Assuming too much?

I got sort of a business proposal in the mail today. In the domain name business. The situation is, my domain name seems to be too attractive not to make a bid for. To quote the email:

Dear owner of dionaea.com,

I noticeded that your domain “dionaea.com” expires in a few weeks, which means that it is going to be publicly available soon. I’d like to buy this domain name before it expires.

I assume that you are not interested in keeping it for yourself.

I can buy this domain for $60 plus any renewal related expenses. What do you think?

I’ll leave out the name of the sender, that’s not important.

So, I get an offer for my domain. Fair enough. If one want something, it’s always worth a try asking if there’s a chance getting it, for some amount of money or other. I don’t mind getting an offer.

What gets to me though, is the followup, where the sender of the mail assumes that I’m not interested in keeping the domain for myself. Uhm, excuse me? I not only have the domain name, I also have a web site under that domain, and it’s most certainly in use. This blog admittedly hasn’t been updated in a while, but that’s just one part of the site. In order to be able to do all I do on this domain, I’m most certainly interested in keeping it for myself. Anyone’s more than welcome to visit though, and hopefully get some pleasure or use from these pages.

So sorry, the domain is not for sale. It will be renewed, as usual.

I’d like the full text, please

Up until now, I’ve just served part of the full text in the feeds from this blog, so that you would have to visit to read it all. Why did I do it this way? Well – I’m not sure… Getting visits to my pages are nice of course, and there’s always chances you’d see and try links to other parts of my site, maybe even the store (which I of course heartfully recommend ;))

Then again, if you should become interested in what I have to write, you’d have to read it first, and to be tempted to read me you’d better get a real taste, and… Well – from now on, it’s full text feed. I hope you’ll enjoy.

Firefox users like unicorns

UnicornIt happened first in July, and it’s happening again now: The majority of Firefox users that visit my site, are drawn to my page with unicorn poetry. That means that Firefox users are attracted to unicorns, right?

Of course, I can read my statistics a different way, too: There was a surge in Firefox users in July, and again now. They’re referred to my site – or that unicorn poetry page in particular – from a blog that is a bit popular: boingboing.net. Yep – I’ve been boingboinged for the second time. To the same page, from the same page. 🙂

I’ve moved!

When moving, there’s often a lot more to take with you than you expected, and once installed in your new home, there may be some small things that you don’t seem to find again, or something. So it is with me.

OK, I’ve only moved my site to a new host, but there is the small things here and there that may not be in place yet. I struggled a bit with the databases I had started to use, but I managed to get them over and populated. It looks like they work now – well, except for my Norwegian blog… I haven’t quite figured why that one should behave different, but I don’t worry much. It’ll work out in the end.

Maybe there is a few more things to do (just remembered that I have to check the hi-score table of the breakout game – it needs to be writable… ;)) but things seems to fall in place.

This post was mainly written to spread the joy I feel right now because of that. 😉

The Bitty browser and my updates by feed



The Bitty browser looks like a cool feature – but how should I use it? For quite some time – or a couple of days a least – I didn’t have any idea for any useful use for my site.

I still don’t know if it’s anything useful, but at least I had an idea: Maybe I could use it as a preview of what my updates-feed for the site is like? The blog(s) aren’t mentioned there, as they have their own feeds, but the updates of the rest of the site – rare as they are – are duly in place.

Maybe I could make a page which links to the different feeds instead of just showing the updates feed, but…

Check it out – is it a good idea?

Something weird

What is going on here? I’m looking at my statistics, and find that for April Opera is represented by 16.2% of the browsers visiting my site. Those who have read my previous numbers see that there were quite a growth in Opera usage the first four months after I changed host, but it didn’t continue to grow like that. It stopped at 7-8%, with a dip down to 5.6% in March.

That Opera 8 was released in April could of course be an explaination – but these numbers were obvious early on, long before the release, so the explaination must be somewhere else. It will be interesting to see how May will turn out.

To continue with the numbers for the browsers I presented in January:

January February March April>
Internet Explorer 70.7% 65.0% 70.2% 63.3%
Opera 7.0% 8.2% 5.6% 16.2%
Firefox 9.6% 9.4% 10.0% 10.5%
Mozilla 2.3% 3.9% 3.3% 1.8%
Safari 2.2% 1.6% 2.1% 1.4%
Netscape 1.4% 1.2% 1.1% 0.9%
Konqueror 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 0.2%

I’ll be crossing my fingers and hope that Opera won’t dip down again – at least not by much.After all, it is a terrific browser. 😉

Gravatars added

While this blog isn’t really swamped with comments – at least not genuine ones – it may be hard to notice the new addition to this blog, as it is a plugin concerning comments: Anyone who will spend their time to comment any post now, will have their comment graced with their gravatar (if they have one.)

Do you wonder what a gravatar is? It is a Globally Recognised Avatar – an image you use to represent yourself and may be recognised by when you post where this is implemented. My gravatar is the image to the left here.

Is it useful or just neat? Well – a bit of both, I guess, and more to boot. An image may be easier to remember than a name, but it also spruce up the pages with some images.

WordPress 1.5 is out

Well – version 1.5 of WordPress is now out and I thought, maybe I should upgrade? Never having done this before, I wasn’t sure what to expect; would it be easy and pain free, or would I have to spend a long time carefully hacking away?

I think I spent more time reading the instructions to figure out what to do before I started, than I used at the update itself. And no problems. Well – apart from a little one that puzzles me, concerning making my old design as a template; that one has had a few problems, but it doesn’t matter. What matter is: I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5 – and it was easy.

I can look into making and tweaking templates later. 🙂