average admins

Ok, after a month or so of technical difficulties, lack of article posting, and personal stuff and business, I’m making a comeback to the average admins. The site has been completely fragged and reinstalled with a fresh copy of the latest WordPress release, version 2.3.

You can post comments once again. I mean, actually you. Not just the SPAM bots any more…

The site will be themed again real soon, probably over the weekend. Until then, enjoy the default WP theme. After I make sure everything is working as expected I will start pushing some plugins back into the mix.

So, if any of my contributors are still out there, please feel free to hate on me for the downtime and get to positing!

Until next time…

I moved the average admins site to a new host today… I should have a lot more control over the site and more bandwidth to boot.

If you had an @averageadmins.com email address before and would like to have it still, please leave a comment and I will get it back on there for you.

Some things may not work like they did before. I took down the original AA blog so some links to the old blog may be broken.

Until next time…

So, today starts a new month, and with this new month comes a fresh slate of bandwidth to be sucked down across the Internet for no apparent reason. Our bandwidth usage for the past 2-3 months has been horrendous. Chris and I have looked through the logs in months past and all of the traffic appears to be legitimate. So, being that this is a self funded project, paid for by myself, I guess it will continue. New hosting with more transfer limits would be nice, but it probably isn’t going to happen and I hate that.

average admins has been what seems to be a great resource since November’ish 2005. We have had some great topics on here as well as some interesting questions and responses. Maybe the tides will change for the bandwidth bandits and they will start sucking down some other site with “suck worthy” content (no pun intended). So, if this month is anything like last month, enjoy the average admins site until around the 9th or 10th of the month… Then, it will more than likely be offline again due to bandwidth limit exceeded… I wish I could theme that error message so that it would at least have our look and feel…

Until next time…

Welcome to 2007! I hope everyone enjoyed themselves last night on New Years Eve. I also hope none of you guys did anything I wouldn’t do…

I want to thank all of our contributors and readers for giving the average admins a great first year in 2006. We have had some useful posts and some very encouraging and helpful comments from you, the readers. I hope that 2007 is even better than 2006 as far as blog content goes and our local aa meetings.

If anyone, local or abroad, would like to start contributing to the average admins blog, please let me know (jeff[dot]cross[at]averageadmins[dot]com). We are looking for anyone who is constantly looking for the best utilities and better ways of doing things with hardware and software. We’re looking for people who have come up with real world solutions to real world problems that may assist other admins and users out there. Again, if you are interested, please contact me directly or post a comment to this entry and I will follow up with you (just make sure you are either registered with a valid e-mail address or use a valid e-mail address when posting).

I hope everyone has a prosperous new year in 2007. Be safe and be blessed.

Until next time…

It seems that over the weekend I am no longer able to access the Dashboard of the blog administration section. I also get 0 bytes returned to the browser after making a post. I just disabled automatically notifying rpc.pingomatic.com when a post is made and the trackback feature for links in average admins posts.

Anyway, here goes… I’m trying to test one theory: The page craps out when trying to contact other sites, i.e. when pulling RSS feeds from other sites for the Dashboard or when trying to notify ping services of a new post or other blogs of trackbacks.

Testing…

…for like the whole couple of days or whatever!

Due to the overabundance of SPAM we have been receiving in the comments the past few days, anyone without a previously approved comment will have their comment held for moderation and will not immediately appear on the blog.

For those of you that are new to the site, please don’t let this discourage you from commenting. We enjoy everyone’s input here at aa but not when they want us to by “cheap meds” or view sites about forklifts.

Hopefully this will cut down on the SPAM we have been receiving. I will do my best to approve valid posts waiting in moderation in a timely fashion.

Until next time…

In the #averageadmins IRC channel this morning, a few of us threw the idea around to have lunch today, so we are. 11:30 AM today at Big Jake’s on Arkansas Blvd we will eat some good food and hang out a bit.

If you’re interested, come on out. It’s kind of like an Average Admins meeting without the meeting… or an agenda… or a months notice…

I upgraded the blog tonight. Please let me know if you notice any funny business!

Thanks,

Jeff

We will have a face-to-face meeting this month on Wednesday, June 21st, at 11:30 AM. The meeting will be held at Big Jake’s BBQ on Arkansas Blvd. A link to a Google map is provided below.

Big Jake’s BBQ Map

Bring your appetite and anything you’d like to discuss. There is no agenda so we’ll just eat good food and hang out if nothing else! RSVP if possible!

Jeff

I figured this would be as good a month as any to post some web site statistics. I think the most interesting are the countries that visit our blog.

I don’t know what the guys from Russia are doing but they account for 19% of our site traffic this far in the month of April. Other countries include (ordered by the number of hits, highest to lowest) the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Belgium, Italy, Greece, France, Brazil, Portugal, Japan, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Mexico, Finland, and Singapore. All other countries reported by Webalizer are related to the US. These countries listed, and the US, are the top 30 out of 67. I think that’s very impressive. Either there are people in other countries interested in our blog content, or the SPAM cartels of other countries are attempting to harvest e-mail addresses!

So, we have had 90,872 hits so far this month averaging 145 hits per hour, 3495 per day, and 236 average visits. The top two articles that were accessed this month were FreeNX on FreeBSD with 2051 hits and What Not to do With a Video iPod and FreeBSD with 639 hits.

As you can see, our visitors are not (or are potentially not) just from Texarkana and the surrounding areas. There is also no way to tell how many are subscribed to the RSS feed as aggregators only hit the site once per refresh, not once per subscribed user. If you have something you would like to document, a how-to you would like to publish, or anything else you would like to contribute to the blog, please register an account and shoot me an e-mail (jeff[dot]cross[at]averageadmins[dot]com) and I’ll get your account set up to post articles on the blog.

Until next time…