Sudoku
I have been seeing books of these puzzles turning up in every grocery store etc, but until recently, never bothered to try it out. I have taken quite a liking to it, although I am not particularly good at it as yet. With no interest in clogging up our house with yet more books, I have been checking out the various online versions to varying levels of satisfaction.
My favourite site? Simply Sudoku which is nice and plain, allowing you to concentrate on the damn numbers. It doesn’t try and make you buy a full, downloadable version or register or any of that crap. You just pick a skill level and have at it.
My thanks to Mathew for putting it together.
Puzzled? [1]Webhosts of merit?
Having asked about recommended web hosts amongst the friends/users of the Textdrive forums I thought it might be a good idea to make a list. These are all web hosts that have been used by real people who do have a clue about what they are doing. I’ll not post reviews here, just links to the companies in question. The links are in the same order that they were mentioned positively on the forum.
(Please note that I am not with any kind of affiliate program where I get a kickback for a clicked link. Also keep in mind that these are the recommendations of others so if you do go with a company here and have a bad time, don’t bother trying to sue me! If you were to end up signing up with Textdrive, I would get a small ammount of cash!)
TextDrive
A Small Orange
Planet Argon
Cornerhost
Fat Cow
Birdhouse
FutureQuest
Netgate
Pair Networks
34sp.com (UK)
Segment (Australia)
Mosso
Dreamhost
I’ll add any more that show up.
Robin's new site
Some more about Robin’s site. Some fucker had their eyes on Robin’s domain name and had registered with a site that grabs names to order. This meant that the moment that her domain became available, the bastards snapped it up and resold it to whoever. Now they have a frigging link farm on it! This has been a shitty business all round and my last words on the subject are:
FUCK UKREG.COM and POOL.COM !
A new domain has taken up residence with our others. Redheadedgoddess.com will be her new home. The site needs content, design etc, but Textpattern, Photostack and Mint are all installed and working.
A couple of weeks ago I had the dubious pleasure of dealing with a client’s webhost. I needed to set up a MySQL database for their new site. It took nearly 24 hours for the damn database to be accessible. Compare that to this: I registered the new domain on my account with Gandi. I then set up a virtual server, complete with a MySQL database on my account here on Textdrive. I went back to Gandi and found the domain was ready for me to add the dns settings which I did. I installed Textpattern, Photostack and Mint, by which time the new domain had propogated so that we could see it live. All this took less than an hour!
Thank you to the folks at both Textdrive and Gandi. It is a pleasure to deal with professionals and a shame that they are so rare on this web of ours.
Your take? [4]Statistics
I watched as the hype over Mint reared it’s head and then calmed down again. While it was going on I had a look around to see what the competition had to offer. Much to my surprise, nothing seemed to have the ease of installation and use, so I gave it a try. Guess what? I kinda like it, much to my surprise.
What have I learnt from it so far?
Only 8% of my visitors run their monitors at 800×600.
Internet Explorer is used by 66% with Firefox running at 25%.
Windows takes 89%, Mac 9% and Linux 2%.
Most visitors come via Google with the other search engines trailing way behind.
Links on the Textdrive forum, Textpattern forum and Textpattern Magazine all bring in a scattering of visitors.
Friends sites do well, with Luc leading, trailed my Gordon and Gavin coming close behind.
These are my visitors languages in order of popularity:
- English
- German
- French
- Dutch
- Turkish
- Italian
- Swedish
- Japanese
- Hebrew
- Spanish
- Portuguese
- (Polish
- Norwegian
- Russian
- Finnish
Quite how Turkish ranks so high is quite frankly beyond me!
Last, but not least, and also accounting for many of the non-English speaking visitors, the most popular search term used that brings me visitors is:
‘penguin bashing’
You could knock me down with a feather, what the?
These people come looking for the Yetisports games that I have mentioned once or twice and account for nearly 30% of my visitors! All I can say to this revelation is – Fucking Hell!
Lastly, I find that many search-victims arrive due to Google et al not comprehending what they index. The following should illustrate that:
Searched – thunder mountain choppers.
Found – A mention of a mountain visited during a trip to a motorcyle event.
Searched – rules “alien numbers” game.
Found – A piece regarding a game I designed using Basic on a Sinclair Spectrum some decades back.
Searched – anthony czak.
Found – An article about the destrution of original Elvis Presley master tapes that mentions the historian Jim Czak.
And finally, my favourite of all the search terms that have brought me visitors:
Searched – diddly umptious.
Found – Me praising my Wife’s earliest attempt at cooking me a curry! What on Earth could they have truly been searching for?