Here are the uptime results for the Blog Ping Relay Server survey I’m carrying out for October 2006. For details of the methodology take a look at last month’s results. I am currently monitoring the following three ping services: Autopinger, Blogflux, and Ping-o-matic.
About a month and a half ago I mentioned that I was going to start monitoring ‘ping relay servers’ to see what sort of performance and availability they get. There were only three that I could monitor at the time: Autopinger, Blogflux, and Ping-o-matic.
I’ve been monitoring the perfromance and availability of some of my websites for two years now. By measuring things like how long it takes to connect to the web server, how long it takes for the web server to respond, and how long it takes to download all the content, I’ve been able to improve the performance of several websites, including of course, BritBlog.
The website monitoring service that I use also alerts me by SMS and EMail when the web sites die, or if they fail to respond in the expected fashion. This has been particularly handy for BritBlog which runs on a rather temperamental server!
Well as I alluded to in my last post, I’m now back from my holiday to Croatia. Had a great time: weather was perfect (sunny and dry with no humidity — just how I like it), food was good, drink (notably the local wine) was very good, and we got to see quite a lot of the Crotian coast in our time there.
We flew in to Rijeka airport in the North of Croatia and spent a couple of days driving down to Dubrovnik (via Šibenik and Split). After spending three days in Dubrovnik we went up to the island of Hvar, spent a few days there (had a great day on a small hire-boat that cost just twenty five quid for the day), then drove back up north to the Island of Krk, ready for the flight back.
As you can probably imagine, I took rather a lot of photos and I’ve started to filter them down. They’ll all appear on flickr in due course, but this time I’m trying something a little different: I’ll be geotagging my photos. I picked up a very small Garmin Geko 301 GPS receiver which I left in my camera bag, so I should be able to work out where I was everytime I took a photograph. (It was giving me accuracy of 12 feet and less with WAAS turned off, which I think is pretty amazing). Just in case there are issues with that, I also recorded the location from which I took lots of photos from as waypoints.
It will be interesting to see if this works, and I’m looking forward to seeing other people photos taken from the same places!
I saved my daily tracklogs (logs of where I had been) on the GPS, and it looks like you can publish them to your website and replay them on Google Earth. I’ve not worked out how to do this, but I’m guessing it’s quite straight forward. So watch this space - you’ll be able to re-live every detail of my holiday :-p
The worst thing about holidays is coming back to email. I’ve already deleted over 3000 spam mails that were missed by my spam filter, so if I’ve missed anything from anyone, then sorry! I’ve got quite a lot to follow up on too, which is a bit of a pain.
Anyway, must press on with work (or rather lunch now).
Well my Garmin Trip and Waypoint manager software arrived this morning, along with my USB cable to connect my Geko 301 GPS to my computer. I was hoping to download my tracklogs off my GPS and onto my computer so that I could (a) take a look at the data, and (b) look at geo-tagging the photos I took on Sunday.
Alas things are never straight forward. The USB drivers fail to install, and my device manager shows an error:
If I double click the USB-Serial Controller and reinstall the driver, it eventually fails giving me the following error message:
Cannot Install this Hardware
The hardware was not installed because the wizard cannot find the necessary siftware.
This is dispite me using the USB drivers on the CD, and trying with the latest drivers from Garmin. Most annoying.
To confuse me even more, I can’t even get it to work on the serial port! Don’t know why that is, and haven’t got time to find out why now, but if I ever get an answer I’ll let you know the solution. In the meantime, if you’ve experienced similar problems and have solved them, do let me know!
Over the weekend I picked up a little GPS device (a Garmin Geko 301
Anyway, geotagging my photos is something I want to have a play with, and while I was thinking about this the idea of GeoBlogging popped into my head. It’s often said that you’ll never hav an original idea, and this is one of those occasions. Still, I thought it would be a great idea to geo-tag your blog posts so that people can find posts from people near them, or blogs from events or holiday destinations etc.
This is something we’ve been trying to do with BritBlog, and are in the process of dropping postcodes in favour of GeoURL-style metadata in a blog template:
< meta name=“ICBM” content=“51.2327,-0.3309″ />
< meta name=“DC.title” content=“Mark Sweeting’s Blog” />
< meta name=“geo.position” content=”51.2327;-0.3309″ />
If you could do this on a per-blog-post basis rather than just on a blog basis then you’re half way there. I was thinking microformats would be the correct approach for this, but you’d need better blogging software support for wide adoption. You’d also need to think about how you mark up RSS feeds.
As I mentioned above, it turns out this isn’t a new idea. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff then you probably want to do a google on the topic, and take a look at GeoRSS. I’m in a bit of a rush at the moment, but if anyone has any useful tips/links or thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.
I’ve just turned on the rank icons for technoranki now, so people should see the icons on their blogs change straight away. The scores are a bit rough at the moment because of the limited amount of data in the system, but this should improve over time.
Well almost. I’ve finished moving everything to do with technoranki over onto a new server (from the old BritBlog server), so once the DNS updates have filtered through this should all be pretty much up and running.
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