Sorry for all you Blogger bloggers. I upgraded my webserver to PHP5 and didn’t notice that one of the scripts used in LibDemBlogs no longer worked. What this meant was that the site thought all your posts were made on the 1st Jan 1970 and so didn’t bother to display them.
I’ve now found the offending piece of code and hopefully everything should be back to normal by now.
I did wonder why it was so quite on the site, but I just assumed that everyone was in Crewe or Henley.
Category Archives: LibDemBlogs
What the € was that?
No, not Mark’s post from earlier, but the random Euro signs which have appear across LibDemBlogs today.
There seems to be a character set issue between my server and everyone’s RSS feeds, so when people used fancy curly quotes they just appeared as garbage.
The true problem will need to be fixed, however for the time being, I’ve just got a find and replace script instead.
LibDemBlogs Number Crunching (2007)
With LibDemBlogs now in it’s forth year, I thought I would display some stats.
We started the year displaying 108 bloggers, and today we have 168.
The most popular blogs were:
- Liberal Democrat Voice (5,284)
- James Graham (1,523)
- Jonathan Calder (1,410)
- Jonathan Wallace (1,364)
- Paul Walter (1,136)
- Nich Starling (977)
- Linda Jack (749)
- Duncan Borrowman (741)
- Jonathan Fryer (644)
- Andy Mayer (573)
Most popular posts:
- Sajjad Karim defects to Tories (124) – LibDemVoice
- Team Clegg: in full scale meltdown? (110) – James Graham
- Is Sajjid Karim as big a scumbag as he is being made out to be? (108) – Nich Starling
- The verdict on Huhne and Clegg’s fuzzy polls (106) – James Graham
- Lib Dem leadership update (100) – Steve Webb
- Take it down, Chris (99) – James Graham
- Nick Clegg up close (98) – Paul Walter
- Shock candidate for Lib Dem leader (97) – Jonathan Calder
- A new banner for Team Huhne (97) – Nich Starling
- Huhne’s campaign turns negative (96) – Anders Hanson
The most popular days to blog:
- 18th December (136) – Clegg wins, Steve Webb not real
- 15th October (102) – Ming quits
- 18th November (102) – Calamity Clegg-gate
- 20th November (102) – Some disks go missing
- 26th November (101) – Saj Karim defects
Days which had high posts to blogs ratios:
- 18th December (0.8395) – Clegg wins
- 10th May (0.7500) – Blair finally goes
- 24th January (0.7170) – Campbell “Troops home by October”
- 15th October (0.7034) – Ming quits
- 21st March (0.6967) – Browns last budget
The quietest days:
- 25th December (20) – See, even bloggers have lives
- 26th December (20)
- 2nd June (23)
- 8th April (24)
- 25th August (24)
Browsers:
- Internet Explorer – 68.50%
- Firefox – 24.35%
- Safari – 3.85%
- Opera -2.20%
- Mozilla – 0.66%
Page stats:
- Visits: 148,760
- Unique Visitors: 25,591
- Page Views: 310,321
- New visits: 16.78%
- Visits to the mobile version of the site: 4,267 (1.38%)
Whilst most of the search referalls were variations of Lib/Liberal/Dem/Democrats/Blogs some which caught my eye were
- brian paddick latest leaflet (229)
- conservative half-price bus and tram travel (145)
- christianophobia (28)
- miranda piercy wedding (27)
- don liberali who (24)
- harry potter and the deathly howells (6) – I always thought their was something dodgy about that Will!
Some caveats, only the most recent 10 posts per blogger are shown on LibDemBlogs, so some archive pages might not contain all the posts on that day. The most popular blog is counted by the number of click-throughs to the main URL of a blog, it is excluding all links direct to blog posts. The most popular posts only count those clicked directly on the title of the post on LibDemBlogs, excluded is any links followed via the RSS feed, or people who clicked on the authors name.
Happy 2008!
Limited internet access
Our old broadband seems to have been finally cut off, so it looks like I’m going to be without for nearly a month whilst we wait for TalkTalk to set us up. I can get my phone to act as a modem (and if I’m luckly I can steal Heather’s which has HSPDA), but please be patient if you have any LibDemBlogs/LibDemVoice technical requirements.
3 years old
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.
Blog of the Year Winner Buttons
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.
STOP SHOUTING
Hopefully a new line of code in the LibDemBlogs script should stop shouty headlines.
So this is a test.
PHP Question – Removing tags and content
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.
Live stats
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.
No, I’m not that mad
Those taking a quick glance at the list of the blogs on the right of LibDemBlogs might be suprised to see Iain Dale listed. However it’s not the blue one, but the yellow one