Well, the server where I host my sites was attacked over the past few days, and it was quite a nasty attack. All my sites got absolutely flooded with comment spam (this site alone was receiving around 1000 spam comments a day), and a few spam comments even managed to make it through the filter.

Things seemed to have calmed down somewhat now, and I’m really hoping they’re going to stay that way. It was very frustrating not having access to any sites — and most of the time I wasn’t even able to get in to delete comment spam.

So if you noticed some odd behaviour here over the past few days, it was most likely because of the attack on the server. If you notice anything else going wrong (I’ve taken some measures to hopefully prevent this from happening again), just drop me a line and let me know. Thanks for sticking it out with me through this attack.

Just a quick post to let you know of a fun new feature I’ve added on my photo blog. It’s basically a little box in the sidebar that lets you view random images from my posts, and a click will take you to that particular post.

While the photos are currently showing up a little weird, due to the fact that they’re two different sizes, I’m hoping to fix that so that they all show up properly in the sidebar thumbnail preview. Also, if you refresh the page, you’ll see a new batch of photos every time.

Also, if you’re looking for more cool images to look at (or interesting stuff to read), check out my friend Greg MacGregor’s site at rewinder.ca — where you can also spend some time admiring his simple, lots-of-whitespace design.

UPDATE: The weird sizing that was happening with the image previews should now be fixed. I have yet to do any testing in Internet Explorer, but things are looking better in Firefox anyway.

I’ve added some photos I’ve taken over the years to this blog — you can find them in the photo section of this site (just use the ‘photos’ button on the top menu).

I recently purchased a Nikon D60, so any photos that I’ve taken this year have been with the new Nikon, whereas any older pictures were taken with whatever point-and-shoot I had available to me at the time.

I’ve published the pictures as close to the date they were taken as possible (given that some were a few years ago, it’s hard to remember the exact date, so I’ve approximated in some cases). Comments are also enabled for all pictures, so feel free to leave a comment if you see something you feel like saying something about.

Currently I only have the pictures in each post, but I’m going to try to add a little bit of commentary at the beginning (even if it’s only a line or two). This will also help me remember where I was and what I was doing when I took the pictures.

I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve been avoiding Twitter for a long time now. It’s not that I’ve had some deep dilemma over the validity or usefulness of Twitter — it’s more that I was worried I’d get engrossed in Twitter-ing my day away.

But I’ve decided that fear of a new technology is never reason enough to avoid it. So in case you’re interested in the minutiae of my everyday life, you can find me on Twitter as ‘lucasmcdonnell’ (yes, I was feeling particularly creative).

I’m not sure what my experience with microblogging is going to bring me, or whether I’ll get bored of it in a week and forget to update Twitter at all, but the experiment’s part of the fun.

I’m determined to try it out at least for a while though, so that I can determine if it’s for me or not. I’ll make sure to post my thoughts on how I’m getting along with Twitter after I’ve been using it for a while.

Angela tagged me to let my readers know 8 random facts about myself. Believe it or not, this is harder than it seems. Here goes:

1. I’m gadget-obsessed — anything electronic usually sucks up a huge amount of my time (and money). Nintendo Wii’s the obsession du jour.

2. I love plants. I have a ton of plants around my home — and I’m always looking to get more. I usually go for cacti, since while I may love plants, I’m chronically forgetful (so they may have to go without water for a long time).

3. I’ve always wanted to go to South America, but I’ve never been there. I guess it’s never too late though.

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Due to the inherent difficulty of trying to maintain two different blogs, I’ve now moved the posts from memetiks.com over lucasmcdonnell.com.

I had initially created memetiks.com in order to focus posts there on memes and meme-related topics, but it occurred to me recently that I didn’t need a separate site in order to write posts about memes and memetics — hence my main reason for moving the posts here.

I’m not sure how FeedBurner is going to treat these new posts, so apologies if any readers of this site get a one-time flood of six or seven posts. Likewise, those subscribers who had tuned in to memetiks.com will be able to pick up anything that was on that site here at lucasmcdonnell.com. Thanks for reading, and hopefully this will simplify things for everyone!

I’ve upgraded the site today to WordPress’ latest version: WordPress 2.5, Release Candidate 2 (RC2). In case you’re curious to see what’s new with the latest version, you can check it out over at the WordPress development blog.

The admin interface has changed substantially (and it seems much more pastel, but maybe it’s just me), with more emphasis being placed on the dashboard as a place to launch functionality from.

Nothing much should change on your end, the site should look basically the same as it did before (with the excpetion of the tag cloud, which looks a bit different, due to the fact that 2.5 RC2 broke Ultimate Tag Warrior, which was outdated a long time ago anyway).

So if you notice anything broken/breaking/on fire, please let me know and I’ll try to get to it as soon as I can (I haven’t thoroughly tested everything, I’m just crossing my fingers that nothing broke). Thanks!

A little while ago, I decided to drop the ‘www’ from this site. I accomplished this by basically redirecting www.lucasmcdonnell.com to lucasmcdonnell.com. Seemed simple enough at the time — and I preferred leaving out the ‘www’ (it always seems redundant to me).

What this also accomplished however, was to drop my Google PageRank from four to zero. PageRank is basically a score that Google uses to determine how high your site should rank in search results (it’s only part of the Google algorithm however).

I’m sad to see my PageRank go — but I’m hoping this is a temporary situation, and that things will go back to normal. There were quite a few plugin issues around making the change, so I’m really hoping I don’t have to reverse the change — not to mention wondering whether messing around with this further will make things worse rather than better. Strangely, www.lucasmcdonnell.com also shows up as PageRank zero now.

Has anyone has had any experience with redirects and PageRank?

In case you’re wondering where I am at the moment: I’ve been in Quebec City for a few days now, and spent a very interesting night at (what I’m pretty sure is) Canada’s only ice hotel. It got a little chilly around 6 a.m., but I survived — and it was an amazing experience that I’d definitely recommend.

Quebec City is absolutely beautiful and a must-see for anyone who lives in Canada or is visiting Canada. I’ve taken lots of pictures, and I’ll try to get some up here on the site in a non-down-to-business related post.

I’m off to check out Quebec’s museum of fine arts tomorrow, and enjoy some more great Quebecois food (although I don’t think it will beat the unbelievable Moroccan meal that I had tonight).

I ended up seeing an exhibit today at the Quebec museum of civilization that really made me think about where we’re headed with connectivity/connectedness and the web in general, especially in urban environments. But more about that when I’m back to non-holiday mode.

I’ve been interested in memes (especially web memes) for quite a while, and I’ve wanted a place to post my thoughts on the subject — so I’ve created memetiks.com! The new site is “about memes, knowledge management and how we learn, interact and innovate through exchanging information, with a particular focus on how information and knowledge transform as they move from person to person.

Since technology also plays a big part in how these transformations happen, the internet is a popular topic as well — including the transitive communities that form, coalesce and dissolve in both the real world and online world, and how, when and why those two worlds intersect.”

While memetiks has started out with a few of my own thoughts on memes and how they affect us, I’m hoping that eventually, I can publish other short posts about memes — so if you have a post (or even an idea for a post) that you’d like to discuss, drop me a line using the contact form here or at memetiks.com (by the way, you can also subscribe to the memetiks feed).