alexwrege.com

As you probably already noticed by now, I have made some changes to the website. This recent series of changes was triggered by concerns over the loading speed of the website (thanks, Sarah!) and I therefore reduced the number of entries visible on the front page to two. On average I made 1.5 posts a day, so if you are daily reader, you shouldn’t notice any changes really, except for the fact that the page now loads significantly faster. If you usually don’t stop by every day, the sidebar contains a list of recent posts, so you’ll be able to track changes that way.

I have added a permanent ‘recent pictures’ album at the bottom of the page which is powered by flickrRSS. If you have a blog, and don’t use flickr . . . go back to 2003. (Lose Yahoo! Photo Albums, buddy. I promise, you’ll love flickr.)

You might have noticed the sweet new wallpaper. It is really starting to grow on me. I hope you like it too.
The header is smaller now, I found it annoying that the old one wasted 40 % of screen real estate. So, I cut it in half.
All right, now there’s one thing you have to do: This blog now (about a year delayed) has Gravatars, which are Globally Recognized Avatars. What’s that? Well, when you comment on blogs (like this one) you typically have to leave your email address for verification purposes. Gravatars use that email address to link you to an image of your Avatar (you get to upload your own image) and it will then show your picture next to your comment on this and about 2 billion other blogs. Oh, and you only have to do the registration process once. So, Eli, Russ, Jason, Sarah, Torey, and everyone else: go to gravatar.com and get your own!

One final thing, Wednesday and Thursday of this week have been somewhat crazy on the blog, one of my posts (How-To: Cancel AOL) got picked up somewhere on the InterWebs and I have had a worrying increase in traffic on these days. Over 4000 new visitors came to alexwrege.com during these 48 hours. What does that mean for me? Well, the *.mp3 file that is contained in the post was downloaded about 4000 times and at 2 MB in size, I burned 8 GB of bandwidth in two days. Things seem to be returning to normal now and I am hoping that I will have enough bandwidth left to make it through the month. One benefit of this experience was that I now know that WordPress is capable of serving pages in high traffic situations.
My normal readerships is distributed (by country and city) as follows: