Holy Shmoly! » inphotos

Voting in the blog awards is easy

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:34:53 +0000

How to vote in the Irish Blog Awards in three easy steps:

Visit the voting page at http://www.awards.ie/vote/
Enter your name and email address.
Scroll down to “Best Photo Blog” and select “In Photos” from the drop down list.
In “Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere” select “Donncha O’Caoimh”
In “Best Technology Blog/Blogger” select “Donncha O’Caoimh” again.

There, no confusion. No wondering who all those people and blogs are. Hope that helped and thanks for voting!

PS. Thank you to Damien Mulley, the brains behind the awards, and to the sponsors of the above categories: Pixenate, First Partners, and Bitbuzz!

PPS. Damien will enter everyone who votes into a draw for a copy of “Vista Home Premium”. That of course might not be to everyone’s tastes, but you can always give it away to your worst enemy if you win..

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Spurned by Google, ignored by all

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:14:47 +0000

Something strange happened on Monday to my photoblog, In Photos.org. It disappeared off Google’s radar and traffic has dropped like a stone since.

Here’s what traffic and search engine visitors looked like last week.

Here’s where things took a nose dive.

And finally, here’s what traffic and search engine referrals looked like yesterday.

I don’t know if it’s connected but on Monday I noticed that my Google sitemap contained an error. This url wasn’t encoded properly and threw the error. It was easily fixed but traffic hasn’t increased yet.

If you use the Google sitemap wp plugin and Ultimate Tag Warrior you may also be using a plugin that adds your site’s tags onto the sitemap. I installed it last weekend here and on my photoblog and didn’t notice this known issue, “Your tag name must not contain an ampersand ‘&’ – if it does, please rename tag without an ampersand – Reported by Jilly”. It’s easily fixed with a urlencode() but I disabled the plugin until traffic gets back to normal.

Would a broken sitemap cause traffic to drop so alarmingly or is it something else?

PS. See you at BarCamp South East? I have a few notes ready. Should be an interesting talk!

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Ray & Jenny, Pat, and Pamela – thanks!

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 10:46:33 +0000

Yesterday’s announcement, the fiasco on the Late Late Show on Friday night and now Pamela Anderson’s divorce drove a lot of traffic yesterday. (People started looking for her video again!) As you can see from the Google Analytics graph, soon after 8am in the morning the flood started after Ian Dempsey mentioned the birth.

I took the opportunity to move In Photos to a new Xen server on Xen Planet for a short test period. If you see posts there without the comments form you’re looking at the old site and your DNS hasn’t updated yet. It should be complete in a few hours. The new site is a 64MB xen server and it’s holding up well. I’m toying with the idea of using Lighttpd, especially as a lot of thumbnails will be served from that host but I won’t have time to work on that until the weekend. Every night this week is already booked up with one thing or another.

In other news, moving a WordPress site to a new host is fairly painless!

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