Some time before Conference, LibDemBlogs had it’s 3rd Birthday. I’m not sure exactly when it was as the archives only go as far back as 5th December 2004 and archive.org only has posts from the 4th October 2004, yet I remember having the site live before Bournemouth 2004 conference.
But looking back at those early pages it’s amazing to see that we only had 16 bloggers and were average around 6 posts a day between us. Since then only half remain active/live (Adam Nazir Ahmed Teladia, Gavin Whenman, Lynne Featherstone, Neil Fawcett, Richard Allan, Ryan Cullen, Sandra Gidley, Will Howells), whilst the others are now gone (Hazel Crabb-Wyke, Jody Dunn, Martyn Hencher, Rob Goodfellow, Sara Grey, Steve Guy, Tom Paul and Vivienne Raper).
Today we have 133 active bloggers, in the last 44 hours 92 posts have been made and the site is one of the most popular LibDem websites.

As I had a slight lack of Internet access whilst in Brighton, it took some time to add the Winner Buttons to the “and the winner is“ post on LibDemVoice. However as there are some 40 posts since then I think the winning (and highly commended) authors may have missed them. So here’s a plug. Feel free to use the buttons on your own site, and the same goes for all those who made the shortlist.

Whilst the press would like you to believe that the talk of the Conference bar is Ming, it’s actual who is going to replace Simon Hughes as our President in 2009!
Campaigning has started early as people arrived at Conference wearing I’m 4 Ros badges. In a panic the John Smithson campaign had to be launched much earlier than planned and Theo got John Smithson for President badges made up on the LibDem Image stand. And last night the Lembit campaign started handing out stickers as they felt left behind.

Just not sure where the Lembit camp got their slogan from

There used to be an ongoing joke that you knew it was Monday because the Daily Express had a Diana Exclusive on the front page. Then I started to notice that almost every day was Diana day, so I thought about writing a script to cache the front page and then comeback months later and check. So the fruits of my code is this: Daily Diana Express. It goes back to the start of March and has every front cover. A quick scan of all the thumbnails and I have counted that 34 / 178 covers featured Diana, another 20 had the royals (Harry / Will / Kate / Charles / Camilla / Ann), but more suprising and featured in this fortnights Private Eye was that 70 out of 118 (59%) papers since the 5th May have Madeleine McCann on the front page.
So maybe its time to stop calling the paper The Daily Diana Express and instead The Daily Maddy Express?

Hopefully a new line of code in the LibDemBlogs script should stop shouty headlines.
So this is a test.

I may have missed this, but I’m sure it’s new. On an article about the CIA and Wikipedia we have this at the bottom:

Does the BBC really need more readers?

This is mainly out there to those who code in php.
At the moment LibDemBlogs, strips out all formatting from blog posts, mainly to ensure that cut-off <b> tags don’t end up bolding everything, but also it puts each post on a equal platform.
However over time I’ve noticed an increase use in the <strike> tag. This tag strikes through text and is normally used to later correct a mistake, or imply someone might not be telling the truth. But as LDBlogs removes the formatting, it makes for an odd read.
So I’m trying to completly remove everything between the tags, Google and even myself believe that this should work
$post = preg_replace('/<strike>([^>]*)<\/strike>/i’, ”, $post);
However LDBlogs is still showing the deleted text. Any other ideas?

Fixed! The code was working, just happened that the bit of the Wordpress RSS feeds I was reading had already removed the tags and other stuff, reading the <content:encoded> gives me the original text.

I’ve recently upgraded the MyBlogLog stats for LibDemBlogs. This now means that you see today’s most popular stories and not yesterdays on the site, and that I can see which posts were most popular over a period of time, making it a bit easier for Stephen Tall to do the weekly round-up each Sunday on LibDemVoice.

Whilst on MyBlogLog I noticed the option to add your Twitter status, after Facebook this morning it looks like Web 2.0 is getting smaller.

Just reading the MyBlogLog Blog and have discovered that they’ve been swallowed up by Yahoo! Hopefully new servers and stuff should mean that they have less downtime and better spam filters. Then whilst wandering about the web I noticed the Gravatar is back up and running, although as much as the claims about servers being better I’m noticing the image display to be a bit slow. However if you don’t have a Gravatar account already get one. It really helps give you a sense of identity on the web when posting on LibDemBlogs or even comments on most blogs these days.

Everyone seems to be sending me money at the moment. Google very kindly deposited money into my bank ().
MessageSpace emailed me a few hours ago to tell me similar news, and checking up on YouGov I’ve finally reached the magical £50 mark (only took almost 3 years). However I believe that it may be a lot longer before that cheque appears through my door.