.: ShaolinTiger - Kung-Fu Geekery :.

Yah so I finally got around to revamping this site, I've been meaning to do it for ages, I was still using WordPress 2.0.10 and hadn't even moved up to 2.2 branch yet.

Plus I was getting really bored of the old Chinese takeaway font header and the whole thing was too cluttered, it was giving me a headache.

This theme has been up since January 1st 2006 when I switched over to WordPress from bBlog. This was v2.0 of shaolintiger.com.

I did like it when I first did it, but moving to WordPress I think I went a bit overboard with things, especially the 10-mile long sidebars.

The loading time was a bit of a pig, it's much faster now..I feel anyway

Previous to that I was using bBlog since October 2004 when I launched this blog, that was v1.0 of shaolintiger.com.

I still really like the simplicity of bBlog and the template I was using.

bBlog was just getting bogged down with spam and lack of updates...that's why I jumped camp to WordPress, I can't say I've regretted it at all. I feel totally comfortable with WP now and power all of my sites with it.

I've updated all the plugins to the latest versions too, included proper tagging and a tag page.

Most of the clutter is gone including the long ass sidebars with all the useless junk. I've just kept a few things I like and find useful.

I've added a few more web2.0 widgets so you can stalk me easier and of course got a new header image.

It's about time I updated the About Me page aswell I think.

If you notice anything wrong or something out of place, or anything missing from v2.0 let me know in a comment or via the contact form.

I have to say I do use Technorati quite a lot, mostly as an ego tool with the nice watchlist

Da I can watch "Shaolin Tiger" "ShaolinTiger" and "http://www.shaolintiger.com" to see who is linking me or talking about me.

They are doing a great job of tracking the movements in the global blog arena, how many new blogs are formed, how often people update and how popular certain blogs are.

They do seem to have some capacity issues lately though as I get 'too busy' messages quite frequently and their "Last updated" was totally messed up for quite a while (It showed this blog as last updated 198 days ago..when I update it pretty much daily).

Darren Rowse of Problogger even bitched about it in January.

What I am looking at today though is the quarterly summary they do, which shows the HUGE increase of bloggers, and the persistency rate has also gone up.

What Technorati have found is that the number of blogs doubles roughly every 6 months! There are 60 times, yes 60 TIMES more blogs than there were 3 years ago (Technorati currently tracks 35.3 Million weblogs).

Technorati currently tracks over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That's an increase both absolute and relative terms over just 3 months ago, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were active. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity.

In addition to that, about 3.9 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly.

Some pretty interesting statistics.

ALL YOUR BASE AM BELONG TO BLOGGERS - w00t