My name is Sam. I live in St. Louis, MO, USA. I'm moderately skilled in web design. I drive a performance motorscooter. I'm not a compu-zealot. I use a Mac, a PC, and a Linux box, all of which are highly modified or home built. I don't smoke. I have part of a degree in Physics. I consider myself a Buddhist. I'm a vegetarian. I'm a conscientious objector. I dig many musical styles. Yeah.
This site is as much as hobby for myself as it is something for you to look at. I use it as a testing ground for web technology, and a playground for interesting programming and usability concepts. Here I will document many of the things I tweak the page with, so that people can learn about them if they desire. This section will get more added as I get to writing it up. In the meantime, if you would like to know how I did anything, please get ahold of me and I'll hip you to the details.
The main technology behind the site is the application Moveable Type, which is a blogging/CMS tool. It uses mySQL on the backend, which is a SQL database server. Moveable Type itself is written in Perl. I highly recommend it, as it is very flexible, very powerful, reasonably easy to install, easy to use, and free for non-commercial use. It is also under active development, and getting better all the time. It supports a plugin architecture that has opened a mighty floodgate of creativity, with numerous plugins available.
Nearly every page uses PHP to include other files, and process directives before the page is served up to you. You can be happy with the fact that each time you load the page, it is generated on the fly, just for you.
The "Around the World" section is created with the assistance of the MT-RSS Feed plugin. It gathers RSS files from my regular reads, and displays exerpts from their most recent posts. The feed is updated once an hour via a cron job.
Here are some stats from my logs about how many comments I get, and how my posting frequency goes up and down. You might not find it interesting, but maybe you do! I certainly find it so, and thus, it is worth posting.
| Month | Entries | Comments | Comments/Entries |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2005 | 2 | 0 | 0.0 |
| September 2005 | 1 | 0 | 0.0 |
| July 2005 | 2 | 7 | 3.5 |
| June 2005 | 1 | 4 | 4.0 |
| May 2005 | 2 | 1 | 0.5 |
| April 2005 | 1 | 3 | 3.0 |
| March 2005 | 2 | 5 | 2.5 |
| February 2005 | 3 | 9 | 3.0 |
| January 2005 | 4 | 9 | 2.3 |
| December 2004 | 4 | 20 | 5.0 |
| November 2004 | 4 | 16 | 4.0 |
| October 2004 | 5 | 12 | 2.4 |
| September 2004 | 5 | 18 | 3.6 |
| August 2004 | 5 | 19 | 3.8 |
| July 2004 | 6 | 23 | 3.8 |
| June 2004 | 5 | 13 | 2.6 |
| May 2004 | 10 | 22 | 2.2 |
| January 2004 | 10 | 36 | 3.6 |
| December 2003 | 7 | 39 | 5.6 |
| November 2003 | 16 | 42 | 2.6 |
| October 2003 | 18 | 190 | 10.6 |
| September 2003 | 16 | 53 | 3.3 |
| August 2003 | 13 | 21 | 1.6 |
| July 2003 | 9 | 15 | 1.7 |
| June 2003 | 15 | 27 | 1.8 |
| May 2003 | 17 | 45 | 2.6 |
| April 2003 | 15 | 31 | 2.1 |
| March 2003 | 23 | 28 | 1.2 |
| February 2003 | 26 | 41 | 1.6 |
| January 2003 | 28 | 38 | 1.4 |
| December 2002 | 14 | 33 | 2.4 |
| November 2002 | 29 | 55 | 1.9 |
| October 2002 | 51 | 90 | 1.8 |
| September 2002 | 31 | 103 | 3.3 |
| August 2002 | 28 | 33 | 1.2 |
| July 2002 | 7 | 13 | 1.9 |
| Total | 435 | 1276 | 2.9 |
The following statistics are gathered and parsed with the assistance of MTWordStats and the Perl module Lingua::EN::Fathom.
Total number of words in 381 entries: 128997
Total number of unique words in 381 entries: 11552
Probability that any given word will be unique: 8.96 percent
Average number of words per entry: 338.57
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 63.83 out of 100
Higher reading ease scores indicate more comprehensible writing. A score between 60 and 70 is considered ideal for adult readers. For comparison, the average Reading Ease score for comic strips is 92. The Readers Digest has an average score of 65 (by design, of course). The Wall Street Journal has an average score of 43. The Harvard Law Review has an average score of 32. Standard Insurance Policies have a dismal average score of 10.
The Flesch Reading Ease Score is calculated by the following equation:
206.835 - (1.015 * Average_words_per_sentence) - (84.6 * Average_syllables_per_word)
The formula requires only sentence and syllable data, but creates a very reproducable and
predictable score. Flesch developed the algorithm over several years of research, and earned
a Ph.D for the work.
