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I used to have a habit of downloading the backup for my blog and store it somewhere safe. This is just in case something went wrong or in case I need to retrieve a previous setting I did to an older entry. The Blogdrive backup management tool is actually pretty cool but it's only available for upgraded accounts.
However, for nearly a few weeks now I've not been able to do any changes to the backup management. I keep getting this note:
We are currently performing systems maintenance that requires us to temporarily disable this feature.
Annoying, isn't it? Anybody else facing this problem? I've been getting this message for a few weeks now. The Blogdrive backup file comes as a *.bdd file and it's not accessible from other form of programmes such as notepad. It might need some other kind of plain text editor or a linux software or some CSV of some sort. No idea really. Tags: blogdrive, backup, management,
Some blogs are experiencing this problem at the moment as I type. Nothing major I think since I haven't come across any outage.
<p align=center>Upgrading servers. We'll be back up in a few of minutes.<br>We are currently storing submitted entries for later processing.</p>
The funny thing is, apparently Deanna's blog is displaying the above code "automatically" at the bottom of her Comment's page and Index page. I don't see it on other blogs though. It could be that she's on an upgraded account but I don't see that on other upgraded account. Any idea why? (could it be Deanna being mischievous and doing it on purpose?) HAH! *Update: I spotted it on my own blog... that thing exist...Tags: Blogdrive, Servers, Upgrade,
One of the thing I dislike most about Firefox is the inability to use the find function within textareas. This is very annoying when it comes to editing php/js codes or templates which have very lengthy and complicated structures.
The Find (Ctrl+F) is especially useful to skim through a large number of words to get to the specific terms easily. I use it all the time either surfing, reading, or coding.
So, a little search on google I found this:
http://www.geektronica.com/2005-11-10-firefox-find-doesnt-work-in-textareas
http://www.liewcf.com/blog/archives/2004/10/firefox-pr10-cannot-search-in-textarea/
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252371 (official bug report)
So (again) why isn't it implemented? Are they disabled on purposed for some sort of security reasons? Or is it just like what the other guy said that they just haven't fixed it?
It's really annoying when I can't get things done due to limitations. And it have a very serious performance hit. The only way I can get this done is to "View Source" and find through the source code. It doesn't work all the time especially when it comes to situations with escape HTML tags such as <(<) >(>) "(")
Does anybody know if there's a fix / greasemonkey-hack / firefox-extension
that I can download?
Tags: Firefox, Find, Textarea, Search, View Source,
For those of you who never get a chance to see what's within the upgraded account packages, heres one of the very cool feature: Site Statistics. To be honest, I totally forgotten I have this feature until a few days ago.
Requests Today: 15459
Requests over the last 30 days: 698405
Daily Hits:
(personally, I don't know what the blue dots stands for and why is it increasing.)
A pretty cool graph and list of types of useragents. As usual, MSIE is the most common at 80% while firefox stands for around 20%. Also, if you look close enough you'll see some search engine bots, Googlebot (4495) and Yahoo! Slurp (10215).
The rest of the site statistics package (Referer, Request) are pretty much similar to this one. Referer shows the 20 most popular referals, while Request shows the 20 most popular file/image/page. I can't show you here as they are kinda confidential.
The Recent package shows the last 10 request. It features IP address, Referals, File request and date/time.
That's all folks.
Tags: Blogdrive, Site Statistics, Stats counter,
I noticed that the insert hyperlink button in WYSIWYG Entry Editor is a little buggy. Nothing serious really but I think someone should look into it.
First thing first, I'm not exactly happy that every time I want to insert a link, I'll have to Open A New Popup Window before I can insert the links. This is, on the surface not a big issue because it's easy to understand and it allows us to select whether if we want to open it in a new window or otherwise. But it takes a long time to open a new window, especially in Microsoft Internet Explorer and it will add up to the time if I want to insert many links all the time. I certainly do hope that Blogdrive will just make it a normal javascript prompt function rather than a new popup window.
