So I got you a brand new header picture! I probably won't keep it too long, since I got plenty of material which would make decent header pictures. While visiting vlogeurope in Hungary I learned how easy it is to create panorama pictures using Photoshop and pictures taken with my EOS 40D, so I have experimented a little with this possibility. As a result you can see a few pictures here on flickr. The current header picture was taken at a boat tour in Copenhagen.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 22:24 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

My non RSS-readers may have already noticed the new header picture: It's a view onto the Staffelberg, taken in the evening sun, with the moon in the picture. Also have a look at my older blog header pictures!

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

Sorry, for the German title and attached German song, but sometimes I can't avoid to bring content in my native language I've got us a new header picture yesterday night. It shows the Pacific coast of the US taken from scenic road #1 somewhere south of Monterey. The day it was taken was one of the last hot summerdays I've had in my US holidays. Afterwards, the weather became colder.

Got to admit, that I missed the great wheather, for a while, although the skiing holiday one week later was equal fun. Guess I can't decide, whether I'm a summer or a winter guy. But well - do I have to? At the moment I really enjoy the summery wheather. But for the days the weather won't be so nice, I've attached the video!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life, Media, Web-Site at 13:27 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Attending last year’s vlogeurope conference, some friends there invited me to join Twitter, which is a micro-blogging community. More or less it is just a very limited RSS feed you get from twitter – limiting postings even beyond SMS size to 140 letters. So just another format for self expression – limit what you are doing or thinking to 140 letter. Since the introduction of Twitter a lot of online communities like StudiVZ and Facebook integrated their own micro-blogging tool, giving their users the opportunity to micro blog what they are doing, but none of them so far offers as many compatibility options like Twitter. Currently my new blog posts become announced on Twitter using Twitterfeed, and all my twitter postings also appear in my Facebook account. All my twits, or however you my call this micro blog entries are also displayed in my sidebar.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 21:36 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Hopefully I managed to resolve the ridiculous performance issues now. I've checked my installed event plugins one by one, and found out, that the CSS browser compatibility plugin, the statistics plugin and the Gravatar plugin had a bad influence onto the blog loading times. I deactivated those, and now the site opens a lot faster.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 16:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Currently I'm desperately seeking for the reason of the pretty slow page reproduction of my weblog. It takes about 7 seconds before the page finally begins to load. I moved to a faster server, but almost no improvement. It seems to be a database issue. But somehow I can't get the s9y debugging tool to work properly..

Update: I discovered a problem with a wrong set file path in my css and therefore could optimized the page a little, since loading the style sheet took quite long. But the DB problem persists

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 12:56 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Although the service and the according s9y-plugin exist for quite some time, it took me until today to include it into my Weblog. It is a simple tool, which tries to allocate avatar pictures to comments. There are two methods to accomplish that. First it looks up, whether an avatar icon for the given email address is stored in the Gravatar database. If it is not successful there, it checks the given homepage URL for a favicon. Since the service is free and there are quite some pages using it, I would like to encourage all comment writers to register at www.gravatar.com.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 18:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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)