While I have had houseofmike.com for several years today is the 1 year anniversary of houseofmike running WordPress. At some point I got bored with the previous CMSs I ran, geeklog, xoops and whatever else I played with. I got bored or couldn’t figure out how to do something with it got pissed and dumped it.

I have been very happy with WordPress and the available plugins for it.
Hopefully the site will make it to 2 years.

I didn’t want to do this, but the spam has gotten to be too annoying to deal with.
If you want to post in the Shout Box you need to a registered user now.
It doesn’t cost anything, you won’t get any spam from me and it’s very easy to do.
Just click on the Register option under the Menu and put in your info.
Thanks
You can still post blog comments anonymously.

Over on the right hand side of the webpage down a little is a shout box. Anyone can leave a comment on whatever they want. One of those cool blog things.
It uses Ajax which makes it even cooler. So it updates in almost real time. No need to refresh the page. The plugin is written by Andrew over at Jalenack.
Have fun!

Stats, stats, stats, we all love stats. At least I do.
At the beginning of January I started using awstats to keep stats on HouseofMike. I figure I share some of them for the month of January.

So for the month of January there were 638 unique visitors.
The 15th had the most visits for one day at 71.
Fridays had more traffic than any other day.
The 7pm hour had more traffic than any other hour.
United States was the top country, followed by Great Britain, Canada, Philippines and Germany.
Googlebot was the most active bot with 5,605 hits, taking 86megs of bandwidth, Yahoo Slurp was second.
87.8% of visitors used Windows, 74.5% used XP. Linux visitors were at 5.6%, Macintosh at 3.6%.
72.8% of visitors used Microsoft Internet Explorer, 70.5% used version 6.
19.2% of visitors used FireFox, 10.3% used version 1.5
Netscape visitors were at 0.4%, Safari 2.5%, Konqueror 1.5% and Opera at 0.8%
Top three screen resolutions were 1027×768 at 54.4%, 800×600 at 19.1% and 1280×1024 at 10%.
90.2% of search engine traffic came from Google, MSN was second at 2.7%.
The top three keyphrases used on search engines were finger frenzy 23.9%, colonix at 3.2% and Sharon tendler at 2.7%
The top three keywords used on search engines were finger 8.1%, frenzy 8.1% and yeti 2.4%.

What are excluded from these stats are any visits from my connection at home and from my connection at work.

WordPress 2.01 has been released a month after 2.0.
114 Bugs were fixed in the update. The update went smoothly on HouseOfMike, everything still seems to be working.
A summary of the update.
* You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
* Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
* Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
* XML-RPC uploading works.
* Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
* Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
* Imports now use much less memory.
* Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

I have changed the layout of the site a bit. I took out about all the positional divs and setup the layout of the site with tables. Yeah, those “evil” tables. Personally I think working with tables is easier than divs. I guess it is what you know. The divs were giving me issues with the sidebars. If the center content did not have enough horizontal space to display, the sidebars would push the content down toward the bottom of the page underneath the sidebars, quite annoying.
With the table layout if there isn’t enough horizontal space I get the horizontal scrollbar. I’d rather have the 5 pixels or so of horizontal scroll instead of the big blank spot in the middle of the top of the page.
I like the boxes I have the sidebars content in, I think they make the site look a bit cleaner.

Still have to do something with the footer of the page, and the photo album banner is messed up. It does validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional, atleast the frontpage.

I have added a Games section to the website.
These will be flash games that I find enjoyable. The games can be accessed by selecting Games from the menu on the left.
The first is the original Penguin game. The game became so popular it spun off variants of it and even made it to the xbox and cell phones.
The next one is a remake of the original Penguin game called Part 1, a little nicer with different penguin physics.
Part 2 involves hitting the penguin with a snow ball on to a target.
Part 3 involves throwing the penguin as high as you can, with a little help from some Seals.

More information about YetiSports can be find at YetiSports.org.

I have had houseofmike.com for I think over a year now. It was not always wordpress. I messed around with geeklog and xoops a little. One thing that has never happened at houseofmike is getting crawled by googlebot. Every few months or so I submit my site to Google. I review my logs, and not once has googlebot stopped in and said hello.
I do use adsense and googlebot stops in for that page, but never will it crawl the site.
I do use Google’s sitemap feature which gets me into Google’s blogsearch.
msnbot and yahoo’s slurp bot, crawl the site at least every other day, but not googlebot

I have checked the web archive to see if the previous owner(s) content would have caused this and it doesn’t seem to be the case.
It just complexes me why this is happening since my new site I put up flyersfancentral.com was crawled a few days after submitting it to Google.

How have I offended thee, o’ googlebot?

They say that blogs that are focused on a specific topic do better than ones that do not.
Who ‘they’ are I do not know.
But I listened to ‘they’ and setup another blog.
No, houseofmike is staying the same old crap, well for the most part.
I took all the hockey related posts and put them on my hockey themed blog.
FlyersFanCentral.com
Flyers, hockey and stuff like that, so visit!

My graphic designing just sucks, I know it and well someone else noticed too.
Jesse was like, you need a new banner. So he did one up quick.
The banner at the top is his doing. It isn’t fancy pancy, but does look better than the old one.
Thanks, Jesse!