Secondly the bug, which is why this entry is written. To insert a link, you basically highlight some text and click on the hyperlink button. A popup window will come up and you can just fill in the details for your link. It works fine most of the time. Most of the time... It doesn't work if your selected text involves a ' Yes, an aprostrohpy. This is evidently a javascript error, Blogdrive ought to add a filter to escape this aprostrophy so that it'll work. Like I said, nothing major. Tags: Blogdrive, WYSIWYG, Editor, Hyperlink, Bug, Popup,
Recently there's been some improvement in technology that allows us to track out going clicks. Sitemeter offers that and it open a totally new perspective to what I can know about my visitors. Don't you think so?
I get to know what my visitors are looking for by looking at what search phrases they use to arrive on my blog. For example Windows Live Mail Beta.
But how do I know if they actually do read my blog? Or if they actually stay as long as they should? Or if the navigation on the side bar actually works?
Now I know.
Oh by the way, after using Urchin/Google Analytics for a few weeks, my comment to it is that it sucks.. Mainly due to speed and responce.
Tags: sitemeter, statcounter, outgoing clicks, stats,
It appears these days Blogdrive has began to improve a lot. Just today I noticed that we need to insert a human code verification to submit a comment. I'm not sure how soon was this implemented but I believe it could be installed in the recent "outage" that was causing a lot of noises in the forum. See, good things come after the bad. ;)
Notice the ... erm ... advertising at the top? haha Anyway, the Anti-Spam filter works just like the tagboard's. If you are logged in (to blogdrive) you probably won't see it. But if you are not logged in, you are very likely to see it. You only have to fill in once as a cookie by the name of "asc" will be stored in your browser. So, don't complain that it's too annoying. I'm pretty happy with this feature, although it's a bit troublesome (sometimes) it really cuts down on comment spams. *Updates* It appears this is being reported over at Blogdrive Update, good to see real blogdrive updates.Tags: Blogdrive, Comments, Spam, Anti-spam,
Gah, I hate that friends service. It just isn't my cup of tea to camwhore all day long. Besides, I hate to see other people more sexy than my sexy self. No room for competition.
The fundament power that drives these online social networks so successfully is non-other than social sex. Of course not directly, you can't expect them to "produce" a massaging hand out of the computer screen to give you any pleasure. It's more of a dating thing, they promise you sex and it's all up to you to bring it back home.
Friendster offers you an online profile, testimonials (from your friends), a kick-ass friends network, blog (typepad), personal messages, and other mini-and-cool-but-not-so-rare features such as css editing of your profile page.
I must say, the part I love most about friendster is the friend's network. It shows you who you connect with other people if they aren't immediately your friend. It's one of the best way to get a date make new friends.
Then there's the testimonial part to boost yer ego. You write something good about others, they'll write you back in return. The more testimonials you have prooves how likable you are and the more number of friends you have tells how popular you are.
Friendster makes it easy for you to stalk update on your friend's current affairs, much like how some personal blog works. It even allow you to stalk learn more about that hottie you met last week in the bar. (talk about privacy)
Brilliant, isn't it? Wait there's more. Friendster even allows you to blog. You hear that? Blogging, on Friendster. That's even more brilliant than sleeping naked. (right)
It does have some limitations which really isn't that much to complain about. To make custom templates is pretty tough there, it's all CSS. You have to find out all the classnames before you can come up with a CSS hack. But, I guess that's just about the only limitations.
Summary of what I like about Friendster:
1) Friends network
2) Testimonials
What can Blogdrive learn from Friendster?
Duh, the Friends Network. Blogdrive currently have profiles enabled for blog owners and there's also the tagging feature. Honestly I don't know what the tagging feature can really do other than a form of measurement who have seen your profile (or blog in some cases)
The new feature ideas would probably be something like this:
1) You are able to add Friends on your profile page,
2) You can see how other people connect to you,
3) You can leave a quick testimonial on the profiles page,
4) Personal Messages,
How would this benefit Blogdrive?
A wider userbase. Currently there are only around 300000 signed up accounts on Blogdrive including the abandoned/deleted account. That's a very small percentage in the world of online social/community. Wider userbase would also mean greater traffic and that would add to the bandwidth cost and server overload problems. But that would really depend on what they want really.
Note: Everything said here, just like everything else in this blog are my personal comments and observation and doesn't represent the views of our beloved Blogdrive.
