Euroshop photos
I just uploaded some photos from the Euroshop trade show. You can see the booth and the house I stayed in.
I just uploaded some photos from the Euroshop trade show. You can see the booth and the house I stayed in.
Six days with almost no internet connection gave me a backlag. I just waded through all e-mail and some RSS-feeds, and hope to process all that information today. As of today I will focus completely on the CeBIT show, show posting will probably stay on a low level for some more time.
The EuroShop was in my opinion a moderate success. We made some good propaganda, but I would have liked to have more contacts. As with any trade show, the real result is only known after some months, when we know how interested the visitors of our booth were in our products.
The EuroShop trade fair starts Saturday, so you can imagine what is on my mind at this moment. I just finished packing my suitcase, and will take the airplane tomorrow morning at 8:00. Ai, that means I have to leave home at 4!
As I wrote before, I will be in hall 6, stand G30, the stand of the company Wirth. Besides ICG Software, the hardware companies Star and AQSonic will be on the stand. It is the first time we are present on the EuroShop, so I have no idea what to expect. I imagine that most visitors are shop owners, but seen the size of the fair it could very well be that I will be able to catch some potential distributors as well.
Being on a trade show usually leaves not a lot of time for other things, and certainly not for surfing the internet. So I will leave the management of this site to the spammers for some days ;-)
Instead of publishing, I have spend some time thinking about my site. The trigger was the article Stinky links by Matt Haughey. At that moment I had just created my FeedBurner feed combining my posts with my Flickr photo's and my linkdump, and I knew that I had done something wrong. Readers following me because of my Movable Type writings are probably not interested in my holiday photo's, and people who want to know about my life abroad don't want to be bothered by my link dump. This site has a lack of focus, and I only made it worse.
The feed readers have the biggest problem, since they don't see the context of each entry. On the home page, my ‘normal’ entries take up the bulk of the space, the links are shown in the sidebar, and the latest photo is shown in the sidebar as well. People who read my feed, don't see the context; the three content types appear in exactly the same way. To solve this, I am going to offer three more feeds: one for my weblog, one for the links and one for the photos. They will be added to the current everything-in-one feed, to give my readers more choice.
Once the biggest problem has been solved, I want to restructure the links section. My main problem is the category structure, since I find it increasingly difficult to correctly place the items. I have to review the existing categories and their items, and will probably start using a tree structure with sub-categories.
Next, I want to split the weblog part in two parts: a web–tech site and a personal site.
First I will have to find out how to move certain categories from one weblog to another, but a little bit of SQL-fu should do, right? To link everything together I would like to change my homepage to a gateway to the different parts of the Brain tags empire. I guess this would also be the right moment for a new stylesheet, as I am getting fed up with light blue as well.
Once all that work has been done I want to start a new site, focused on a subject I work on every day, but which does not show up often on weblogs: point of sale software and hardware. I still have to work out my ideas on this subject, and I want to talk it over with some people, since it comes awfully close to a business weblog, but I think it would add something to the current blogosphere.
These are my ideas on the near future of Brain Tags. What is your opinion? Am I right, or should I go in another direction? I would like to hear and read your opinions.
[Update 2005.02.17]: The first step has been taken. I added a new feed for the photo's: http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainpics.
Mmm! Flogging Molly! Tobacco Island
It’s trade show time! The coming weeks I will present our products in two trade shows in Germany. Note to self: start practising German.
The first show is the EuroShop in Düsseldorf. Though this show is aimed at end-users, I will go to support our German distributor. We will share the stand with some hardware companies. At the moment I am working vary hard to make leaflets for fashion shops, shoe shops, perfume shops, supermarkets,… Besides that I am double checking the quality of our German software and arranging a thousand of small things.
I will be in hall 6, stand G30. If you’re in the neighbourhood, just drop by and I will show you our products in person.
The CeBIT is a show from which we expect a lot. There are many potential dealers walking around, who might know us from last year. As this is the second year we have a stand on the CeBIT, we are better prepared than last time. I can assure that the posters won’t fall from the wall every 15 minutes this year :-D
After my return from the EuroShop I will start working full time for the CeBIT. Our stand at the CeBIT is located in hall 1, stand 6i14.
While reading the great joke Google Maps find Weapons of Mass Destruction, I noticed something strange: all searches performed without specifying a state give results in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa. Not exactly the states where I expect many things to happen. I did some more tests, and each time the results were found in the centre of the country.
