Recently Google update its pagerank database. The page rank is a Google intern measure to judge the relevance of a homepage. Until recently the page rank of maljaysia.de was “4” which is quite good for a private website, and might have been a result of many blogger friends linking to maljaysia.de. After the last update my page rank was reduced by 50% to “2”. I didn’t have a clue why this happened and thought it would be an arbitrary thing, Google would just do from time to time, like that episode, where my friend Jan was thrown out of the Google index. But it appears that there was another reason. From time to time, I’m doing paid reviews for the Swiss service Trigami, which I consider a decent and interesting option for bloggers to gain some revenue from there hobby. But reviews for Trigami also include links to the reviewed website/company/product. Google obviously considers those links as “paid links” and has policies which forbid those links. So my Weblog was punished and my pagerank reduced. I could have added an attribute (rel=’nofollow’) to those links, preventing search engines to follow those links, but in my opinion – if I willingly (even paid) create such links, the relations should also be recognized by search engines!

Anyway, although the pagerank of maljaysia.de can be neglected now, it seems to rank higher on search engines. Since two weeks the average number of visits to my page climbed from 75 to over 100 at the moment.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 20:37 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

I'm currently evaluating new designs for my image gallery. There are a lot of designs available for Gallery2. I currently have my eyes on the design "PGLightbox". It features some nice mouse over effects and all in all puts more focus on images than on surrounding information (which my current design features). So far I've changed an undersection of my gallery to this theme. There are still some issues with this design, and it is working far from flawlessly but I would be very happy if you would have a look at it, and communicate your impressions!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 20:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The partitioning of the columns in my blog has been bugging me over the last few months. I had two almost same sized columns to hold my widgets, but the widgets required different amounts of space. The tag cloud had to little space, resulting in two many line breaks, while the blogroll or the random image had a lot of free space next to themselves. As a way out of this dilemma I changed the width of these columns and moved the widgets.

Also Chrisi was so nice to update my s9y-script to the newest version. This should improve the trackback/pingback abilities.

What do you think about the positioning of those widgets? Any comments?

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 13:13 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

At the moment I feel blackmailed by Flickr. It let me upload a lot of pictures – but over half of them are being held prison by the system. I had to learn, that additionally to the upload limit (which kindly has been raised from 20 to 100mb a month) and the fact that images of free users can only be accessed in low resolution, there is a limit on the number of pictures that are been shown by the system. This limit is 200 pictures. That’s a lot if you only post pictures occasionally, but not if you want to make a huge number accessible. This is what I tried after vlogeurope, because the audience for whom I had taken the pictures would have had easier access to the images – until the limit hit.

So Flickr is a free service – how can I complain about the limitations of something that is free? Well, the only thing I need Flickr is to enable me to interact in a certain social network. I’ve got my own stand-alone gallery up and running, so far holding 22985 items, it suits me very well, I’ve got all degrees of freedom I could ever dream of using an image gallery– but it is not connected to a social network. Flickr is a social network, into which I’ve already been sucked into slowly step by step.

So, will I pay the ransom? I’ll decide later..

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 02:05 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

I’ve been looking for a header picture like the current for quite a while now. Unluckily the pictures of bands with crowds I’ve taken before somehow sucked put into the 5:1 format I need for the blog header. Stupid enough the header picture still is far from perfect. It is taken with my Canon EOS 400D camera and the bulk EF-S 18-55mm lens. It was part of a series of pictures I took with a fixed exposure time of 1/10, since I intended to get some movement of the crowd clapping, but guess little shorter, or a lens with an image stabilizer would have done better.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 23:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

My last big update on my blogroll was almost a year ago. Within such a timespan a lot of stuff happens inside the blogosphere. So I had to remove quite a few Blogs since they are no longer active. Changes I noticed:

• Martin Röll canceled his weblog
• Anna finished her thesis
• Schoschi is back from Sweden
• Timo back from Poland
• Florian finished his New Zealand trip
• DrLoves musings moved from Kopfspucke to Koffeinjunkie
• Blogscott no longer informs us about his love to the morph club

To compensate the losses I've added some new blogs, that appeared on my radar. Have a look at Citysitting and Michl's Blog - I found them worthy to be listed.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 20:30 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

In preparation for my visit to the Southside Festival I've added a new feature to my blog. Using serendipity's popfetcher-plugin and the O2-MMS-to-E-Mail feature I'm now able to send blog postings directly from my Sony-Ericsson mobile!

With this feature I'll be able to blog my experiences live from the festival! Those entries will be filed under the newly added category "mobile". I'm currently struggeling a little bit with the parsing script, which allows me to post only the picture attachement, and now text.. But I'm faithful that I'll get that thing fully running until Friday

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in mobile, Web-Site at 19:26 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

It has been a while, since I’ve been using my little scratch file, to create a new blog entry. I was too busy creating text for my diploma thesis, that I’d have enough time and muse to write extensive entries here. But I have got a few creative ideas and I plan to write them down here

You might already have noticed that my blog has a new toy – I added the nifty plazer widget to my sidebar! Now you can trace my current location… Currently you will notice, that I successfully moved in at Katrin’s place at the moment. Since my friend is on holiday in South America for the next 5 weeks, I can use her apartment to spend more time in Bamberg.

After one week here, I managed to settle in here, and almost forgot about the stress of the last weeks. It’s time for an energetic restart. Gotta get my job applications going! Cross your fingers, that I’ll be successful soon.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life, Web-Site at 18:07 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)