Tags: Blogdrive, Friendster, Social Networking, Blogs, Friends Network,
The last couple of weeks I see an increased amount of contact forms asking for advices on useless and a-waste-of-time stuff. Well, it's rude to say that but when you get questions that can be answered if the question-er knows where to look for answers instead of asking.
Sad. Isn't it?
Don't get me wrong. I actually LOVE to receive contact forms, doesn't everybody? It's always such a merry thing to see a contact form. Besides, it's the best way to know what people are thinking about your site. And it also tells you of any bugs that's been floating around. 
One of the messages I received was regarding Azwani. She complains (everybody complains) that the Referer.org script she implemented on her site isn't working. She provided a very good follow up of what she did:
1) contacted Referer.org
2) got a reply from Referer.org
3) contacted Blogdrive.com
4) no reply from Blogdrive.com (not surprised)
Anyway, the responce she get from referer.org is pretty amazing. The team told her that her script, despite being inserted correctly, isn't being indexed by their spider bot. They (Referer.org) claim that Blogdrive.com has filtered the script out of the source code.
Damn, that's one very bold statement to make coming from Referer.org.
But anyway, I took a look at the site and found that it's somewhat true. Their mirror page did not actually showed a filtered version of her blog, rather it's showing a 404 page.
Now, there's only two explanation to this scenario:
1) Referer.org hasn't updated their database with the Azwani's blog, Or,
2) Blogdrive have set the 404 page to turn up when it's being queried by Referer.org
Could it be true? I have no idea but I do know that the BD admin did mention about some third party websites spidering their pages taking up bandwidth. Makes sense but why block them?
Or, I could be entirely wrong because I overlooked certain things. What do you think?
Reference: Referer.org,
Tags: referer.org, blogdrive, javascript, spider, internet, robots,
I find tag clouds fascinating. It's a really cool way of design and it tells a lot of information regarding your blog. A useful way to evaluate the contents of the blog, categorising it's post and an instant method of evaluating the blog.
But it's not possible here on blogdrive, yet. Maybe it'll be a good suggestion to Blogdrive's new category/tag system. (You guys listening?)
Well, cool it may be. I wonder if your visitors actually look at tag clouds? Will they be using the tag clouds to navigate the site? Will they just see it as another blind section and not bother about it anymore?
I wonder if there are sites out there that offers tag clouds for blogs. It'll need some spidering of a blog before they can come up with a tag cloud. Technorati have them but they are not very good. In fact, technorati is under bad heavy pressure from spam blogs that almost any non-spam blogs are considered spam.
Back to tag clouds, I'll attemp to make my own if I can't find an available service.
Anyone with suggestions?
*UPDATE: Just found ZoomClouds, try it out dudes.
Tags: tag clouds, design, navigation, spam, blogdrive,
There was a topic in the forum devoted to reporting the status of Blogdrive not too long ago (one month to be exact). But after a short while it disappeared. I wasn't sure why the admin removed it but I do know that people aren't happy that it was taken down.
I do know that people are happy when they can be informed of the status of Blogdrive when they find something not working well with their blog. At least some kinda note or message that give them a bit of relief of some sort.
The forum, used to be filled with angry voices whenever a technical problem arises have been the one of the destination that people go to for advices. The other is the main tagboard, of course.
Now, let us put our hands together and give around of applause to the official Blogdrive update:
Let's hope it gets updated regularly. (not too regular, we don't want bad news, do we?) Reference: Blogdrive Update Forum, Tags: Blogdrive, Update, Server, Status,
*Updates* Blogdrive fixed the Plain text editor.
Since Blogdrive's PTE isn't going to be fixed anytime soon, I've decided to write up my own fix for it since I can't use the greasemonkey fix that was created by Xr.
Here's the link and features surrounding it:
1) URL is similar to that of blogdrive
http://design.blogdrive.com/manage/blog_entries?big=123456&pid=
http://www.blogdrive.com/manage/blog_entries?bid=123456&pid=
2) includes Extended Entry and Keywords.
3) behind the scenes features: dates automatically changes to current time
4) behind the scenes features: BID/PID auto updates from the URL.
5) behind the scenes features: inserting images in old fashion.
6) Not able to call up your previous entries contents. It does not enable editing of previous entries however it allows you to REPLACE it.
