blog.LucasQualls.com

Today, I installed Google Analytics into all pages that this wordpress loads. In a few days, I should have more accurate information as to just how many people read (or don’t read) this blog. I’m not sure whether to be excited that I get an accurate count, or to be worried that I don’t actually get any traffic at all.

I honestly doubt I get much traffic these days. I haven’t posted anything with actual content in months. The only thing that has been posting on here are the twitter digest posts. I’ve changed that to where it only posts weekly, so I hope that works out. Last time I changed that setting, I had an issue where twitter tools made about 250 posts for one weekly twitter digest. I’m hoping I don’t have to go manually delete 250 posts like I did last time.

Such is life when you’re always trying new things. I own a hosting account from 1&1 that gives me more webspace than I think I will ever need. I have this, and pay for it, because I just like to mess around with all the new things I hear about. I listen to (and/or watch, depending on the format) several technology podcasts, including most of the TWiT.tv shows (This Week in Tech, Windows Weekly, MacBreak Weekly, Security Now, Daily Giz Wiz, Net at Night), several from cNET (Buzz Out Loud, The Real Deal, Gadgettes, PrizeFight), and a few from other networks (Tekzilla from Rev3 for example). As such, I hear about a lot of new technology. That is how I heard about Google Analytics in the first place.

I own several domain names, a few of which I’ve accumulated over time and haven’t actually done anything with. I’ve installed countless things that involve PHP and MySQL, including PHPBB2 several times and most recently, PHPBB3 (which can be seen at my current general purpose forums site, Late Night Computing). I’ve installed a version of WikiMedia software (currently visable at http://lukenova.com), Joomla, Druple, and of course, this WordPress blog. I’m always trying new things. For example, I found a personal twitter analytics software that is in Pre-Alpha code from listening to net at night a few days ago. I did download this code and play with it a bit, however I never got it working. I think I found that the problem was that it is written for php5 and 1&1′s hosting that I have uses php4. I’m always looking for new things to play with.

As I mentioned earlier, I do have a personal general purpose forums site at http://forums.latenightcomputing.com. The original purpose of the latenightcomputing.com domain name was for a podcast I did with me and an old friend of mine. The 14 episodes we did are still available at http://latenightcomputing.com (Please note, these episodes are NSFW! Don’t listen if you get offended easily or if you don’t do well with cursing.) The last episode of the podcast was recorded over a year ago as of this typing, but I would like to start it up again. I had a lot of fun recording and getting to play around with audio hardware and software. I recently had to restart the forums site because the database of the old site became corrupted. I know, I know. I should have been making regular backups of the database so I could have recovered. But since all these things are just my personal projects and are not business critical, I haven’t taken the time to do backups.

So what’s next? What’s going to be the new big thing? What will be the next thing I spend a night, or a week of nights, or a month of nights….or say on an off for seven years (in the case of my forums – I’ve had a forums site running since I was a junior in high school)… What will be the next thing that grabs my attention? Who knows. As the title of this post says, there’s always something new.