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

If you are interested in software / security / windows, I recommend listening to this episode of Chaosradio. It’s a german language podcast, sorry for the others…

“Microsoft Windows hat in der Öffentlichkeit was Sicherheit betrifft einen schlechten Stand. Windows gilt als System mit offenen Scheunentoren und wird von der Elite gemieden. Doch in den letzten Jahren hat sich eine Menge getan und die letzten Releases von Windows XP wie auch das bevorstehende Windows Vista kommen mit signifikanten und grundlegenden Änderungen daher, die das Bild bald ändern könnten.

Im Gespräch bietet FX Einblicke in die Vorgehensweise von Microsoft in den letzten Jahren und erklärt, welche konkreten Ergebnisse Microsoft in seinen aktuellen und kommenden Betriebssystem-Releases erreicht hat und anstrebt. Am Ende gibt es auch einen Blick auf die Ist-Situation bei Linux.”

Source: http://www.chaosradio.de/cre022.html

I just received a love-letter from Sixt. What a great way to please a satisfied customer even more.

Three double upgrade vouchers…yeah! Ride on!

It seems that they want to thank me for my comments I made on their cars and service.

Source: http://www.sixt.de

Uhh… more than 13k SPAM Mails last month…

It’s not that beautiful. But well it looks better than the old “” icon.

grab your copy here.

Source: http://feedicons.com/

AJAX is the key to rich web applications. And finally someone bridged the gap between click-tracking and those rich web applications.

With “Crazy Egg” is is possible to track the users of any site right down to their clicks…how cool is that (well if the users-webbrowser is configured to allow that) ?

Mashable.com was able to test it on their website…which looks like this:

After one our Crazy Egg created this heatmap…showing where the users clicked the most…

Source 1: http://www.crazyegg.com/

Source 2: mashable.com
Source 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

A new Microsoft community site is showing up…

“10 is a place for people who want to use technology to change the world.”

“Every weekday at 10:00 am (PST) we’ll update this site with a new video that highlights people, their passions and often the technology they are using. At the end of each week we compile these videos into a full length show with some extra surprises for you.”

Source: http://www.on10.net

Martin pointed me to this promising company which is out there to bring us great Portale Media Players…but at the moment… no real information is available on their website…but the start is done…international blogging…good way to start…

Source: http://www.venzero.com

Still in the testing phase the instructables step-by-step how-tos are quite a good concept for online collaboration….

Instructables is a venue for showing what you make and how others can make it.

Instructables is a step-by-step collaboration system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. We hope to make documentation simple and fast. Show your colleagues how to operate a machine, show your friends how to build a kayak, show the world how to make cool stuff.

Source: http://www.instructables.com

This Web 2.0 and AJAX thing is getting bigger every day… there’s now even an AJAX Weblog-CMS showing up…

Source: http://www.logahead.com/

As if he wasn’t big enough I am here to tell you once again something about the statistics behind schrankmonster.de. There’s the obvious tendency upwards – and I intent it to go straight upward for the next years…

any questions?

there’s a weblog ranking on blogscout.de - Of course this was one of the very good days

Source 1: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/
Source 2: http://counter.blogscout.de

There’s a new idea of comments: It’s really hard to stay up to date when you are making many comments on many different websites. So there is CoComment. It’s keeping track of your comments and gives you one overview of all the conversations you’ve made the past days/weeks/months…

Source: http://www.cocomment.com

Zur Feier des Tages mal ein Artikel ganz in deutsch und von thesuck.de:

Sehr geehrter Herr Trefz,

mit Freuden las ich, dass Sie sich der Ilmenauer Weblog-Szene annahmen. Nunja. Fast ganz ein wenig halb vollständig, aber das ist ja erst einmal egal. – Interessant und wirklich gut geschrieben ist Ihr Artikel allemal.

Was ich eigentlich nur kurz loswerden wollte ist, dass Sie natürlich Recht damit haben, dass ich auf thesuck.de noch viel zu wenig Inhalt gegen NYBLOG bereitstelle. Ich bin voll und ganz Ihrer Meinung: Man muss mehr tun! Man kann sozusagen nicht genug gegen Herrn S. und seine Webseite sein – und das muss man zeigen.

Ich bin nach wie vor hauptsächlich mit meiner eigenen Webseite (das ist im übrigen in einer anderen Sprache geschrieben, deshalb haben sie das bestimmt übersehen) beschäftigt und deshalb eigentlich nur halbtäglich mit der Arbeit an diesem “Gegenblog”, wie sie es nennen, beschäftigt.