7) I tried to include Amazon affiliate thing to this, but I realised there's a server indifference here that disallow variables to be passed through. So I have no choice but to disable it.
So, there you go.
In the previous year, we see lots of small startup or small companies being bought up by big media giants to be key players in their industrial roles. Sites such as blogspot being acquired by Google and hotmail acquired by Microsoft.
Not that I want BD to be sold to other parties, but it's an interesting speculation.
Here's an interesting read on what Hungry Media giants are looking for in small companies:
Also of interest are sites that allow people to play casual interactive games; store, send, manipulate and print photos; build and store blogs; and research and shop for big-ticket items like cars. Also eliciting interest are "next generation" Web sites, like those focused on allowing people to search the universe of blogs more effectively.
The media companies' interest has to do with the continuing shift in the ways Americans consume entertainment and shop. Just as the advent of cable television carved up a once-concentrated block of network TV viewers, so has the Internet — with its literally millions of Web sites — created highly fragmented niche audiences.
For big companies, the key is to build or buy Web sites that attract those niche audiences, but in substantial numbers. For a Web site to pique the interest of mass-market advertisers, it needs to have at least a million unique visitors a month; to be considered a major takeover candidate, it needs to have five million unique visitors, said Sharon Wienbar, a managing director with BA Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm that invests in Internet content companies.
Note: Photobucket was mentioned in the article. Seems like Photobucket's most valueable asset it's their user base.
Tags: blogdrive, photobucket, internet, media, companies,
A few months ago, or rather one year ago we were seeing the quick boom of online social networking websites. First there was friendster, or some other companies like myspace, zorpia, hi5, ringo, facebook, bebo and many many others, I'm not even sure which one appear first but they all just sprung out of no where trying make their mark in the boom.
As far as I know, Friendster and Myspace are among the most popular social networking websites available. It is estimated that friendster may have over one billion users account, while Myspace claims they serve up to 10% of the entire internet's advertising. That's one very brave and bold statement to make.
In the past (in the web 1.0 period), there were different types of online community websites. They are mainly separated into several types: Blogs platforms, Social Networking, photo sharing/hostings, Music Sites, Forums. As each of these website develops, they started to attempt to synchronise each of these different types of websites into themselves. In the hope of gathering more users.
One of the very first social networking that did this was Zorpia, where many of it's ideas came from developing a photo sharing community, and Xanga (a journal type website) and social networking (friendster based). Not long after the idea became realise as a brilliant way of providing more features to their users and extending their userbase, Friendster acquired typepad (blog software) as their default bloggint tool. Myspace choose to develop their own blogging feature as well.
These are the big giants in the pioneering business of the new way of life.
The bigger giants started to jump in the bandwagon, Google acquired BlogSpot, Yahoo did 360 and MSN did MSN Spaces.
So what we'll be expecting to see in the very near future is a portal based on a combination of these:
Blogs + Social Networking + Photo/Music/Video sharing + Instant Messenger + Forums.
Of course, the giants that have the bigger advantage over other companies in the long run due to their wide IM userbase, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. BLOGDRIVEIn the way the direction of internet business is going, it makes sense that BD will probably be introducing more features to satisfy their users needs. Such as music hosting, video, networking, personal profiles and many more. It has been revealed, somewhat that videos are coming out? And that they are researching on Myspace, going into networking kinda thing. We'll be expecting to see new features on Blogdrive. How soon I don't know but I'm excited to see the new features. Hopefully we'll get to see some Personal Messaging thingy too. Read about Hungry Media Companies find a Media Menu for websites to buy. Next entry: How Friendster succeed in their business model and why? Tags: blogdrive
In my previous entry I revealed that there are rumours that BlogDrive are going to integrate photobucket into it's entry. The rumour has come true.
 Well now you can add your Photobucket images to your entries without ever leaving Blogdrive, from inside your entry editor.