I guess Google simply found too many results to display, and instead of showing the most significant results for the terms, it used some geographical parameters to decide what results to display…
Google is generous today! I have 50 invites for a Gmail account to give away. Mail, IM, phone me or leave a comment if your interested.
It took a while, but I finally uploaded the photo's from our holidays in Thailand in August last year. I created a set, Thailand, to hold all of them, but since I have a limit of only three sets I probably will remove it in the future. You can always find these foto's by the tag thailand, or simply look at the pictures from August 2005.
I love the many ways of organizing photo's that Flickr offers!
[Update 2005.02.09]: I became a paid member of Flickr, so I don't have any set limits anymore.
Maintaining a site like this takes a lot of effort. After successfully having outsourced pinging external sites to the Ping-o-Matic, and using Flickr to host my photo's, I decided to start using the FeedBurner service for making sure that all aggregators get up-to-date information.
Just as with the pings and photo's, the reason is that FeedBurner offers additional advantages (statistics, feed optimization, Flickr integration, ...) that I am currently unable to supply myself.
I will redirect request for my old feeds to the new location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/braintags.
[Update 2005.02.02]: Besides moving my feeds to FeedBurner, I also combined all my feeds to a single feed.
This week a vulnerability has been discovered in Movable Type. Until today, I did not have the time to upgrade my MT installation, and I hoped that my site had not yet been attacked.
After upgrading I found an e-mail message from my hosting provider, stating that they had patched all MT installations on their servers!!!! Even though they don’t support any software installed by their clients, they already patched my system to prevent damage. Each month I am getting happier with TotalChoice Hosting.
Referrer spam on this site is increasing daily. Until now I use a two-step method to block them, even though I don’t publish my referrers. First of all, I maintain a list of used domain names. I check my referrers every day, and add newly found domains to the list. If a visitor uses one of these domains as referrer, the request is automatically blocked, and the IP address of the visitor is automagically put on a second list, making sure that future visits will be blocked as well. IP addresses stay on the list for one month, to make sure the size of the list does not get out of hand.
I noticed that the domains on my list are all mentioned in the MT-Blacklist. So those referrer spammers are also comment spammers. MT-Blacklist is updated automatically from the clearinghouse, so needs less maintenance. It would be nice to be able to combine the two methods right?
Today I found derefspam.pl, a script to use the MT-Blacklist to remove referrer spam from your server log files. At first thought I wanted to install it, but then I realized that all this script does is throw away information, so it won’t pollute your statistics. Since I want to be able to see what really happened on my server, I prefer not to throw away this information. After all, these requests have consumed some bandwidth… A thought was to implement a script for each request, but I am sure that this will slow down my site too much, since database requests take time… For the moment I stick with my two lists, and hope that spamming will decrease soon.
Copied from Zezunja: Joga from Björk.
It is amazing how many talented people there are. And many of them closer to you than you can imagine!
Yesterday we went to see EnFado in the city concert hall. EnFado is a quartet playing traditional portuguese fado music. The concert yesterday was given in co-operation with dancers of the citie's dance school, which gave the performance more to see. Between the songs they explained what fado is, and where it comes from.
The hall was completely filled, mainly with family and friends of the performers. Though I know them personally, I had never visited a concert before, and I have to admit that I liked it very much. Not that I am going to be a big fado fan from now on, but I was certainly enjoying the concert. Carol, the singer is such a personality on stage; she looks very comfortable standing on stage and doing her thing.
It wouldn't surprise me if we will visit a concert of EnFado again.
For people who don’t know where Lleida is: it lies about 160 km south-west of Barcelona, in the centre of the Segre valley, surrounded by hills. These hills make that Lleida usually is free of wind, which has great influence on the weather in Lleida.
In summer, the lack of wind makes it 5-10°C hotter than e.g. Barcelona, with weeks of 40°C. The inhabitants prefer to spend their free time in the nearby pyrenees or beaches, which have a more pleasant temperature. As a result, Lleida turns into an empty ghost town in summer.
In winter, the lack of wind together with the lower temperatures create a dense fog, which stays for many days. At this moment we haven’t seen a single ray of sun during almost two weeks. The frustrating of the fog is that is is very local. 20km outside of Lleida, in any direction, the sun is shining each day, and the temperature is 15-20° higher! Every day the news shows a clear wheather map, with one small white dot about 160 km south-west of Barcelona. :-(
We desperately want a little bit of wind, which will blow away the fog and show us that the sun still exists. If not, we will leave town in the weekend to get some sun and leave Lleida as a ghost town just like in summer.
