Paul O'Flaherty

What A Week

I love weeks like this, where everything unexpectedly starts to come together.

Sara and I have been plugging away at out pet project, humor site Daily Shite, for months now. We’ve been watching it grow slowly and celebrating as we’ve hit various milestones. We’ve watched with pride and more than a fair few glasses of wine (to celebrate the occasion) as 100 views a day went past, then a 1000, then 5000, 10000 and 20000. We whooped and cheered like we’d one the lottery when we broke our first 50000 day, and last night we sat back in sheer amazement as we soared beyond our first 100000 (one hundred thousand) day.

This post isn’t to pimp out Daily Shite although you really should visit and join the Facebook page while you’re at it. It’s to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who has visited, stumbled and dugg posts, retweeted us and pimped us to their friends. To our authors for their contributions and to our readers and friends who have been emailing and sending contributions via IM.

Most of all I want to thank Sara. She’s done a ton of work behind the scenes, not just putting up posts and pimping Daily Shite left, right and center and deserves more credit than I for us hitting this milestone.

Now, bring on our next challenge – the 200000 day

Screwing Everything Into Place – Scrw.us

I mentioned our personal URL shortening service Scrw.us earlier this week when I was talking about how services like Bit.ly may fragment the web.

Sharing all of our content and the stuff the we come across on the web through Scrw.us has given us some interesting insights into what people are likely to click on.

It often amazes me that what I think will be popular rarely is. In fact, I have about as much success rate in predicting the popularity of our shared links as you might have predicting what Paris Hilton won’t wear next (but we’ll have to exclude underwear from the predictions as that’s just too obvious).

Today we launched the Scrw.us blog which, besides providing information about the Scrw.us service, will also provide insights into traffic trends, click through rates and popularity etc…

Today we’ve posted our first round up of the most popular links (based on clicks) to go through the service since we launched it 14 days ago.

Bearing in mind that currently the only shares are those created by Sara and myself (as it’s a private service) it’s interesting to see that the correlation between clicks and popularity is not always as concrete as one would expect. Sometimes posts have low click through rate but have done insane traffic as they’ve been shared on other services as well, which of course Scrw.us can’t track.

“Screwed This Week: First Edition”, has all the info on the top 10 ten shares of the past 14 days including numbers of clicks as well as an explanation of how we intend to move forward and bring you weekly roundups of the best content.

As a side note, if you’re feeling slightly irreverent and would like to have your blog posts shared through Scrw.us drop me a line and we’ll see about getting your stuff on there. Just be aware that we’re not accepting any old crap. Cranky, irreverent gits will always get preference, followed by great content

Back Up, Speeding Up And Moving Forward

After a few days of intermittent downtime and extreme frustration, all of our sites are working as they should again.

Our web host moved our accounts to new servers in order to improve performance but, as is the way of things, sods law came into full effect and the move designed to make everything better, resulted in 4 – 5 days of intermittent downtime and bug fixing.

Between the downtime, cussing, pulling my hair out and ranting like a loon, we’ve had the opportunity to look at the operations of our blogs, how we organize our working time,  posting frequency and other such things.

The end result is that we’ve restructured everything which will allow for a higher posting frequency both on this blog and Suburban Oblivion, while also keeping the 6 posts a day going up on Daily Shite.

It also means that we have a lot more time for working on new projects, adding features and enhancements and a whole bunch of other stuff, while still getting through the day to day business of having lives away from the computers.

Some of the first changes we’ve made is to remove some of the advertising and analytics scripts from PaulOFlaherty.com and Daily Shite. The long story made short, is that we had multiple analytics scripts such as Google Analytics, WordPress Stats and Woopra, as well as scripts for inserting contextual advertising running every time a page loaded.

By removing some of these scripts and some of the advertising we’re both speeding up the page load times and hopefully providing you, the readers, with friendly sites that aren’t laden with obtrusive advertising.

I’ll keep you up to date with future changes and updates as they happen.

Thanks to all of you for sticking with us during the move and downtime

Clearly Google thinks I need religion!

I was just over working on Daily Shite, (one of the pet projects of mine and Sara’s) when I was taken aback by the adverts being displayed on the site.

We’re currently using Google AdSense to monetize the project and have 3 advertising spots in the sidebar.

Today 2 of them were video ads for the Tom Cruise cult Scientology and the other is text ads for “God Pictures” and “Christian Dating Atheist”.

That strikes me as a fairly strange choice of adverts for a page where today the dominant content involved:

• A New Approach to Potty Training (bondage involved)
• Kate Gosselin Dating video (okay, maybe that one I can understand)
• Two deer humping to sell you condoms
• Inflatable Ingrid, every garbage mans fantasy!

See where I’m going with this? Clearly Google thinks I’m a very bad man that needs saving!

WordPress Comment URL extraction plugin?

I would like to have a list of the URL’s used by everyone who’s ever commented on this blog. I know I could dig through the pages of comments and extract this information manually but that really is too much of a chore.

I’m wondering if anybody knows of a plugin that will output the URL’s used by commenter’s into a text or OPML file. The plugin doesn’t have to output commenter’s names or anything else, just the URL’s.

Any ideas?