Had a slight glitch with the Top of the Blogs thing over the weekend - forgot about the switch to British Summertime, and this confused my processing script a little bit… Just means that the results for Sunday are based on an hour’s worth of traffic rather than 23.

Other than that, had a good weekend down in Hastings visiting Tony of BritBlog design fame. Heard an excellent band in a pub down there on Sunday night called Ko. I have to say I think they were probably the best band I’ve ever heard live, and that’s even after taking into consideration the amount I’d had to drink. A most excellent group: one to watch as they will go far.

Right, got to press on - and my tea will be stewed by now. Arrgghh!

I’ev finally got the Top of the British Blogs chart up and running! Alas the data is a bit pooched at the moment as the (shared) web server (not this one, I should add…) has been up and down like a yo yo over the last few days. Still, we should be moving to a dedicated server any time now, so I hope that will make things a bit more reliable.

Time for bed.

Update I’ve added a “Bottom of the British Blogs” list, with the hope that this will promote some of our less busy members…

OK, maybe not ‘poor me’ any more; I’ve finally feeling much better. I don’t normally take pills and things when I’m ill, but I’ve found that paracetamol has helped wonders.

Anyway, just logged in to mention a blog I’ve just come across: Holizz versus the web. I’ve not had a chance to read much if it, but the design concept is very good! Made me laugh, anyway

Update: Hmm, Holizz seems to have changed his design. It’s no longer funny

Feeling even worse today Am stiff all over, keep going hot and cold, my face is really hot, I have a sore throat, and I feel generally crap

Doh! Am in bed drinking a lemsip: I don’t feel well. Have a headache, have just sneezed, and have a runny nose. Think I’m coming down with something

Sorry for the lack of activity on the BritBlog front - it’s been a busy few days. On Friday I had a meeting in Essex, and afterwards I drove down to Devon for the weekend (via Bristol and Exeter to pick some people up). After a good weekend I went back to Bristol and stayed overnight for a meeting I had on Monday. To round it off, I was out of the house this morning at 6:40 AM for a meeting in Glasgow, and finally got back home about 15 minutes ago!

Right, so what’s happening with BritBlog? Well, I see we’ve had lots of non-British people sign up, so I need to go through and ban these people. I’m thinking of turning on the “blogs must be approved by an editor” feature to prevent some of these idiots getting in. I’m not too keen on doing this, but it may be the only option if this problem continues to grow.

The plan behind the “Top of the BritBlogs” is formulated now, so I just need to find some time to actually write the code and test it. With luck I’ll get it written over the weekend so I can leave it running next week to check it all works. On the other hand, I may just bung it up in beta mode so everyone can see it…

Right, got to press on. TTFN!

The BritBlog Top of the BritBlogs charts have been launched! To enter in the charts, sign in to your BritBlog account and click the link “Enter the BritBlog Top of the BritBlogs chart!”.

The service is still in testing, so please provide as much feedback as you can. Cheers

Did I mention how much I like PEAR? I’m pleased to say that Gary over at Perlworld has offered to help me with the running of BritBlog and with some additional coding. As I mentioned, I’ve got a few exciting ideas that I’d like to implement, but finding the time to actually do the code is not so easy these days.

Anyway, one component that I’ll need is a bot, and the plan behind it is growing. I’m going run bots from several remote locations, using the PEAR XML-RPC interface to enable them to communicate with the main BritBlog server. This may not sound like a great idea, but my web host has complained about the load that BritBlog is causing on the shared host already, so running additional processes on the box is not an option. Just passing a bit of info backwards and forwards though should be OK.

The actual useragent stuff will be done with the HTTP packages. and the HTML parsing will probably use the XML_HTMLSax3 package. This is designed to handle badly coded HTML, so with luck it will be just what the doctor oordered.

Right, I’ve just realised what the time is. It’s too late to cary on planning this stuff - must get my head down!