Category Archives: Web Design

LibDemBlogs Number Crunching (2007)

LibDemBlogs, ,

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:

  1. Liberal Democrat Voice (5,284)
  2. James Graham (1,523)
  3. Jonathan Calder (1,410)
  4. Jonathan Wallace (1,364)
  5. Paul Walter (1,136)
  6. Nich Starling (977)
  7. Linda Jack (749)
  8. Duncan Borrowman (741)
  9. Jonathan Fryer (644)
  10. Andy Mayer (573)

Most popular posts:

  1. Sajjad Karim defects to Tories (124) – LibDemVoice
  2. Team Clegg: in full scale meltdown? (110) – James Graham
  3. Is Sajjid Karim as big a scumbag as he is being made out to be? (108) – Nich Starling
  4. The verdict on Huhne and Clegg’s fuzzy polls (106) – James Graham
  5. Lib Dem leadership update (100) – Steve Webb
  6. Take it down, Chris (99) – James Graham
  7. Nick Clegg up close (98) – Paul Walter
  8. Shock candidate for Lib Dem leader (97) – Jonathan Calder
  9. A new banner for Team Huhne (97) – Nich Starling
  10. Huhne’s campaign turns negative (96) – Anders Hanson

The most popular days to blog:

  1. 18th December (136) – Clegg wins, Steve Webb not real
  2. 15th October (102) – Ming quits
  3. 18th November (102) – Calamity Clegg-gate
  4. 20th November (102) – Some disks go missing
  5. 26th November (101) – Saj Karim defects

Days which had high posts to blogs ratios:

  1. 18th December (0.8395) – Clegg wins
  2. 10th May (0.7500) – Blair finally goes
  3. 24th January (0.7170) – Campbell “Troops home by October”
  4. 15th October (0.7034) – Ming quits
  5. 21st March (0.6967) – Browns last budget

The quietest days:

  1. 25th December (20) – See, even bloggers have lives
  2. 26th December (20)
  3. 2nd June (23)
  4. 8th April (24)
  5. 25th August (24)

Browsers:

  1. Internet Explorer – 68.50%
  2. Firefox – 24.35%
  3. Safari – 3.85%
  4. Opera -2.20%
  5. 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

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!

Shared servers

Web Design, , ,

There is a problem having your website hosted on a shared server, which is that you really need to trust your webhost. So I was rather shocked today when installing phpMyAdmin that without configuring the config.inc.php file I was able to login to the mySQL database.
Not only that but I could see the names of every table on my server. Now this has happened before, but any attempts to view these tables resulted in errors, but this time I was able to view any table, read all the content and even edit a random persons blog post (don’t worry, I undid the changes).
Of any security issue this was a big one, I could have gained access to a large number of wordpress blogs, and if I looked I’m sure I could have found a forum with usernames, emails and md5 hashes of passwords.
However I’m not out for “hacking”, so I contacted my webhost and shortly after as password was added to the mysql root.

New Gmail Problems

Web Design, ,

Gmail LogoIt’s seems that Gmail has gone through some small changes, extra divs showing background ajax commands, my email address inside the <title> tags, whilst writing emails the Firefox status/loading bar flashes like a disco and some other stuff.
I know it’s changed as I’ve got an Older Version link, however on the What’s New page I can’t see anything and the same goes for the blog.
The problem, I’ve now had Firefox crash on my three times (over two machines) when I’ve clicked on the Spam link (not everytime), and for some reason it doesn’t want to remember that I don’t want this new version. I can’t see anything great about it, and whilst they don’t want to tell me whats new why would I.
Maybe it’s time to downgrade to a UK version?

Hide from all except admin

Plugins

I wanted to put a WP-Admin link on my blog, but one which only showed to me whilst I was logged in.
So hunting through the WordPress Codex I tried to find something like is_admin(), but couldn’t find it. Then going through all the PHP files I found this function current_user_can(capability) which returns true or false if the logged in user can do that capability. Next I had to work out a capability which only admin could do, but a quick look at the source code showed that it should be possible to enter an integer which related to a level.
So finally I have this on my blog:
<?php if(current_user_can(10)) { ?><a href="/wp-admin/">WP-Admin</a><?php } ?>

Tidy Slugs

Plugins

I’ve been playing about with WordPress plugins all day, and have created (more like stolen and modified a small amount) Tidy Slugs.
This plugin tries to catch a few of the random stuff that WordPress misses when I make the post slug.

For example if my post title was:
Ryan's Tidy Slugs, WordPress would make a URL of blog.artesea.co.uk/2007/11/ryans-tidy-slugs.html

however if it was:
Ryan’s Tidy Slugs (notice how the apostrophe is slightly more curvy) it would be blog.artesea.co.uk/2007/11/ryan%e2%80%99s-tidy-slugs.html

Very, very ugly!

(OK, you might not be able to spot the difference as WordPress loves to curve the apostrophes, however try creating a post title using the second one).

3 years old

LibDemBlogs

3rd Birthday Cake 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

LibDemBlogs, LibDems

No not me, I didn't win. It was James Graham 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.

Presidental Election

focusFodder, LibDems

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.
I'm 4 Ros John Smithson for President I Pik Opik
Just not sure where the Lembit camp got their slogan from 😉