windows hosting to use Blogger, and I'm not doing that! :)</geek speak> I am going to be working on porting all of my existing posts over to this new blog, and when I get things all set up, I'll put a redirect in at the old blog to this new spot (notice the /blog in this URL). There are some features missing in this software, when compared to blogger. For example, post preview, and GUI stuff like buttons for links, images, etc. But, I have been really frustrated with Blogger's frequent outages, where everything seems to be working OK, but for some reason I can't post to my blog. I type out an entry, hit post, and it just spins forever without ever posting. Hopefully I'll have a more reliable blog with BlogCFC. And the developer just told me he's releasing BlogCFC 4.0 here soon, so hopefully it has some cool new features! :)

Mobile Blogging

Sat, 07 May 2005 08:44:00 -0600

Google just released mobile blogging. All you have to do is send an SMS email to go@blogger.com. This post was created that way.

My browser stats for 2004

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 21:05:00 -0600

Today I saw a post somewhere asking for people's browser stats, and I decided to figure mine out for 2004. I was pretty surprised by the results. I've always assumed that most of my visitors are IE users, because the last time I checked that was the case. But according to recent numbers, Mozilla based browsers are visiting my site a lot more than Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers. Go Mozilla! What's that you say? You aren't using Firefox!? Go get it, before someone sees you with your pants down!!
On a similar note, I'm not sure why, but my total unique site visits went way up as well, the graph (not posted here) is a straight line from 121 in January to 2231 in December. Those numbers also include My Mom's website, but most of the visits are to this blog.