You’ve probably noticed at this point that the website (again) looks different. Over the past few months I have been installing, customising, tinkering and fiddling with Wordpress to get it”just so”.

If you are a technically-minded user, you may also be wondering why I chose to go with Wordpress versus my own blog that I wrote a couple of years back. The answer to that is both “interoperability” and “functionality”. Since we are going overseas soon (I’m sure you’re all aware of that now), I wanted an easy way to update while away.

Wordpress has an email-to-blog function which means all I need to do is to send an email, wait a bit, and have it posted. I’m sure I could have coded it myself, but it would have taken a while and Wordpress already has it. There are a bunch of other great features I’ve introduced including Gravatars (which allows you to have a picture beside your comments), Flickr integration (whenever I post a photo from Flickr, the data is read as well as the comments on that photo — this is my attempt to integrate both my blog and photoblog) and a bunch of other stuff designed to make it easier to get in, read what you want and find more content that makes you want to stick around.

At this point, I will step back and give a quick history of bludger.org, since the old site will soon come offline and I won’t have pictures of it any more; indeed, I only have pictures of the most recent versions of the site.

• 2000 - bludger.org is registed primarily for me to have an email address I never have to change again.
• Early 2001 - The first blog is created, though I didn’t know it as a blog then. A gaudy bright orange and dark blue colour scheme are used (based on a Microsoft Access database running with ASP, hosted at www.brinkster.com).
• Late 2001 - The site switches to mike.bludger.org as I’d decided to create a “global” website and a personal one. As well as a blog, it also had book, movie and restaurant reviews (still on Microsoft Access and ASP).
• 2002 - 2003 - Not a lot of blogging goes on, but I was attempting to revamp mike.bludger.org. It never really materialised.
• Early 2004 - My first use of software I didn’t make. I used PHPNuke after setting up a Linux server at home. The server was a paltry P133 and couldn’t really handle running Apache, mySQL and PHPNuke together.
• Mid 2004 - After 4-6 months of using PHPNuke I decided to again build my own site. I used mySQL and PHP this time and created a simple site with a “blog of doom” and “links of peril”. A dark blue colour scheme with the first appearance of the couch.
• Late 2004 - I decided to recode the entire blog from scratch as blogs are becoming more popular and I decide to make my blog more “blog like”.
  
• 2005 - A few problems with the style sheet on the new site prompt me to change the look and feel again. These problems are mostly due to Internet Explorer’s poor handling of transparencies.
  
• 2006 - A small visual refresh of the look/feel to the site.
  
  
• 2007 - (Where we are now) I install Wordpress, create my own custom Flickr integration using PHPFlickr as well as creating my own custom Wordpress theme.
  

This is actually not the first time I have installed Wordpress. I installed it late in 2006 with the intention to moving across and using lots of AJAXifications, but became bored with the look and feel of the site I’d come up with.

Getting the data in posed a problem, as I had to take my data from my database and change it around to suit the database structure for Wordpress. Since I’ve done plenty of database stuff both at home and work, it wasn’t particularly taxing but was time-consuming. Speaking of time consuming, I went through every single post and painstakingly added tags to each one. Some are better tagged than others, but they’re all there.

Since I have been working mostly on this site, I decided to simply ignore my other site. I was updating both simultaneously for a while, but thought getting you to read a number of older posts might be a good way to get you to explore the site.

So there you have it! Explore, enjoy and let me know what you think.

This morning, I thought I’d download the new version of NASA’s World Wind and give it a try. I had never used it before and it intrigued me.

The speed at which it downloaded reminded me why I like cable more than generic current ADSL offerings* , it managed to get pretty close to the maximum speed available:

I like cable Internet. Here’s hoping Optus will introduce DOCSIS 2 soon, which offers up to 30Mb downstream, rather than the 10Mb we currently have.

* Excluding iiNet and Internode, who are now offering up to 8Mb, if you are damned close to an exchange.

A while back, I wrote how blogging can lose you your job (and mine, hi Glenn! ;). However, that’s not the worst that could happen — especially if you live in Iran.

Mojtaba Saminejad and Arash Sigarchi have been jailed, with Arash receiving a 14-year sentence, for “espionage” and “insulting the country’s leaders”… just from blogging. Outrageous.

Not going to post anything more today, so this can sit at the top until I get off my butt and post again.

The future of the web? Some old geezers over at University College London are trying to “future-ise” the World Wide Web using what they call Liquid Information.

Instead of static links, each word becomes a hyperlink on it’s own. For instance, if I typed Melbourne, and you hovered over it, there would be options to find out anything else about Melbourne; it might be tourist information, recent news, history, whatever else. I’m not quite sure exactly how it works, but it does sound interesting.

More information is available over at wired.com. For now though, you can view bludger.org using an early version of Liquid Information.

When I previously mentioned that BitTorrent accounted for fifty-three percent of Internet traffic, it made me realise how popular the scourge of P2P is. However, I believe the article meant that BitTorrent was 53% of P2P traffic, not all traffic, whoops. No, wait, the article says 35% of Internet traffic… OK so if BitTorrent is 53% of P2P traffic, and it’s 35% of Internet traffic, does that mean 70% of Internet traffic is P2P? I’m confused.

I would like to see the stats beginning December 19/20 though, since the operator of major site Suprnova has decided to shut down. Along with TorrentBits and Youceff disappearing, this will likely be a major blow to BitTorrent’s popularity.

According to slyck.com (who I had never heard of before today), the Suprnova folks are apparently developing a decentralised version of BitTorrent, which doesn’t require a central server hosting torrents (or tracker links). This means that sites that host the torrents will no longer be required, since every user would be hosting them as well. Interesting idea, and it’s not really any worse than the required sharing of data that the BitTorrent system already uses.

We shall now have a moment’s silence for the end of Suprnova, one of the most popular public torrent sites out there… … … OK, that’s enough silence.

This morning I received some… strange spam. It was strange because it wasn’t spam sent to me, but it was a returned email claiming to have been from my domain (the contact address I use for my domain).

So, someone out there (and this particular person is using Compuserve to send out spam) is masquerading as me. Very annoying.

And if anyone out there is visiting this site because they want to contact the administrator/whatever about the spam — it’s not coming from here.

Grrr.

I haven’t posted for an entire week now (I thought I would keep you all in suspense as to whether I’d fallen off the face of the Earth), but when I saw this, I felt compelled to post it:

According to British web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet.

Wow. A couple of years ago, no one even knew what BitTorrent was. Fast forward to now, and it’s accounting for a full third of the Internet’s traffic? Amazing.

Update: Oops, here’s the article at Wired I was reading.