I am a huge fan of the Windows Live Writer. It’s been some years now since Microsoft made this free tool available to bloggers who want to blog on Windows. And in a bold move Microsoft announced the other week that they will be moving all Windows Live Spaces weblogs (a free weblog hosting service) to WordPress.

In an accompanying step they just released the 2011 version of the Windows Live Writer. Actually I think it’s a shame that there is no comparable tool on Mac OS X … which is quite unusual since those types of tools in that quality are more common on the apple platform.

The new Window Live Writer 2011 comes with the Ribbon UI already known from Office 2007 and 2010 (and 2011 now).

Source 1: http://wordpress.visitmix.com/
Source 2: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials

So here we are on a new blog engine. It took me the better part of two days to do the Migration of 2,869 posts and 2,732 comments, a lot of pictures and movie files.

I will write an article on this but for now only two captures images from the migration:

yeah PHP rocks!

 
had to do some regex action to do the url rewrites

…switch this website to another weblog software in the future. The dasBlog development isn’t exactly what I would call fast-paced. It even seems that there was no movement at all for the last year at all regarding new features.

I took a short look at a current WordPress installation we did for our Developer Website at sones – and I have to admit that feature-wise this WordPress is way beyond anything I could achieve in dasBlog anytime soon.

Additionally the fact that the skin of this site seems to be broken (especially for older browsers) I would have to do a skin-redesign – turns out that this is way easier in WordPress than it is in dasBlog.

Die Bits-und-so Adventskalender DVD kam an! Hurray! Und nicht nur die war in der Packung:

Oh dare you Timo Hetzel!

It’s time for a review of last years numbers regarding the schrankmonster website empire. I did not write that much – and I could clearly see that reflected in the monthly statistics. Nevertheless I am quite impressed what numbers where reached in the end:

the year 2008 in numbers:

• 1.671.932.652 kbytes ~ 1.6 Tbytes of Traffic served to the visitors
• 6.393.160 unique visits (532.763 on average per month)
• 17.716.918 unique pages delivered
• 63.656.905 hits overall (5.304.742 on average per month)

Sounds like a lot of work for one machine. In 2008 there were 3 machines that hosted schrankmonster and the sites around schrankmonster. I think schrankmonster now finally arrived on a machine where it can grow in the future. (I think the new machine will handle peaks like the famous “iTunes for Windows Mobile” articles easily)

I just found that Mozilla Firefox plugin that allows me to blog from the Mac (which still lacks a great and compatible blog-tool for this site).

If you can read this text AND if you can see the picture – everything worked fine.

Von Zeit zu Zeit ist es von Interesse, zu erfahren, wie es um die eigene Webseite im Internet steht. Für einfache Statistiken gibt es entsprechende Log-Tools, die die Anzahl der Zugriffe über einen bestimmten Zeitraum messen, den verwendeten Browser und die Seite, von der der Zugriff erfolgte, anzeigen usw.

Mittlerweile gibt es aber auch Dienstleistungen, die sich auf qualitative Analysen spezialisieren, zumeist auf die Frage: Wer ist der Nutzer und wie kann man ihn möglichst interessengenau mit Werbung zupflastern? Etwas, was im Bereich des Online-Marketings sehr wichtig ist und natürlich Geld kostet (aber nicht muss).

Ein kostenloser Anbieter ist die Webseite www.quantcast.com. Eine Überprüfung für Schrankmonster.de ergab folgende Analyse über den typischen US-Nutzer:

Er ist

- männlich,

- weiß,

- zwischen 35 und 44 Jahre alt,

- verdient zwischen 30.000$ und 60.000$ im Jahr,

- hat zumindest einen College-Abschluss

- und keine Kinder zwischen 6 und 17 zu versorgen.

Darüber hinaus noch einige weitere Angaben:

- die Seite erreicht durchschnittlich 6.583 Nutzer im Monat,

- überdurchschnittlich viele Geringverdiener

- überdurchschnittlich viele Menschen, die weder weiß, schwarz, asiatisch noch Latinos sind (Wer bleibt da eigentlich übrig?)

- überdurchschnittlich viele ältere Menschen ab 65

Die Genauigkeit dieser Messungen muss natürlich stark (und zu Recht) bezweifelt werden. Die Ergebnisse wurden aufgrund weniger auswertbarer Nutzer aufgestellt und hochgerechnet. Dadurch entstehen selbstverständlich eingeschränkt repräsentative Zahlen. Aber immerhin…

Quelle: http://www.quantcast.com/schrankmonster.de/demographics

Jens Heymann

It’s available now!