So go make an entry!(Just click on the image icon in your entry editor) This is a very good move to make blogging a better experience, and I think it should have been done a long time ago. I've just tried the feature, and I'm not really sure it's been well developed. The popup window is set to no scrolling, this means that when you log into Photobucket, you can't see anything other then the advertising present at the top of photobucket's website. I have no idea why this happens, it's almost as if it's been casually programmed over lunch. Anybody have any suggestions how to work around this? Tags: Photobucket, Blogdrive, partnership, bugs,
This is the uniformly distributed diagram of number of visitors around the world that comes to this blog. This time round ( see the old one), it's more evenly distributed around the USA, while the rest of the world is still a mystery. For example, why isn't there many canadians, china, south africa, austrialia, south america or even russia that visits here? It appears my topics only cover the English speaking regions (and some middle east). Interesting graphs. Geo Map Overlay. References: Blogdrivers' locations, Tags: Analytics,
This dude sure sounds really angry:
Any problem? BD should've inform the users.
BD, if u cant figure out the problem, the least you can do is put up somekind of announcement about these problems/failures.
Rick is even more angry "I'm sick of this!"
How many hours of frustration do we customers need to endure from Blogdrive? It's been 20 hours since I've been able to update my blog. Why does maintenance have to take longer here than at any other site host on the internet? This is adversely affecting my site and is bound to affect any potential business in the future. How can I be expected to have a news site if I can't offer news? The blog I'm paying $100 per year is always down, but the ad-supported ones seem to work. Can I transfer to a server that works? Why I keep thinking things will improve is really my own fault for having faith in Blogdrive. If anyone knows of other, more reliable hosts, please let me know. Helpee, do you care? Are things going to improve? Or are we content with these sporadic service levels. I'm not and I hope you're not, either.
Remember that there WAS a BD status thread in the forum? it already dissappeared. I have no idea why the authorities decided to take it down despite having receive support from various users...
Sigh... The worst part of all is that the reason behind all this problem remains a mystery. It's is unknown if it's actually a server failure, overload or whatever other reasons.
Tags: BlogDrive,
*Updates: Helpee explained in the forum:
As with any technology based company, unexpected situations arise from time to time. We work diligently to resolve these situations.
Yesterday we experienced an unexpected situation. In order to resolve that situation with no data loss and keep blogs present, we temporarily put areas of the site in a Read-only mode. We have since resolved the situation. We've updated any entries that were made during that time. This event affected both subscribers and free sites equally. Knowing it was simply a matter of hours before the site would regain full functionality and that only certain areas were affected we felt it unnecessary to notify all.
We will try our best to stay on top of such issues. I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.
Word clouds are pretty cool, in a geeky way. Check out mine for this blog  
Try them out yourself at Snapshirts.com and let me know what it looks like.
Technorati has proven it's worth by pushing the hottest news of the hour to the top of the charts. This exact system have also been the sole publicity for the recent singaporean Nan Yang Polytechnic sex scandal. What actually happened was a girl aged 17 years old filmed herself doing certain sexual actions with her boyfriend using their 3G mobile phone. Her phone was stolen and someone uploaded the video on to the internet. The rest is history, right? No, I mean yes. It became more bizarre than paris hilton's phone sex scandal. The singaporean blogging community is one scary barbarian tribe. First, it's paedophile. Child pornography. Then, it's asian sex. Also, there are people out there circulating the video through email or direct downloads. Yes, these people are to be damned for distributing child pornography (not to mention Tammy's own fault for having sex AND recording it).
Technorati Promotes Sex Scandal
What's amazing here is how technorati serve as a promoter of this news to the world. The girl's life is ruined by the singapore blogosphere. With technorati, the entire world get to shares this video. Tammy scores top five in the top searches on Technorati a few days ago. 
Technorati Filters
Today, technorati decided to filter the searches (finally) but at the cost of being reliable. From their blog news, it is well known that technorati's filter automatically filters out all pornography or sex related keywords. Now there's a new set of keywords added into the roll, Tammy, Tammy NYP, NYP (which is supposed to be one of the most reputable college in Singapore, Tammi (because humans aren't stupid), and some other which I don't know.
Sex Scandal Business and Traffic
Well, as usual things are blown out of porpotion. Valuable resources wasted. There are now ebay auctions on the videos, cafeexpress is selling tshirts of "I fucked Tammy at NYP" and forums created to entertain the hunger of *cough* human desire for free sex videos *cough* There was a saying, that all major news in blog world are ugly. Either a blog war, or natural disaster, real war, or sex scandals. Believe it or not? Tags: technorati, sex scandal, paedophile,
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