To enjoy the Three Kings tomorrow: Sunburn from Muse.
Tomorrow will be the day that many Dutch blogs will show the special action page. The list of participating bloggers is getting bigger and bigger, and includes some prominent bloggers. You can read all about it on the action page.
Today I received the instructions, which consist of simply replacing the index.html page with the action page. This won’t work for Movable Type blogs, since MT will overwrite the index.html page when a comment is posted to an entry. Furthermore, I wanted the page to show up for all requests, since many visitors enter the site through Google, and won’t see the home page. And finally, I am a lazy person, so I want this to happen automagically.
Therefore I uploaded the file as actie.html and changed my .htaccess file to (temporary) redirect all requests for html pages to the action page. I used the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY} >20050105
RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY} <20050107
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} index.s?html$
RewriteRule ^(.*) /actie.html [L,R]
Furthermore I hace changed the action page a little bit. The page basically consisted of a table-based layout, with a single image showing the text. For once I won’t complain about table-based layout, since we are working for a good cause, and I value the work they have put into this project. But I did take the freedom to add an alternative text to the image, so that visitors that cannot see the image also know what is going on.
Some nice music: Iron Flower from K’s Choice.
My good ol' club Jong Nederland has a new site, based on the Mambo Open Source (MOS) CMS. The old site was based on home-brew PHP, and desperately needed a change.
It looks like they have the basic functionality up and running in MOS, but in my opinion they need to work a little bit more on the design. I am sure that they will fix it, since it already looks better than this morning. Of course the horrible “Designed for Internet Explorer” disclaimer has to go!!!
Further tips to make the site better:
.htaccess file;As a regular contributor to the old guestbook, I need to browse my old JN stuff to find my membership number, so I can access the new forum.
The year of the rooster has officially begun. I wish everybody all the best and a lot of love in this year. May all your wishes come through!!!
For obvious reasons: Tsunami from the Manic Street Preachers.
The year 2004 is almost over, which means that it is time for reviews. All important media have a review, so Brain Tags as wel!
Lets start with the most important day of this year: August 7. For us the greatest thing of that day was to see all our friends and all our family together. Even though they could not understand each other, it was great to see how they tried to help.
Another personal highlight of 2004 was of course our holidays in Thailand. I still have to upload the pictures, but promise that I will do it.
2004 has also been the year of new technology. It started with a a new computer after cursing on the old one for over two years. I chose a cheap but decent white label box, and expect that it will last seven years as well.
After that came a new cellphone since my ‘old’ one landed under a car. I am still very happy with my Siemens M55.
And to bring back some structure in my life, I searched eBay for a PalmOne Zire 31 PDA. It is used daily, and can’t image how I got things done without.
Also my professional life became more interesting, with our participation at the CeBIT, and trips to Cyprus, the Netherlands and Germany.
And finally, this site. Since it is my hobby, I spend a lot of time tweaking it. This year, I have upgraded the CMS to version 3, added a Link Dump section to store links to interesting sites and texts, changed hosting provider since my old provider is going out of business and added a Music Jukebox to offer MP3 files.
Quite a good year, don’t you think?
Once in a while I put a song in the Jukebox. Some songs are popular, others won’t be downloaded at all. That’s your choice. Today I put a file in the box of which I was sure that it would be popular. Why? Because the famous Boing Boing links to it.
And while I have enough bandwidth left for this month, I had no idea what to expect. 10 downloads? 100 downloads? 1000 downloads? More? In such a case, it is wise to monitor the traffic.
At this moment the file has been downloaded 170 times and has generated 835 Mb traffic on a little bit more than two hours:
If the downloads stay at this level, I can easily keep on sharing the file; but you never know what to expect when America gets active the next hours. I will keep on monitoring…
[Update 2004.12.30]: The biggest peak is over, everything is quite now. The file only consumed 1,5 Gb bandwidth:
This is our new entrance, with some chistmas decoration. The nativity scene is made from clay, with lead hands (clay fingers tend to break) and real textile clothes. The mark in the upper left corner contains dried mushrooms, hand-picked by my inlaws.
Found on Boing Boing: a Beatles Mash-up Medley.
Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!