antti.vilpponen.net

I did some tuning of my website to get it into a 3 column layout. I also re-installed my Wordpress through Dreamhost’s oneclick install, which will help me save a lot of time in the future when upgrading into new versions. I can say that all this went a lot smoother then 3 to 5 years ago when you had to really get your hands dirty with the code.

Ok, I’m trying this again. I now have my domain registration at GoDaddy and will transfer the hosting to Dreamhost. I’ll post an update here once it’s working and has propagated across the internet.

Update: The hosting now works, but I still can’t figure out why Dreamhost won’t let me map subdomains through my .htaccess, or at least they are not working at all.

Update 2: Ok, I’ve managed to get the site more or less working now. I had to create DNS entries for this subdomain and that took the entire weekend to get working (and I actually did it wrong the first time so I had to do it again). I’m still having some issues with the stylesheet, but let me know if there are any other problems with the new site.

Ok, now I finally got a go-ahead with the domain transfer so I will try and transfer my domain to the new hosting company. Please refrain from commenting until you see an update in this post saying everything’s ok :) Thanks.

Update: Ok, I really suck at this or then it might be the fact that I haven’t done this before. I’m changing my domain registration to GoDaddy and once it’s there I will change the nameservers to point at my Dreamhost account. This might happen some time next week as I just received a notification from my current web hoster (damn they are slow).

I’m doing a domain transfer to another hosting company so the website might be down for a while. Please refrain from commenting - I’ll let you know when everything’s running a-ok.

Update: Apparently my current hosting company Int2000 isn’t the fastest to let go of my domain… so I’m still in the limbo.

Click to enlarge

This is a screencapture from Google Analytics on my website visitors.

The distractions on my site has broken the sidebar. The problem lies with the RSS-feeds of del.icio.us, which aren’t working at the moment. Hopefully they’ll get their act together soon and I don’t have to start fixing my site layout at all. But is this something to do with Yahoo acquiring del.icio.us? Transfer to their new servers… hmmm, doesn’t look too good from the users’ point of view.

I’ve added a little bit of code in my website that will most probably annoy the hell out of IE users. It shows a banner at the top that will try to get people to switch over to Firefox. This is all part of another campaign called Explorer Destroyer.

Let’s see how this works - comment on this entry if you see any problems :)

Oh, and for the rest of the users - you won’t notice a thing! :)

Update: Here’s how you can participate in the campaign:

1. Click on the image and set-up a Google AdSense account.
   
   
2. Download this script from the Explorer Destroyer website and put it to your site. You can make a few bucks in the process when you alter the Google code for your AdSense. See the installation instructions here.

Update 2: Being the marketing guy that I am, I put back some Google ads to my site :) Just can’t resist them! Do say if they are interfering with the “visual experience” :)

Update 3: I’ve taken down the banner, because Adsense doesn’t apparently support the feature outside US (it was worth the try though :-) ).

Ok, I’ve done some updating here and at the moment I can say I’m pretty happy the way things are working. Here is a short list of what’s running here now:

• Distractions
  The small dynamic snippet at the top left corner is an RSS parsed feed from my del.icio.us site. I post stuff that interests me and might interest others as well. These are usually things that don’t cross the threshold of blogging about them, but still should be noted somewhere. The feed is being generated by Magpie RSS. I’m thinking of doing some info on how to set that up as well - wasn’t too hard, but it’s always nice to have some info on it.
• Photos
  The photos page is totally automated now. It is running FAlbum and all the photos are being pulled from my Flickr page. Sweet, eh? You too can get FAlbum from here. It’s quite easy to install, but I had some trouble with the .htaccess which I managed to fix in the end.
• Blog Archives
  The blog archives haven’t changed that much. I put the monthly archives into a dropdown menu to save some space, I think this works better as I have entries dating as back as 2002 August. People usually use the search function anyhow to find something they think they saw here before.
• flickr moblog
  I put four of the latest flickr moblog photos on the front page. I think they fall inline with the design pretty well so they shouldn’t stand out too much. This has been acomplished with the FlickrRSS and a bit of tweaking of the styles.

Comments are always welcome! ;-)

I was just going through some CSSReboot sites and decided my horrible oh-so web 1.0 homepage needs a redesign. I want this to be more web 2.0! Nah, just kidding, but I think I could do with another redesign. I can’t even remember when was the last time I did something to the design… so put up with me. Let’s do a little experiment; you’re going to be witnessing the rebuild live - meaning all the horrible errors and such that my redesign will create. Hopefully the result is going to be something nice.

I have no idea how long this is going to take, but we’ll see.

Update: It’s now 1.10am and I think I’ll call it a day for tonight. I got pretty far and I think I’ve only got some minor tweaking to the normal templates and of course I need to change my photo settings along with the about page. Oh well, tomorrow then!

I’ve added some Google Adsense ads on my website. I’ve tried to blend them in as much as possible. I’ve added them because I want to see how they perform on my website. I know I won’t make a living out of this, but you’ve got to experiment everything to know how these work :)

I’ve had some experience with the AdSense ads on my other website, but they are in Finnish so they ought to perform a bit better. I mainly write about things relating to Finland and Internet here, so I want to see how the English ads perform on a page like this.