“Gadget Geeks” is a new video podcast show made by some guys from Berlin. Just wanted to point you to that Give it a try.

P.S.: this is episode 0. Hopefully that does not mean that they’re going to argue why they did not start with episode 1 in the next episodes…

P.P.S.: I like the Schäuble picture

P.P.P.S.: Oh… what about more… NOT OSX specific stuff? It’s not as if there are no OSX only podcasts available…

Source: http://gadget-geeks.de/

I’ve got two joost invitations left. So if you want one just comment on this one and leave your eMail. The first two ones will get it.

What? You don’t know what joost is? Take this:

“Joost™ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We’re in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!”

Source: http://www.joost.com/

Well some of you may be interested in how many other people are visiting schrankmonster. Well it’s more than a year since I last did an article about the official schrankmonster statistics. One year is about time to take another look on where we got in this year:

As you may see there’s a huge jump from January to February 2007 which can be explained by the introduction of the XBOX 360 Achievement Generator. But even without this new service you can see a huge increase in visits and hits. Now if there would be more comments

The internet comes up with new ideas of information transformation and management every day. Yahoo now came up with a great idea of how the users could almost freely transform syndicateable data to anything they like.

Yahoo says this about it’s new baby:

“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.”

If you ever wanted to connect NY Times articles to Flickr, you can do this and many other things now. You even get a decent editor:

(yes, that’s in a webbrowser…)

Go and give it a try.

Source: http://pipes.yahoo.com/

I am not watching LOST since the very very very disappointing Season 2 final. And as it seems I was right not watching anymore.

Now there’s a blog article about just what happened until now and how badly everything went wrong.

Source: http://krhunt.blogspot.com/2007/02/why-lost-is-lost.html

You might have noticed it. Schrankmonster is back in blogging business. And I am trying to get back to the old days when 5-10 articles a day were standard food for devoted readers.

So now back to you: show me that you love it!

Thanks for linking to me. And you kotaku readers: grab the RSS feed and keep on reading this blog!

Imagine the possibility to search for keywords in Podcasts. Imagine that integrated into every next generation podcast application: Wouldn’t it be great? There’s a company that does that right now:

“HearHere™ lets you quickly find the portions of an audio or video podcast that interest you.

Pluggd’s HearHere allows people to jump to the exact position in audio or video, such as podcasts and video casts, where there is something they want to hear. People have come to expect this instant return with web pages, but up until now audio and video have failed to deliver the same searchability. Now, you will no longer have to listen to five minutes of an NPR podcast before you reach the topic you care about. HearHere changes everything.“

Source: http://www.pluggd.com/demo

There’s the professional business behavious that reminds us to divide between our job and private life… but there’s always someone who did not get it:

Yeah; of course the Nintendo DS is awesome and everything. But come on, that’s not the kind of news I want to read on developer web pages by Microsoft.

Source 1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/
Source 2: The Nintendo DS is awesome!

“Omar pulled the trigger and we released DasBlog 1.9.6264. Why 6264 you ask? Because it’s 2006 and the 264th day, that’s why. Download it.”

• Much better multi-user/blogger support including a Top Posters macro and total comments – from Christoph De Baene
• TagCloud Support – from Scott
• Support for Mobile Browsers like Blackberries and SmartPhones – from Scott
  • Note the large section in your web.config and the mobile theme that is required for this support.
• Huge (100x+) speedup in Macro execution – from Scott
• Support for If-Not-Modified to speed up execution, improve RSS bandwidth and CPU cycles – from Scott
• Direct Feedburner Support with 301 redirection for RSS and Atom feeds. Don’t lose a single subscriber. We’re the only blog with direct support for Feedburner and Feedflare I believe. – from Scott
  • I encourage you to check out FeedBurner. You can add FeedFlare to your posts, and modify your feed in ways DasBlog can’t. They also handle your Feed bandwidth and provide rich statistics. It’s free ($ for advanced stats) and it’s very powerful. Do be aware that when you make the decision to move over to FeedBurner your existing feeds will start redirecting folks to FeedBurner immediately. That’s part of the power of the whole thing, but be warned.
• Delete comments directly from your mail reader – from Omar
• Comment moderation option
• New themes out of the box, 18 at last count – from Many Folks
• New XML-RPC support for newMediaObject and new version of XML-RPC.NET from Charles Cook – from Omar and Giuseppe Dipietro
• Macros for Next Post and Previous Post – Justice Gray
  • Check the DasBlog theme or add this line to the top of your itemtemplate.blogtemplate.
    <%PreviousLink("« ",25)%><%MainPageEntryLink("Main", "|")%><%NextLink(" »",25)%>
    
