Site down for a while

June 22, 2006 eirikso6 Comments

I am very sorry for the inconvenience, but eirikso.com went down when my post about how to make simple illustrations reached the front page of digg.com

I am currently communicating with the support team over at Dreamhost to find out what went wrong. I have been digged, boingboing’ed and flabbergasted before without any problems.

824 people digged the story before they had to remove it from the front page because my site was down. I had about 17 000 pageloads in a short while, even with my site down most of the time.

Having a blog that can’t handle links from sites that most bloggers only dream about is of course unacceptable. I’ll have to get som answers from my hosting comany…

Problem with Bloglines and PNG

May 16, 2006 eirikso2 Comments

Update:
The problem is not PNG. As stated in the comment from Ben Lowery it is a CSS issue. I am truly impressed by the fact that the good people at Bloglines actually found this post on my blog, read it as a bug report and actually fix the problem. Now that is what I call customer support!

Original post
I have quite a bit of readers subscribing to this blog through Bloglines. It seems like Bloglines has a problem when displaying pictures in the PNG format. All the slides in my previous post turns up with a very wrong aspect. I have changed the files to JPG and will keep using JPG in the future to avoid this annoying problem.

And while I am at it. I really recommend you to subscribe to my feed. I am not updating this blog daily, so checking back all the time to look for something new can be a bit boring.

You can sign up for my email update, or use any RSS feed reader to subscribe. You can read more about RSS here and find all links and forms for the subscription alternatives here. Of course I promise that you won’t get any spam!

What’s so special today then?

April 25, 2006 eirikso8 Comments

First of all, it’s my birthday. A friend of mine just told me that I had to post that on my blog, because otherwise nobody would know… (hmm, time to get a life?) Well – now you know!

Second, today eirikso.com will pass 400 000 pageloads since I installed Statcounter.

Third, over the past couple of days I have upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and done some small changes to the site:
– added a new “About this site” page with links to all the WordPress plugins I use and a couple of other things
– added a “popular content” page with links to… popular content.
– added an RSS and subscriptions page with all the links you need to subscribe to this blog in any RSS reader or by mail

…and a couple of other small changes.

Have fun and please don’t hesitate to contact me with suggestions for the site, the content, a way to celebrate my birthday or whatever… Comments are open.

More on my Talkr podcast experiment

April 10, 2006 eirikso1 Comment

Thanks to some readers I have been made aware of the fact that the “Listen to this podcast“-link does not work for old posts in my blog.

The guys at Talkr have made a reasonably good job on trying to explain the problem when you click on a podcast-link in an old post:

We have encountered a problem with your request

Apologies, but we cannot find a post with the permalink:
http://www.eirikso.com/…this old post…

This often results from one of the following timing issues:

* If the RSS feed is generated by FeedBurner, it is possible that the post was published so recently that FeedBurner hasn’t found it yet. FeedBurner’s pretty fast, so if that’s the cause, this will probably be fixed within a few minutes.

* On the other hand, it is possible that you are requesting an audio file for an old article — one that was not present in this blogger’s RSS feed when they first created their Talkr account. In this case, Talkr has no way to create the audio. We’d like to apologize for this inconvenience.

Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to include the podcast link only on the posts that are working in Talkr. Of course all posts from now on will work, but my site has a lot of good articles way back in time, and people keep reading them as well.

Can’t say much more than what they do on the info page over at Talkr. I apologize for this inconvenience!

Listen to eirikso.com

April 5, 2006 eirikso2 Comments

Erling Sivertsen points me to Talkr. A service that can give you a computer generated audio version of RSS-feeds. From now on you will find a nice little button in my side bar that says “Talkr”. Copy the link from that button into your podcacher (iTunes or Juice or whatever), and you can start listening to eirikso.com. I don’t think eirikso.com is the best blog to listen to because I try my best to include visuals in addition to the text. Photos and illustrations. Still this is a cool service and could be very valuable for people with limited vision etc.

You will also find a little link at the end of all articles saying “Listen to this podcast”. Click it, and your browser will start reading the post for you.
And if you want to listen to a blog that has no “Talkr”-button, you can sign up for a free account with Talkr and add up to three RSS-feeds for your own. They also have a paid service that let you add more feeds. Quickly clicking around at the help pages did not give me any information about what languages they support. My guess is that the service at this point only support English feeds.

…and a small note about the name – “Talkr”. Please guys! Just because Flickr spelled their name in a cool way that is impossible to pronounce you don’t have to do the same. Throwing in an “r” in the end of your name does not mean that VCs will run for the money.

w00t! This blog is a winner.

December 6, 2005 eirikso15 Comments

As mentioned earlier eirikso.com was nominated for “Best Technology Blog” in Dagbladet’s competition (Norwegian) where they want to find the best blogs in Norway. Dagbladet is one of Norway’s biggest newspapers.

Now, the voting has ended, and this blog won a “Golden Blog Award” for best technology blog.

If you master the strange language of Norwegian you can head over here to read the public announcement and an interview with eirikso.