Aber ich gelobe Besserung und sehe Ihren Artikel als Aufforderung und Ansporn zugleich, nun schließlich die wirklich Interessanten Tatsachen Berichte von Betroffenen (Stura, Uniskop,…) online zu stellen.

mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Daniel Kirstenpfad

Achja. Wen es interessiert. Der geschätzte Kollege von der schreibenden(und vor allem dann auch druckenden) Zunft schrieb einen kleinen Artikel in der Thüringer Allgemeinen Zeitung, Ilmenauer Ausgabe vom 05.01.2006. Den Artikel kann man (leider offenbar unvollständig) auf der Web-Präsenz der Tageszeitung nachlesen.

Source: http://www.thesuck.de

Es wird Zeit fr eine kleine, sprich kurze Antwort:

Hi Daniel,

Hallo Herr S. (oder wie du dich auch immer selbst nennst),

ich les ja deine blog schon lange nicht mehr – ber Umwege ist mir heute mitgeteilt worden, dass du eine “warfare” planst. hm .. wieso?

Ganz erstaunlich dass Du das nicht selbst weisst! Nunja: Es geht einfach nur darum mal deinen Opfer zu zeigen was fr ein komischer Kerl du eigentlich bist. Wie du auf andere wirkst und warum die anderen (Stura, Uniskop, …) lieber garnichts mit dir zu tun haben wollen. Ich hab dich mal vor langer Zeit gefragt wieso du so aggresiv gegen andere schreibst – so ganz ohne Grund: Und du hast gesagt “Ich mchte aufrtteln und zum Denken anregen.” – Nun will ich und ne Menge andere (hey viele schreiben mich an und untersttzen mich in dieser Sache, danke dafr) gerne dich wachrtteln und dich auf den Boden zurckholen wo du wohl seit Jahren nichtmehr warst.

Hab’ ich was verpasst? Oder brauchst du einfach nur Hits?

Ja du scheinst da was verpasst zu haben. Oder ignoriert? Hits kann man immer gebrauchen.

Sorry. Ich find’s ein bisschen albern. Wenn Du Dich auf den Schlips getreten fhlst, dann sag’s mir bitte. Ich wollte Dich bestimmt nicht persnlich irgendwo angreifen. Sollte ich Dich gar verletzt haben, bitte verzeih mir – es war mit Sicherheit nicht so gemeint, und schon gar nicht gewollt.

MP. Entschuldigt man sich denn wenn man nix zu entschuldigen hat? MP. Superfalsch. Aber das gehrt zum “Wachrttel-Service”. Du darfst nochmal!

Ach zum Thema: neee ich fhl mich nirgendwohin getreten – ich fhl mich blos unfassbar angedet und genervt von deiner Art mit Menschen umzugehen und darber zu schreiben. Mir geht deine selbstverliebte “Mr. Investigativ” Art auf den Senkel. Und weil es nichts ntzte dir das Face 2 Face zu sagen, vielleicht verstehst Du’s ja.

Oder hast Du Angst, nicht mehr der Leadblog in Thringen zu sein? Gerne kann ich Dich auch wieder in meine Linkliste aufnehmen. Also rede bitte mit mir. Ein Promoaktion fr meinen Blog kannst Du dann immernoch starten.

Ich seh schon die Werbeplakate: “Du bist Leadblog – Du bist Deutschland”. Ehrlichgesagt ist mit irgend ein Ranking vllig wurscht – mir gehts um obiges.

Ich wnsche Dir und Deiner Familie ein Frohes Weihnachtsfest,

Ich glaube nicht an diesen Gott. Wnsch mir lieber schne Ferien.

Source: http://www.thesuck.de

The warfare has begun! This whole campaign will be in german – so english readers please ignore everything with NYBLOG in the article name (in fact even ignore everything regarding NYBLOG in the rest of the internet as well)

klicken um zu thesuck.de zu gelangen.

Chaosradio is the monthly radio show produced by the Chaos Computer Club Berlin and Radio Fritz!. Each last wednesday of the month chaosradio is part of the Radio Fritz! Bluemoon program. As I am listening since years now the only thing I can do for you is to point you to the podcast URL/FTP where you can download what you maybe have missed to date: ftp://ftp.ccc.de or ftp://ftp2.ccc.de or Podcast/Homepage.

But the old-fashioned radio show “Chaosradio” is not the cause of this article. Yesterday we had a meeting in the FeM Office to discuss the upcoming general meeting when Skype showed up with a conference call of Tim and typo23 (sorry dude, what’s your name actually?). As far as I can say Tim is really passionate about the new “Chaosradio Express” concept: a Chaosradio podcast without the need to ask somebody – just produce and “broadcast”. Freedom of speech!

So I do not only recommend the old-fashioned Chaosradio episodes – I strongly recommend you to subscribe and listen to Chaosradio Express through this link: Chaosradio Express Podcast.

Source 1: http://www.chaosradio.de
Source 2: Chaosradio Express Podcast
Source 3: schrankmonster articles regarding Chaosradio