The folks over at Adaptive Path have invited me into their private alpha testing of Measure Map. The setup was extremely easy. They have prepared specific walkthroughs for several different blogging platforms complete with screenshots that are clear and concise. I had my WordPress blog setup in less than five minutes.

It seems that Measure Map is currently focused on providing stats which are important to bloggers, but their proposed feature list will certainly include more and more robust (read: enterprise) type statistics. RSS feed management is coming soon and as it is an alpha, there are sure to be tons more features.

I only spent about 15 minutes with the app, so these are just initial impressions, but like most everything from Adaptive Path, it looks great. It seems to be fast right now; scaling will be something to keep our eyes on. I have not personally used Mint, but I can certainly say that setup is much easier with Measure Map mostly because it’s a hosted app and not something running on your own server.

I hope to post more insight both here and to the Measure Map folks after Thanksgiving. Heading to the folks for a few days and won’t be online, but I like what I see so far.

I have included many of the more obnoxious and common spam words in the blackhole filter of WordPress. So, if you post a comment and it simply disappears for more than 24 hours, it was probably automatically tanked because of some word. Sorry for the harsh rules, but the comment spam is just a big pain in the ass.

I had to turn off all comments for a while. The spammers greeted me with 40 spam comments this morning after 10 or so every day for the last week. I will update when I turn them back on. Sorry for the trouble.

UPDATE: Should work now…maybe that was enough errors to run them off for a day or so.

We are now going to user FeedBurner to manage our RSS feed. Please update your feedreaders, BlogLines, MyYahoo, NewsGator, Rojo, or whatever feeds to our new feed address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpittingLlamas

Thanks for your support!

I am messing with the comments sections of the site as we under attack from trackback spam. It seems that our comment spam blocking attempts were successful enough that now someone has decided to work on WordPress and trackback spam it.

So, for now, problems may arise in the comments area. Trackbacks and/or comments might be on and off as the day wears on. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Update: Trackbacks are turned off for all posts and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Comments are enabled, but will be heavily moderated. Thanks for your patience.

I’m sure you have all noticed by now, we have new clothes again. In the past few weeks we (once again) moved our site to a new host. This time we’re staying put. About 6 months ago we were tempted away from our host and offered a better deal elsewhere. Since we pay for everything out of our pockets, we went with it. It turned out to be a mistake in the long run as some site features were hampered. We are now (happily) back with our previous host.

As a result, over the coming weeks you’ll see some new features come online. I’m in the process of moving the LlamaTails over and will get busy updating them. The forums may come online right after that.

Probably the biggest change you’ll see is the eventual addition of advertising. Yes, we did swear many times that we’d never fall to the dark side, but after 5 years of paying for this site out of our pocket it has added up. We promise to keep any advertising low-key, like including some Google ads and maybe a banner or two. There will be NO pop ups or unders or hit the monkey with the hammer-type banners. We just need to offset a few expenses before wives revolt and toss our PCs in the trash.

More details to come. Until then, keep reading. And let us know what you think!

Without getting into the string of events that caused our forums to dive… we have them fixed up and back online. We are still tweaking them cosmetically, but all is well.

Hop in the fun!

As a test, we have switched our feed over to FeedBurner. It helps provide us with some stats on the feed and lets us make the feed better for you. It shouldn’t affect the functionality of the feed at all.

Subscribe to the feed

In fact, this change should be transparent to those of you using the feed. If you are using our feed, please use the new URL to update your subscriptions. The old URL will continue to work for some time, but I’m not sure when/if we will discontinue it, so check this space for more news.

As with all technology, there’s a bit of a glitch with our forums. I am working feverishly on my real work, so that I can make some time to get this fixed.

Sorry for any inconvenience to the two people who were addicted to our forums. I will post an update when I have them back up and running.

If you can see this post, then the DNS has updated and you have found out new server home. Get comfy and enjoy.

We opted to move to 1and1 Hosting and move away from IMHosted.

We had taken to calling them IMHozed because their 99% uptime guarantee was a joke. I’ve had so much contact with their customer service, I’m on a first name basis with a few of them. So off to 1 and 1 we went. From the looks of it, we can expect wonderful quality.