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For 2023 (and 2024 ...) - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))
Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more

Yesterday, there were 10,000 downloads of this image from our web site, and if you click on the image, you'll get a full sized copy and see that it's 1600 x 1200 pixels and nearly a megabyte in size. So that's some 10 Gbytes of traffic! I know I'm quite well followed in some quarters, but this is ridiculous!.

A quick analysis of my log files, and I see that the picture is being called up from URLs such as http://www.plurk.com/song4u, and the IP addresses seem to point mostly to Taiwan ... it looks like my buffet lunch picture is hotlinked from someone's "Plurk" account, and my image has been used in their plurking. Does this sound a bit like Twitter and Tweets? Am I *really* out of date and I should have moved on from Twitter to Plurk ... perhaps to Jaiku ([link]) which is the Google offering, I understand ... or to Identi.ca, Qaiku or Brightkite? I found a comparison on Twitter v Plurk [here], which actually says that they're both microblogging services but not really comparable, and I then found a Wikipedia page which compares them(!!) and various others, [here].

I'm "on" Twitter - my automatic feed is [here] but is seems to be patchy in how it performs (must look at that - the intermittent bugs are always the worst!). More importantly, I'm [here] on LinkedIn ... and I'm blogging daily and on various forums too. So I'm going to skip over the other "microblogging" sites for the moment - there just aren't enough hours in the day.


So what am I going to do about all those hits that I'm getting from Taiwan? And what are they costing me? We're very fortunate that we have plenty of bandwidth on our hosting; unchecked for the month, it could perhaps have been an expensive issue, but I've chosen to move the picture to a new URL and replace it with the one seen on the right of this paragraph - down from 1 Mbyte a go to 10k per go. There's little point in me putting up too much of a sales message (I've nothing to sell to Taiwan), and if I started slinging mud or putting up adult images, some of the mud could come back and stick on me.




OK .. Tweet Feed solved. I changed my Twitter password but had left my script unaltered. Duhhhh! I've written before - [here] - about automating a Twitter feed. I haven't shown you the error message that you get when you use the wrong password in the script - it's:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<hash>
  <request>/statuses/update.xml</request>
  <error>Could not authenticate you.</error>
</hash>


I HAVE written, before, about the need to check return statuses in production code, and I commend this problem as a good example of why you should do so!


(written 2010-01-05)

 
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G905 - Well House Consultants - Blogging and Blog Administration
  [1] First Jottings - (2004-08-05)
  [6] Blog v Forum - (2004-08-07)
  [18] Wanted: More hours in the day - (2004-08-18)
  [141] Too technical? - (2004-12-05)
  [145] A comment on comments - (2004-12-09)
  [177] Blogs come of age - (2005-01-14)
  [185] Who am I? - (2005-01-21)
  [204] The confidence to allow public comments - (2005-02-06)
  [231] Feedback as lifeblood - (2005-02-28)
  [245] I'm not blogging it - (2005-03-14)
  [359] Chicken soup without the religion - (2005-06-26)
  [390] Moderating wiki, blog, and forum contributions - (2005-07-26)
  [405] Horse's Mouth is a year old - (2005-08-07)
  [410] Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page - (2005-08-12)
  [425] Caching an XML feed - (2005-08-26)
  [508] Comment, please! - (2005-11-28)
  [671] Both ends of the animal - (2006-04-05)
  [876] Making pages clearer - easy Disability Discrimination Act Compliance - (2006-09-23)
  [1000] One Thousand Posts and still going strong - (2006-12-18)
  [1077] In answer to 'am I glad I started a blog' ... - (2007-02-12)
  [1203] A Fresh horse - (2007-05-24)
  [1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
  [2000] 2000th article - Remember the background and basics - (2009-01-18)
  [2192] Copy writing - allowing for the cut - (2009-05-21)
  [2449] Four aspects - Chamber, Transport, Courses and Hotel - (2009-10-11)
  [2517] Blogging accuracy - open invitation for any corrections - (2009-11-29)
  [2751] Going off at a tangent, for a ramble - (2010-05-04)
  [2823] Where have all the bloggers gone? - (2010-06-24)
  [3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
  [3163] Twitter - the special use of @ # and http: in tweets - (2011-02-09)
  [3186] How to add a customised twitter feed to your site - (2011-02-27)
  [3208] Links for social media, microblogs and business networking - (2011-03-20)
  [3514] Microblogging - what I should have tweeted in the last 48 hours - (2011-11-10)
  [3759] The five oldest blogs and the horses mouth - (2012-06-09)
  [4000] 9 years, and 4000 articles on - (2013-02-09)
  [4121] Has your Twitter feed stopped working? Switching to their new API - (2013-06-23)
  [4292] The Horse is back! - (2014-09-15)
  [4568] Moderation - and the tendency to over-moderate - (2015-11-02)
  [4714] The technical article feed continues - personal updates more proactive on Facebook now! - (2016-10-30)

