Joseph Scott's Blog

It’s Time For A New Blog

Joseph Scott — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:13:32 +0000

I’ve been using this domain (joseph.randomnetworks.com) for some time and now I’m ready for a change. I’m moving to a new domain, josephscott.org. All of the content here is staying and I’m starting fresh with a new WordPress blog.

Consider this blog retired. My new home is at http://josephscott.org/.

PollDaddy & Automattic

Joseph Scott — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:11:43 +0000

We’ve (Automattic) made another acquisition that I can talk about now: PollDaddy Goes Automattic. As part of the announcement today for buying PollDaddy there’s a new PollDaddy plugin for WordPress and integration for WordPress.com blogs. Check out the video on that post to see how that works.

For more info check out the announcement on the PollDaddy blog and Toni’s blog.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Lenny and Eoin while hanging out with the rest of the Automattic crew (which includes the Intense Debate guys) in Colorado. It’s been good to get to meet more of the Automattic group as it continues to grow. Most of Automattic (all the ones in Colorado) are pictured at the bottom of this post.

WordCamp Utah Recap

Joseph Scott — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:39:57 +0000

WordCamp Utah was on Saturday and nothing exploded, so were calling it a success! Another round of applause for our sponsors that helped make it possible:

And a big thank you for everyone that came to the event. Our estimated attendance was 135 people. This number might be a little bit low, it’s our best estimate at this point.

With the big day having come and gone, I’ve been thinking about what thinks went well and what I might have done differently. The scheduled probably should have just included 10 (15?) minute breaks between each session. Balancing between developer desires and user desires was still a big issue, going with multiple tracks would have helped that I think.

On the plus side doing things through EventBrite and Paypal was good. Lunch worked out well (I really wanted to make sure no one felt like they didn’t get enough food), especially having it served by the folks doing the catering (The Smokehouse). Having key specific things handled by volunteers, like registration (thanks Clint, Sheri & Shauna!) was a huge help.

What about you? If you were at WordCamp Utah what did you think went well and what could be improved upon?

Qwest Redirecting DNS lookups

Joseph Scott — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:49:46 +0000

Qwest has started redirecting DNS queries to their own servers. Not because I asked them to, they did it to start pushing their own search results page when DNS queries failed (like so many others have and some still do). This new “service” is called Web.Help. In order to do this they reset my DSL line this morning (which was irritating), but they did at least provide some links on what this.

After reading through some of their information on their new “service” I found a link indicating that I could opt out (not that I ever opted in). I’m not sure what they were thinking here though, instead of the “opt out” taking me to a page where I could opt out, it took me to another documentation page on their new service. I had to dig through three or four layers of “opt out” links before I got to a page that would actually turn this off. Which of course reset my DSL connection again about 5 minutes later. We’ll see where this ends up.

The search results they were showing for failed DNS queries were from Yahoo. I wonder if Yahoo is paying Qwest to do this.

Things You Learn The Hard Way

Joseph Scott — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:53:51 +0000

Don’t try to run both VirtualBox and Parallels virtual machines on your Mac at the same time. Seems to be a good way to give Mac OS X a heart attack.

WordCamp Utah Sponsor: Twelve Horses

Joseph Scott — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:03:48 +0000

One more sponsor for WordCamp Utah: Twelve Horses. A big thank you to Steve and company.

WordPress 2.7 Admin UI Survey

Joseph Scott — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:53:14 +0000

Want to give input feedback on the new admin UI being worked on for WordPress 2.7? There’s a survey being conducted on that very topic.

WordCamp Utah Reminder

Joseph Scott — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:47:32 +0000

Reminder that WordCamp Utah is less than 2 weeks away. If you are planning on going and haven’t signed up yet now is the time to do it. This will make it a lot easier to get an accurate head count for lunch and t-shirts.

How I Know That Alexa Traffic Stats Are Worthless

Joseph Scott — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:58:51 +0000

Just for kicks I was checking out the Alexa traffic stats for joseph.randomnetworks.com. They let you compare your stats against other sites, so I started looking at how my stats compared to a few others. Most of them easily eclipsed my numbers. Then I compared it to ma.tt:

I’d always had a healthy level of skepticism about how accurate Alexa was. Once I saw this graph any hope of usefulness that Alexa may have had was completely gone. I know for a certainty that not only does ma.tt get more traffic that this site does, it gets a ton more traffic that I do.

The level of disinformation that Alexa is providing has gone from being just useless to actively harmful. So remember, friends don’t let friends rely on Alexa traffic statistics. For anything.

WordPress.com – 4 million blogs

Joseph Scott — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:08:49 +0000

To answer my own question, it took just over 4 months to go from 3 million blogs to 4 million. The sign up rate continues to increase, if that trend continues WordPress.com will hit 5 million in less than 4 months (end of December?).

The next big line to cross? Breaking 40 million page views a day.