Category Archives: General management

2007 blog reader survey

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If you’ve already taken the blog reader survey on another blog, your answers will be applied to this blog too if you click the link (and you’re on the same computer, with cookies enabled), so please give us three seconds of your time.

If you haven’t taken the survey, do it if you got some time to spare. The full survey takes about 12 minutes, but you can skip the later questions if you like.

…The idea is to support blogads and by extension blogging itself, as well as satisfying our curiosity. Some questions won’t apply to the Europeans among us.

One in a million!

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It’s too bad that WordPress seems to break HTML in the title field – so I can’t use a modest Roman numeral to indicate that it’s you! Yes, you, reader from pol.co.uk, who clicked on a link in your google reader at 2:32 am CET, who is the one millionth sitemetered unique visitor to A Fistful Of Euros. Of course that doesn’t mean you’re actually the millionth person to see this page or read its content. After all, the definion of “visit” is different from counter to counter, as is the definition of unique visit. Moreover, Sitemeter.com doesn’t have a chance to count even one of the about 4000 feed subcscribers we have – according to our feed statisticians over at feedburner.com – if they don’t come here in addition to reading afoe in their favorite feed reader.

Still, it could have been anyone – but it was you! Congratulations! To you – and to us.

@foe is online again.

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Just a brief note to those who were using our European web aggregator @foe before we had to take it down due to the CMS transition – the aggregator is online again. I will continue to improve a few things in the next couple of days, including adding more feeds, so you may still experience shaky behavior at times. But basically – it’s back. So go forth and vote…

Update – I just realised that there were a couple of CSS problems that were caused because the conditional IE6 CSS code wasn’t loaded properly since the transition to WordPress. Since all the about 20% of you, who are still using IE6, suffered in silence, I’m asking everyone else using a less frequently used browser to tell us if there are any issues with the design. Thanks for your help!

Comments are open! All Permalinks work!

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Welcome back to afoe 3.1 – now running on WordPress. What I considered to be a weekend’s job – moving a blog of the size of afoe from the multiblog capable Movable Type to the single blog CMS WordPress and hacking it to the extent necessary to keep the impression of a multiblog – turned out to be just a little more complicated and time consuming.

I’ll write about this in a little more detail in a couple of days, so those among you, gentle readers, who might suffer from the same comment spam/Perl induced server problems, can benefit from my experiences to some extent, should you ever attempt to make the switch.

There are a couple of new features, mostly concerning comment subscription possibilities. Unfortunately, apart from the occasional lack of appropriate WordPress CSS, some things still don’t work, like our aggregator @afoe, which won’t function properly until I’ve renamed a couple of functions in the meneamé and pligg scripts it uses.

But for the moment, I’ll just sit back and wait for your participation – because the most important good news is the following:

Coments are open again – and despite the beautiful categorised permalinks which we are using now, not a single one of your links to any afoe archive page will break…

Moving again

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Gentle readers,

should you be concerned about the relative silence on afoe while seemingly everyone else is celebrating the European anniversary, I would like to let you know that, afoe is once again in the midst of an important transition: Following the recent comment spam/Perl-related server issues with our host that forced us to temporarily disable the comments in order to keep the site online, I am now porting the blog from Movable Type, the blog CMS to which we have been faithful since 2003, to WordPress, which, as you can probably imagine, is not too simple given the plethora of small functionality differnces, differences in template structures and, not least, the size of the afoe blog family.

For you, I suppose the most important information will be that I am fairly certain we won’t loose even a single permalink during the transition due to a lot of google research and a hack for the WordPress Movable Type importer that allowed us retain the post IDs once assigned by Movable Type. Thus, at the end of the transition all MT Permalinks will be seamlessly redirected to the respective WordPress entry. No need to adjust any of your links.

So, if all goes well, we will be able to reactivate the comment functionality in a day or two, and hopefully, you won’t even notice that we’ve switched to WordPress.

Comment Spam Problems

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Gentle readers, as so many other blogs, afoe is having major problems with the way Movable Type, the system we’ve been using to run this blog since 2003, is handling comment spam.

Unfortunatly, as you may have noticed, our host, totalchoicehosting.com, decided this morning that it had to suspend our domain temporarily because of the excessive server loads created by our comment spam – we’re talking about a couple of thousand comment spam entries per day.

In order to avoid future suspensions, I have disabled the comments on the entire system until we have worked out a solution that will avoid future account suspensions.

You can still contact us by email and the contact form on the about page. I will update this post as soon as we’ve worked something out.

Spam filtration

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The problem that has caused comments from regular readers to be treated as spam should now be resolved.

For the information of other MT and Akismet users, it relates to how MT handles multiple spam tests. MT-Akismet assigns a score of +/-6 to each comment, then the e-mail and URL fields are checked against past comments in order to establish trust. You used to get a score of +1 for previous publication of your e-mail and +1 for a URL.

The problem arose at the next step, where the total score is averaged across the three tests. MT doesn’t include zero scores in this, so the following bug results: if you get one point for each of the trust checks, and six from Akismet, your average score is +2.67, which is below the trigger level. If, however, you had never commented before, rather than divide the 6 points from Akismet across the three tests, MT disregards the zero scores, so you get a final score of +6 and instant publication.

The workaround is to increase the scores for links and e-mail to 2.

The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards

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The purpose of the awards is to recognize the efforts and contributions of Europe’s many talented bloggers, to maybe help build a sense of community among us, and, more than anything, it’s a chance for people to discover lots of new good blogs.

A blog is eligible if it’s written by Europeans or has a European (Czech, Catalan…) theme. Our own blogs aren’t eligible. Finalists are chosen based on the number of nominations as well as editorial discretion. So you want to nominate a favorite blog even if someone else already mentioned it.

Nominees for Best Southeastern European Weblog
Nominees for Best CIS blog
Nominees for Best Writing
Nominate Best Culture Weblog
Nominees for Best Personal Weblog
Nominate Best New Weblog
Nominees for Best European Weblog Overall
Nominate Best Political Weblog
Nominate Most Underappreciated Weblog
Nominees for Best Humor Blog
Nominees for Best German Blog
Nominees for Best French Weblog
Nominate Best UK Blog
Nominees for Best Expat Blog
Nominate Best Academic Weblog

…the final will be in mid-February.

…next week.

Blogrolling

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It says something about AFOE charter member and – to use a NASA title – principal investigator Edward Hugh that, when Nosemonkey recently did a roundup of new European blogs, the top one on the list had already been roped in to EdWorld, as a contributor to Demography Matters and Global Economy Matters.

You will be assimilated.