If I can trust WordPress’s post counting mechanism, this is my blog post number 1000!

I wonder whether I’ll ever make it to 10,000…

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As the recent statistics showed, I blog about many topics and in many languages.

I’m sure many of my readers know and expect this (perhaps they even like it?), but I imagine it might be frustrating for some.

I presume you might be interested in my thoughts on British politics without wanting to read about child language development in Danish.

From my own point of view, it is frustrating that I can’t add my blog to an index of political blogs.

So I’ve been wondering whether I should split my blog in two, putting everything about politics in English into a separate blog, and keeping the rest here.

Would it be a problem that the political blog wouldn’t be very active (around a blog post a week)?

Would the political stuff leave a gap at the main blog?

Is it wrong to leave the rest here, or should I really create five or ten blogs?

What do you think?

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Let us first have a look at the languages used (the graph on the right – click on it for a larger version).

It’s clear that English is by far the most frequently used language here, followed by Danish, and the distribution doesn’t seem to change much over time, so the drift towards English that I detected two years ago seems to have stopped.

Although I do occasionally blog in other languages, it’s basically a little added spice rather than a regular occurrence.

I’d love to promise to blog more frequently in other languages, but I must admit that it takes more time and limits my readership, so it’s unlikely to change drastically any time soon.

The situation is quite different when we look at the topics that I blog about (the graph on the left – again, click on it for a larger version).

Politics is clearly the most important topic, but apart from a brief spike during the summer months, it has never come close to dominating the blog – it’s just primus inter pares.

Also, the picture is much less steady. A topic can become rather frequent for a month or two and then fade away again.

Just like last time, I’m not sure what to conclude. I clearly have many interests, and my blog reflects that.

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Just a shame WordPress wouldn’t let me schedule it for 09:09:09. ;-/

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Most newspapers seem to be losing money at the moment.

Their old revenue model doesn’t work, because more and more people are getting their news from the Internet or from free newspapers like the Metro, and they feel they have to give away their articles for free online, but online advertising doesn’t bring in nearly enough money to compensate.

Rupert Murdoch has now threatened to end free access to the online editions of his newspapers, and if he succeeds, most other newspapers will likely follow.

However, I seriously doubt it would work.

There are so many blogs, public-services news sites and other sources of information that people might just abandon the newspapers altogether.

The problem with paying for news is that most newspapers would want a lot of money (something like £100 or DKK1000 for a year’s access), which would mean that most people could only afford to read one or two.

Often pay-per-view is also offered, but again the price for one article is at least as high as buying the printed newspaper in the corner shop.

Also, the newspapers would have to spend lots of money tracking down plagiarism using an army of copyright lawyers, or all their expensive articles will quickly be republished with slight modifications on free blogs.

I don’t think newspapers will ever be able to charge serious money for news and other topics that are available in great amounts on the Internet.

Neither will they be able to make money on editing and presenting news.

The only area that some people might be able to pay money for is well-researched and well-written articles, but such articles will tend to belong more naturally in weekly papers like The Economist than in daily newspapers.

Even if the newspapers ganged up together and created a common pay-per-view model, it would just drive most of their readers into the arms of the free media (such as blogs), and they’d quickly start losing money again.

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The Study Hacks blog has a posting about when and how “real” writers write (hattip: Mailund on the Internet), and it makes the following recommendations:

• Spread out work on an assignment over several days. Coming at it fresh increases its quality.
• During these days, get up early. Probably earlier than you are used to. Say, around 7 or 8 am. (This means these days will be weekdays, probably early in the week so you can avoid temptations to party the night before).
• Have a mini-ritual to jump start the day. It should probably involve coffee. Breakfast. Maybe the morning paper. Don’t take too long.
• Go to the most isolated place possible.
• To get your mind ready to think, review the last pages you wrote.
• Work for two or three hours. Then stop.
• Follow this habit regularly. Don’t write during other times. Don’t write in public places. Don’t start writing the day before.

