crazed monkey » site

My blog now has tweets

Ian Stevens — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:21:19 +0000

If you’re following this blog (and if you are, you’re one of the few) you’re probably wondering what’s happened here. I recently changed my blog so that it imports my tweets. I’m not happy with how it looks but it was a quick and painless addition to a stagnating blog. We’ll see how long this lasts.

A lesson in properly closing . The culprit? IE, of course, which doesn’t support the former.

This blog has moved

Ian Stevens — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:05:17 +0000

Iâ€™ve moved my blog to another hosting service and have migrated all my posts to WordPress. Hopefully there are no problems, but if you notice any errors or missing pages please let me know.

Update: Apparently the hosting service I am using has problems with category URLs. I have since implemented a work-around.

… and we’re back

Ian Stevens — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 00:06:51 +0000

My site has been down for the past few months, first because of a failed power supply and then because of a damaged irrecoverable hard drive. The last backup I made was over a year ago, hence the ancient entries you see below. Everything since September 1st, 2003 is now gone, including all my email for that period.

I still have to tweak a few things before I can get this weblog looking and behaving as it did before the crash. Syndicated sites are still down as well.

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Ian Stevens — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 04:15:00 +0000

This is just a short note to let you know that I am still alive. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to craft a decent weblog entry and have let things fall to the wayside.

Here are a few items that I haven’t written about:

Paul Martin. (I had an idea for a story a couple of weeks ago, but I’m sure everything which can be said has been said since then.)
Jean ChrÃ©tien. (See above.)
The Ontario Liberals. (They’re off to a bad start, to the surprise of no one.)
David Miller. (Including a wish list of minor items I’d like to see him push during his term as mayor.)
This site. (Major redesign in the works.)
Java. (I hates it.)

These and other stories will appear in this weblog as soon as I am able to sit in front of a computer without having to resist the urge to kill.

Year one

Ian Stevens — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 18:45:00 +0000

One year ago yesterday crazedmonkey.com went live. Since then this site has seen just under 150,000 hits, 35,000 visits and over 15,000 unique visitors. (This site existed before November 12, 2002, but not at its current address. My weblog also existed before then, but as a Radio Userland account.)

I don’t write nearly as many entries as I did a year ago, but I’d like to think that I have successfully replaced quantity with quality.

Upgraded to Blosxom 2.0

Ian Stevens — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 03:58:04 +0000

I have now upgraded this weblog to Blosxom 2.0 RC5. I found myself hacking up the Perl code in an older version to do precisely what some Blosxom 2 plugins have been able to do for some time. I have yet to use any plugins which would be obvious to readers of this weblog, however.

One change I did make was add a new template flavour so that individual weblog entries are rendered alone in their own page with the title of the post appearing in the title of the web page. The resulting URLs make much more sense than the original date-based ones. After all, when viewing the URL few will care when the post was made, but most will probably care what the post is about. A few Apache RewriteRule trickeries later, and nobody is the wiser. It will be interesting to see how having the title of a post in the title element of the HTML changes my Google ranking for certain searchin terms.

Speaking of using HTML properly, I wish I could lucidly explain how to make advantageous use of valid HTML without degenerating into a frothy, rabid mass spewing forth rants on semantic markup, the separation of content and style, and the importance of using proper names, titles and sensible URLs. Restructuring our company website so that it conforms to an HTML standard and makes use of semantic HTML should make it more accessible to search engines and so increase its search ranking. I routinely see this weblog rank higher than definitive web pages for certain search terms, so I must be doing something right. The trouble is, our web guy is of the DreamWeaver school, so I wouldn’t even know where to start. Perhaps when I have some spare time I will take a look at a couple of our existing HTML pages and see how they could be improved.

Strange Google hits

Ian Stevens — Wed, 07 May 2003 02:24:11 +0000

As far as Google searches go, I thought this weblog had seen it all: from searches for various pornography involving monkeys, to … well, more searches for obscure pornography. This latest one, however, tops them all, not necessarily for the content of the search phrase but more for the frequency of hits and the fact that this weblog is number one for that search result. The search phrase in question? Sex crazed Iraqi bitches.

That search phrase has appeared not once, not twice, not even three times, but eight times in the past two days, and not from one area, either. Those Iraqi women are a world-wide phenomenon with originating countries including the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, Finland, Italy, and Syria.

Why Syrians are searching for their neighbours is beyond me, but where nubile Iraqi nymphomaniacs can be found, Saddam Hussein can’t be far behind.

Crazed monkey is now public!

Ian Stevens — Tue, 15 Apr 2003 03:55:00 +0000

I have been following my progress on BlogShares with some interest. However, my interest had been somewhat muted given that my market value peaked at $50 and has been rapidly falling towards zero. Inexplicably, my weblog reached its IPO point today, and so the interest mounts. I had thought that a weblog’s valuation was the sum total of the value of its incoming links. Barring a fluke link on a large weblog, it seemed as though my weblog was destined to remain in the doldrums. However, crazedmonkey.com is now public and I rate it a Strong Buy.

Update: If I had bothered to read BlogShares’ news for the 11th of April, I would have found out that claimed weblogs are valued at $1000 in addition to the total value of their incoming links. So if you would like your weblog to go public, claim it!

My posts have been infrequent as of late. Everyone seems to be “warblogging” and I’ve given up adding to the noise. I have been somewhat distressed at the “fiercely independent thought” on some of the more “conservative” weblogs I have been forcing myself to read. I am tempted to write a few words, but that would just be feeding the trolls. We’ll see.

Titles for everything!

Ian Stevens — Wed, 12 Feb 2003 02:18:00 +0000

Dive Into Mark: In brief: All hail the Benevolent Goat Masters!

I put in my two cents about supporting the title attribute to allow authors to specify tooltips for everything (but especially images, links, and form elements). This is such a fundamental usability feature, I didn’t realize how much it mattered to me until I tried Safari and didn’t get them.

I didn’t realise that all HTML elements could contain a title attribute. From now on, titles for everything! I try to provide titles for all my image and link elements, where appropriate, but now I will try providing titles in even more places, such as code blocks, and possibly weblog entries and quotes. I’m drunk with the possibilities!