Having put it on my bookmarks toolbar, every so often when on a website I will press the button and see what errors I get on a website. I don’t tend to dig deep on the page, it’s just nice to see how crap some of the major players on teh interwebs really are. For example, loading iGoogle and pressing the buttons gives me sixty (yes, 6 0) errors and nine warnings. Facebook (when logged in on the homepage) isn’t so bad with 10 errors and two warnings.

Daze’s blog gives just 23 warnings, although he is in the middle of a new theme design having broken the old one. I think the worst I have found so far though is ePhotozine:

Eeeeeek!

Just in case you can’t read that it says 409 errors, 13 warnings. Damn that’s mucho errors!

Why is getting your site validated against the W3C standards important? Well, it means that generally your website will display how you would expect it to in a Standards Compliant browser (anything except Internet Explorer (up to 7, 8 apparently plays by the rules!). Apart from that? Unless you’re an anal code junkie it’s really isn’t that important – as long as your website looks right in most browsers and the code isn’t bloated to buggery, don’t worry about it!

For your information, before you start pulling this blog apart, I have 19 errors, all created by either the Footnotes WordPress plugin, the SHARETHIS WordPress Plugin or the code given by YouTube to embed its videos on the blog.

Strangely, I have just installed Habari to play with and apart from the validator not liking the “hr” tag the system passes the test!

Does your blog or website validate? Do you care?

Occasionally I see it used to good effect and start to wonder about it, then see it used to its worst effect and remember why I have never tried it.

Daze has used it to great effect in some of his car images (check his Flickr set) and then we get to see things like this where the “photographer” has employed the technique just because he can. It’s more like a novelty.

Which is exactly what Jim over at JMG Galleries thinks.

The next reason why I hate HDR photography is that most people doing it approach its use as a novelty rather than an applied solution. In the process most images are completely butchered. This is most especially true of landscape and nature photographs. Much can be said for artistic style and there are a few photographers out there that have used HDR processed files rather creatively, but by and large most photographers are using HDR as a “gee whiz neat” function that does nothing other than create throw away images worthy neither of repeat viewing or print.

Jim goes on to suggest some alternatives to using HDR which are very valid and useful techniques to learn anyway. If you do nothing else, then go and read that post.

I would then suggest that you have a look at some of his photos and subscribe to his RSS feed. You won’t regret it!

TT suggested a splash of colour. Well, the logo now has a “splash”. Ok, it’s the colour for the original Thundercats logo, slightly toned down. Does it need more colour?

Phil thinks minimalist would be great, and while I agree, I kinda like the flexibility of the two sidebars at the moment. I have made them thinner and forced them more to the right to give more white space.

I am hoping to install Alex King’s twitter tools plugin and use it to create posts which will become the asides. It means that I can have an integrated Twitter without having to use the flash (which I hate) or the Twitter RSS feed which takes about three hours to update.

Daze also mentioned that he saw an error message about the search page in Internet Explorer. I haven’t figured out what that is yet but am going to start turning off plugins to see if they are causing the error.

So, what do you think?

WP Shortstat gives slightly more accurate information:

Since 29 March 2006When I installed shortstat

Unique visitors: 17301
Hits: 229804
RSS Subscribers (average): 102

My post popular search referrals:

eight treadmills: 243
funny shit: 162
London Underground song: 112
maria school: 93
cornell finch: 79

These are the most popular search results. I also get (amongst others) the following: wife sucks balls, donkey fuck,saddam executionI don’t even remember mentioning this!!!,”sebastian weetabix”.

Sebastian Weetabix? W.T.F??

My Flickr statistics nowhere near match the above:

Photos: 200 I don’t have a pro account and have hit the limit. I might buy one soon though!
Views: 2617

I am listed in Technorati at position 95,081, with 68 links from 34 blogs. Must do something about that…

I think if I were to narrow the number of subjects then I would (eventually) get more readers, especially if I chose the right subject. I’m not going to do that, I write about what interests (or riles) me and I think that both my regular readers would lose interest if I specialised. Anyway, I already have a specialist blog for my photos. I just need to advertise it more, finish the theme, oh and put some new photos on it!

Sounds good right? you’re thinking Canada or Sweden or the like right? Wrong. Sweden or Canada I could have coped with. The job’s in Moscow. Don’t think I’d be popular with my family or friends if I took that job. Although, my friends might be glad to see the back of me, I would get crucified for taking Rach. I also wouldn’t be able to ride my bike for most of the year!

On an entirely unrelated note I have decided that I’m not gonna photoblog for the time being. I have a flickr account and all of them get uploaded there. I’ll put the flickr badge up the top of the screen so the visitor can get to the account easily and see my photos. It just seems so much hassle to do and I’m running out of decent pictures to blog. There’s one called The River scheduled for tomorrow and I’ll still put the occasional photo up that I’m really proud of but otherwise you’ll need to visit the flickr account to see them.

Update: Ok, after a blatent piece of code theft from Daze I have ripped out his “Latest Photos” code and the associated CSS and dumped it into a widget in the sidebar. I think it works better than the flickr badge. If you want to know how to display your photos like you see in the sidebar, let me know and I’ll post the code and CSS. :)