One flaw I can see is that this was based on a study of professional non-fiction writers, but the blog posting suggests applying it also to other areas such as blogging, and in some of the comments it seems to be seen as applying also to fiction.

However, blogging is often done best once the idea pops into your head, for instance straight after reading an article that you want to say something about. I think a blog that was written for exactly two hours every morning would have a distinctly non-bloggy feel to it.

And while I’m sure many fiction writers are happy to work in a similar fashion, others are known to work differently.

Douglas Adams for instance was known not to write much before the deadline had passed and then to be locked up in a hotel room till he had finished the book.

Also, while this morning pattern suits early risers, I’m sure many people would work better if they scheduled the writing to start at midnight.

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I normally write blog postings by finding a nice Creative Commons-licensed photo on Flickr and using the Blog this button above it.

However, the consequence is that it appears on my blog immediately, without giving me the chance to proof-read it or anything.

It would be much better if the blog postings could end up in the Draft folder at first.

I was searching for a plugin to achieve this on the Wordpress plugin site, but to no avail.

However, I finally found just what I needed here.

I just don’t understand why he hasn’t made it into a proper plugin package – it’s just so useful!

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I got this from Prime Hosting (the company that is hosting this blog) today:

This Thursday, 26th February 2009, we are moving our servers from London to Manchester. Since December 2008 our parent company has been building their own data centre based in Stretford, Manchester, the building is now ready for live servers.

All servers (web hosting, dedicated servers, co-location etc) will be taken offline from 10.30PM Thursday. We anticipate the physical move will last between 6-7 hours from turn off in London to turn on in Manchester. We have hired a van in order to move the servers in one drive, the drive from London to Manchester, traffic and road works pending, will take no longer than four hours.

Our windows services will be moved at a different time yet to be decided so are unaffected on Thursday and will remain online.

For detailed information on the data centre, including build progress pictures, please visit www.manchesterdc.com.

Summary points:

• Funded with the companies own cash and angel investor – No debt
• 20G redundant connectivity back to London
• Capable of holding 145 racks, initial phase is 29 racks
• On site offices available for rent on the first floor
• 24/7 on site security and support staff
• Cold-aisle containment ensures the building is very efficient and uses less power for air conditioning than traditionally built data centres
• Newly built detached office building
• Professionally designed and fitted out by data centre builders inssudlows.co.uk

The construction of our own facility is a watershed moment for all those involved in the company. It provides us with a very secure facility to house our existing clients and huge expansion space for new services. The inclusion of on site staff will also enhance our support capabilities.

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As I hinted to in this blog posting, I’ve had problems with two RSS feeds that I process in the What Others Are Saying box on the right.

I had fixed them once, but I then upgraded to a new version a bit too quickly and lost my modifications.

So now I’ll post my changes here, so that they’re saved for posterity.

First of all, my beloved Phyllis insists on writing her titles in all-caps, which looks crap when mixed with other postings. This code takes care of this:

if (stristr($url, 'phylsblog'))
        $title = ucwords(strtolower($title));

Secondly, John Wells’s blog stores the date in the title field in a non-standard format, and the title in the description field:

if (stristr($url, 'phon.ucl.ac.uk')):
   $day = substr($title, 0, strpos($title, ' '));
   if (strlen($day) < 2)
      $day = '0' . $day;
   $month = substr($title, strpos($title, ' ')+1, 3);
   $month = $months[$month];
   $year = substr($title, strpos($title, ' ', 4)+1, 4);
   $issued = $year."-".$month."-".$day." 00:30:00";
   $title = $item['description'];
endif;

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I’ve just upgraded WordPress to version 2.6.2 (from 2.6.0).

I used the Automatic Upgrade module, and it did everything for me – I just needed to press next step repeatedly.

As far as I can tell, everything is working well. Let me know if anything seems to be broken.

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