G503 - Well House Consultants - Newsletter and publicity
  [48] PHP - onwards and upwards - (2004-09-14)
  [57] Posting 1000 letters! - (2004-09-21)
  [281] What they are saying about our OF COURSE newsletter - (2005-04-16)
  [336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
  [458] Final courses of '05 coming up .... - (2005-10-08)
  [480] New look to website - (2005-10-30)
  [734] Keeping customers informed by email - (2006-05-26)
  [904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
  [1087] Telling a story in different ways - (2007-02-20)
  [1090] Too many instructions, too much detail - (2007-02-23)
  [1284] An update on the West Wilts show ... - (2007-07-30)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1673] Spam Filters ... are working! - (2008-06-11)
  [1698] Dealing with The Press - (2008-07-06)
  [2051] A Presentation about our company - web and PHP - (2009-02-23)
  [2124] Building down expectations - (2009-04-09)
  [2244] What should a web site cost you? - (2009-06-16)
  [2388] `Of Course` is back! - (2009-08-31)
  [2873] Another toot of the trumpet - (2010-07-16)
  [3153] Points West to Belfast - (2011-02-01)
  [3165] Journalism 101 - (2011-02-11)
  [3354] Sales and Marketing - adding advertising to the product - (2011-07-11)
  [3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
  [3984] 20 minutes in to our 15 minutes of fame - (2013-01-20)
  [4266] Facebook marketing - who are we reaching? - (2014-04-23)

G209 - Well House Consultants - Keeping up to date
  [82] Keeping up to date - (2004-10-10)
  [83] Geek Cruising - (2004-10-11)
  [86] Talk review - Idiomatic Perl, David Cross - (2004-10-12)
  [143] Network Camera - (2004-12-07)
  [160] Review of the Autumn - (2004-12-22)
  [250] We dont stand still - (2005-03-18)
  [396] The next technologies - (2005-07-29)
  [1488] New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses - (2007-12-30)
  [2032] Mobile Internet - an alternative to hotel WiFi - (2009-02-09)
  [2078] A lot has changed - but the memory lingers on - (2009-03-12)
  [2352] Printed Directories - the start of the updating season - (2009-08-12)
  [2940] Training course locations - Melksham, UK; Buxton, UK; Lake Constance, Germany; Venice Italy, the USA and India - (2010-08-30)
  [3003] What will we be teaching in six years? - (2010-10-17)
  [3469] Teaching dilemma - old tricks and techniques, or recent enhancements? - (2011-10-08)
  [3653] What is happening in 59 days time in Melksham? - (2012-03-14)
  [3755] Cruising on the Mersey Ferry? - (2012-06-07)
  [4200] Endorsed Perl, Python and PHP training - Tcl, Lua, Ruby and C too! - (2013-10-24)
  [4314] PHP training - refreshed modern course, backed up by years of practical experience - (2014-11-16)


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Some other Articles
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Extra MySQL course dates (2 day course, UK)
Excellent staff make for excellent hotel
Bright day, snowy day
Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more
Efficient debugging of regular expressions
Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year
The future of MySQL
Training comparison to QA Training, Learning Tree, GB Direct.
Moving the product forward - ours, and MySQL, Perl, PHP and Python too
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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