Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

Firstly I need to say, once again, happy 400 posts to me! Granted over the last almost ten years I have technically racked up quite a few more posts than this, such as my old Greymatter powered site reaching around 300 posts and then the database collapsed, or the Movable Type version that managed 500 before I switched to Wordpress and then rebooted, cleaning out what I considered to be unhelpful posts. However with my new found vigour and comfort in my blogging style, I have hit 400 posts I’m relatively proud of.

I also noticed a great deal of traffic from automotive websites so thought I’d investigate why. It appears my use of comparative images of the US and European versions of the new Ford Focus were being hotlinked to by many and varied forums, people who didn’t want to extend me the courtesy of hosting the pictures on their own space. Hotlinking is linking to an image on someone else’s site and with forums this means the site being paged every time someone views the thread. I personally hosted them here so that I wouldn’t leech bandwidth off those sites that I found them at, so it irked somewhat that it was happening to me…I wouldn’t have minded if there had been credit for me or for the owners of the images. However more importantly I was curious why this was possible as I was sure I had enabled hotlink protection. A quick check found that with a recent cpanel upgrade the protection had been disabled so I quickly clicked it back on and went looking. Sure enough, the forums are now lacking the images the posters were so exhuberantly discussing. Poor things.

Finally I would like to mention something as we’re on the subject of my site and linking. The Ancient Gaming Noob featured me in a quick run down of new sites linking to him, as I’ve become a fan of his writing. Since then I seem to have recieved a great deal more traffic, for which I’m very grateful.

I’ve had a busy day so far getting the food shop out the way and spending some quality time with Sian as she’s been away all weekend at a hen party, so I didn’t much feel like jumping into my gaming as I would normally be doing around this time. What could I do that wouldn’t be too taxing?

Spring clean! I just had a quick look through all my themes to check they all still work and thankfully only one, Caffeine Addict was broken. The rest work like a charm and when I find the time I’ll convert them over to Wordpress’ handy dandy widgets system for the sidebars so I can keep the sidebar on all my themes current from within Wordpress.

I fiddled with said sidebar some, ditched a widget that was getting no use and reorganised it a bit…there is too much information on there but I don’t really want to be rid of any of it. I also still have to fiddle with my pages and build one for World of Warcraft Rayda, whose personal back story is my creative pride and joy. It’s also reaching epic proportions.

Well I’ve only just dipped in after a smooth upgrade but Wordpress 2.5 is pretty gorgeous so far. There’s a one click media adder so I can plop in pictures, video and other such delights.

Then there’s a nifty feature which automagically installs upgrades for my plugins, a new emphasis on the ever popular new tags system all blogs and sites are using and a nifty new dashboard which can be fully reconfigured to your liking.

Tip of the iceberg stuff really, looking forward to seeing what else it can do.