• A few security and XSS fixes
• Support for Gravatars, images of your choosing that appear next to your comments – John Forsythe
• Support for limited HTML markup in comments - Alexander Groß
• Emails removed to avoid having email addresses stolen from Feeds
• Added an Email page for leaving comments to the author, includes Captcha
• New support for RSD so client software can autoconfigure itself – from Omar
• Pluggable Rich Text Editor, choose from the latest version of FreeTextBox or FCKEditor or write your own adapter – from Josh Flanagan
• Support for alternate SMTP ports
• We work with Windows Live Writer out of the box – from Omar
• Support for CoComment – from Scott
• Microsummary support for Firefox 2.0 Beta – from Scott
• Organized source, build, and packing for clarity – from Josh Flanagan
• New Feed Icons – from Omar
• Autometic generation of Google SiteMaps – from Scott
• Automatic disabling of Comments after a certain number of days. Also manual “close comments” support – from Omar
• ContentLookAhead show future dated posts – from Josh Flanagan
• Other fixes and suggestions from Tomas Restrepo, Jason Follas, Rene Lebherz and Steven Rockarts. Added entry CPU usage optimizatons from George V. Reilly.
• Ajax Autosave Drafts support from Steven Rockarts and Justice Gray.
• Better strings and support for German, Portueguese, Turkish and Vietnamese from Ph?m Ð?c H?i.
• Many great new themes
• Updated readme.rtf from Tim Sherill
• Single-handed support of DasBlog.info and DasBlog.us to the enthusiastic and tireless Tom Watts!
• Welcome to new team members Alexander Groß, Paul Van Brenck, and John Forsythe who really did a lot of work to make this release possible! Thanks to Jacob Proffitt for doing some crazy debugging of caching on FireFox that will be in a point release soon.
• New DasBlog Badges/Artwork from Alexander Groß…download them here: File Attachment: DasBlog Artwork.zip (1015 KB)

Source: DasBlog 1.9 Released

I just updated schrankmonsters software “dasBlog” to the newly released version. As far as I can see it’s running without any problems. If you experience any problem, please comment here.

Well that’s news! I mainly used my Mac for blogging. But there’s a new application from Microsofts Windows Live Team that is indeed a strong competitor.

It comes with Spell Checking, WYSIWYG and much more… just what I’ve waited for…

You can grab your copy from here.

Source: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

“A CAPTCHA (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”, trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.”

This technology is mainly used to filter all those spammers from the normal commenting users. Schrankmonster even uses this technology. Kiesow doesn’t like very long captchas and I don’t like dumb ones…like this one which was sent in by Tomasz Naumowicz:

Source 1: http://www.kiesows.de/blog/2006/07/19/captcha-2

Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captchas

I got the new Community Server platform up-n-running now on slow-backward.de. But with the help of the dasBlog developers I am able to tweak dasBlog a little bit for speed. You should have noticed a dramatic improvement on front-page loading-times…

Oh… just in case you are searching for the Promise m500i…. it is VTrak not VTrack. So try this search.

Schrankmonster is powered by a 4-way XEON 2.8 Ghz machine with 2 GB RAM running Windows Server 2003 and dasBlog blog-engine. And believe it or not: dasBlog actually utilizes all 4 CPUs completely at peak times.

Much of this is led by the fact that dasBlog was built for much smaller weblogs (not that schrankmonster is big…). And for MUCH less traffic. When you load the front page of schrankmonster you instantly notice the lag between typing the URL+pressing enter and the completely loaded page showing on your screen.

dasBlog does not use any database server. Instead it uses XML files. Two for each day of the year. And well. It parses them very often…

Very much to my pleasure the traffic on schrankmonster is raising each month. And that means: slower page load times… It became more and more unacceptable in the last weeks.

Beefing up the hardware is not an option. I believe it’s a quite beefy system already. And the main problem remains: the software. So it’s time for a change: I will move schrankmonster bit by bit from dasBlog to a shiny new software called “Community Server“.

I just finished the test-setup today and I am thinking how to move the content to the new platform. The main goal is that nobody will even notice (beside some radical layout changes) that there is a new blog engine powering schrankmonster.

Source 1: http://www.dasblog.net
Source 2: http://www.communityserver.com