King  Gary 

I quickly whipped up a WordPress plugin to do something that I wanted, which was to display stars in a post’s comments next to the comment’s author. Each star represented 10 comments that the author had made on the blog so far; I find it interesting to see how many people in the, say, top 10 people that comment on a blog make up a large percentage of the total comments on a blog. (For those who are wondering, the top 10 commenters on my blog make up 67% of all the comments.)

Screenshot

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Popularity: 51% [?]

Running a blog network with nearly 200 blogs is no easy task, and when you’ve got the same item being downloaded a few thousand times every second, it can put quite the strain on a server. That’s why the b5media blogroll (an example is shown to the right of this post) can pretty much kill a server if people love our blogs too much, and if the blogroll isn’t as optimized as it could have been. We needed to fix the blogroll so that we could use it without straining our servers nearly as much as it once did, so I jumped in and optimized it so that it would be nice and speedy.

The good thing was that whenever the blogroll was requested by a website, the same data would always be sent (in XML format - what else?). The reason that the blogroll may look different on several websites is because each website parses the XML file differently. This enabled us to cache the blogroll XML data that is returned, since it is not dynamic; it only changes if we add/modify/remove a channel or a blog.

Average load times

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Popularity: 14% [?]

After much deliberation, mostly with myself, and with other people who have absolutely no design experience (which is why I simply tossed their advice - sorry guys! ), I have finally broken down and decided that my website really needs a major overhaul. Thus, the new look is what you now see before you.

I personally think that this is the best change I’ve made to this site since I started blogging here, and I hope that you’ll agree, too. I’m pretty sure that the old theme didn’t have many fans, so I couldn’t wait to release this new theme for public viewing.

For posterity’s sake, I have saved the old theme. It can still be viewed here if you choose to do so, but I doubt many will take that option. For everyone else, bathe in the warm glow of a new design, and rejoice in the fact that my new design looks much nicer now! If you’ve got any questions, comments, or concerns, then as always, feel free to post a comment to let me know what’s on your mind

Popularity: 17% [?]

The b5media meetups have concluded. We’ve posted some of the photos from the events on Flickr. There are also some photos of the b5media public meetup, courtesy of Babak. I’ve had a great time meeting the guys from b5, especially Aaron Brazell, Christina Jones, and Darren Rowse, all for the first time.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

• Ipod saves Soldier’s Life on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  Apparently, iPods really CAN be lifesavers
  (tags: ipod)

Popularity: 18% [?]