Fantastic. Because the two other blogs nominated in the same category are very good ones as well, I take this as a huge compliment from the people that voted for this one. The two other blogs are in norwegian: Tversover and Jo Christian Oterhals’ sÃ¸keblogg.

A huge, plain, simple, upper case “THANK YOU” to all the people that voted for this blog. Still, this also has to be the time to thank my readers in general for comments, feedback and motivation.

This blog started out as a personal tool for myself to remember hacks and tweaks for all my technology experiments. After gaining a bit of readers I have started to post articles on other stuff as well. Several posts, including the one about the guy to the right has driven a bit of traffic. I am now the happy editor of a blog that gives me more knowledge about the thoughts I post here, new friends all over the world and experience running a web site that actually reach out to a certain amount of people.

Special thanks go to:
First of all the person that entered my blog into the competition! I didn’t know about this competition before I saw the traffic from Dagbladet… Then Oyvind at Brilliantdays for huge amounts of knowledge and a link to my post trying to convince people to vote for me. Ian over at The Media Center Show for mentioning me on the show! Thomas Hawk for nice compliments and a link in his excellent post about my short comparison of Flickr and Webshots.

And:
Simon, the Australian beef cattle farmer that voted for my blog. I mean, how many Norwegian blogs get votes from Australian beef cattle farmers from Wagga Wagga?

If you are new to this blog…
…please check out my most popular posts through the list in the right sidebar. You can also find some selected links here and here.

– “Yeah. Right. I found all the technology and some food. Now, where is all that travel?”
– Try this one, or maybe this one.

Update:
I just recieved this badge that I can use on my site. Making the competition, taking blogs seriously, helping people understand more about the Net and all these new tools. All of them very good initiatives from Dagbaldet. Winning the technology category is an honour. Still, I have one problem. I find this badge ugly. Aesthetic judgement is a personal thing. I am sorry. Can’t use this one permanently on my site.

I guess I’ll have to stick with the glory and honour, keep up the good work and make an even better blog. Without this badge in my sidebar.

Now I really need your help :-)

November 22, 2005 eirikso16 Comments

Update: I actually won the competition!

This blog, www.eirikso.com has been nominated by one of the biggest newspapers in Norway (Dagbladet) to the prestigious title “Gullbloggen”, or in plain english: they want to find the best Norwegian blogs.

First, huge amounts of blogs where nominated by the readers of Dagbladet. Then, a panel of experts selected three blogs in the following categories:
1. Politics
2. Technology
3. “Under 20”
4. Open Category

Actually, I did not know about this, and would like to thank the person that nominated Eirikso.com under “Technology”.

The other nominated blogs in the technology category are in Norwegian, but very interesting as well:
Espen Andersen: Tversover
Jo Christian Oterhal: Jo Christian Oterhals’ sÃ¸keblogg

Of course, now I need your votes! The page is in Norwegian, but I have provided some nice instructions and translations. Click the image to see a bigger version:

Then you vote for eirikso.com here.

And, for the people that need a reason to vote for this particular blog, here are some posts to give you an impression of this site:

My insane, yet slightly interesting experiment with images:
Everything you would ever want to see

The story of Bob the Millionaire:
How Bob the Millionaire became a pirate

Help for the people that need to know more about all this talk about blogging, flickr, del.icio.us, BoingBoing, RSS etc…
Help for â€œthe left behindâ€

A quick list of links with help for building a home theatre:
A quick update on the home theatre

Some fantastic vintage computer ads:
Whatever happens in the future it will fit into this space

Help for the people trying to make interesting presentations:
How to avoid making boring presentations

Fighting spam in WordPress

November 6, 2005 eirikso1 Comment

A quick update on the situation
I have been using BotCheck to fight comment spam on this site. After a while I realized that BotCheck also killed all trackbacks. So, I deactivated BotCheck and installed “Bad Behavior”.

Still, after a while some spam got through. To prevent that I installed SpamKarma 2. After I installed SpamKarma I have had absolutely no spam, and one single case of a trackback that was stopped unintentionally.

So – basically I am happy as can be. Bad Behaviour + Spam Karma 2 = No Spam

Eirikso at the ITAvisen podcast

November 4, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

In today’s issue of the podcast that the norwegian website ITAvisen publish every friday they have interviewed the Admin of this website, Eirik Solheim himself.

I am talking about blogging, media centers, open and closed video codecs and the Online Spotlight service from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.

Unfortunately ITAvisen is entirely published in a closed codec called Norwegian. Including the podcast. That’s bad. Wasting the advertisers money on something that only four million stinking rich privileged people there up north can utilize! (Stupid joke alert)

For the people lucky enough to master this rare language head over to ITAvisen and listen carefully.

Problems with BotCheck and trackbacks

September 2, 2005 eirikso6 Comments

I just noticed why trackbacks have been failing on my site. The plugin I have been using to prevent comment spam, BotCheck have been stopping trackbacks.

In my quest to solve this someone recommended using a plugin called Bad Behaviour instead.

So, I have just deactivated BotCheck and activated Bad Behaviour. Trackbacks should be back working fine, and I will report back later on how this new plugin prevents both comment spam and trackback spam.

eirikso

Photo, media, technology

Site info.