I've made a few tweaks to Nuketown's information gathering capabilities, updating a newer verison of the Google Analytics module for Drupal that includes the ability to track downloads and monitor Drupal search terms. I've also added the FeedBurner module and redirected the primary feed and the podcast feed to FeedBurner.

The upgrades should be transparent to everyone; the old feeds automatically forward to the new FeedBurner ones, so no one should have to resubscribe to anything (or so say my tests with iTunes and the Radio Active feed earlier today).

The ultimate goal here is to get a better grip on download numbers for Radio Active. Analog, Dreamhost's stat crunching program, tells me that Nuketown averages about 8,500 MP3 download requests a month. That seems crazy high to me, and I have no way of knowing how many of those requests failed, and how many successfully completed.

It did raise my curiosity however.

Thus, the new FeedBurner and Google Analytics modules, both of which should tell me more about what's really going on. I've also changed Nuketown's access.log from a 3-day log to a 30-day one, and with all three tools at my disposal I should be able to get a better idea of what Radio Active's audience really is.

I've been spending a little too much time lately deleting spam user accounts from Nuketown. These are accounts that you, gentle reader, never see; they're created by spambots hellbent on promoting all manner of products, and I kill them before they can stick their spammy little necks out into the sunlight.

However, it was a manual process and, depending on how many I got on a given day, a time consuming one as well. So I've decided to deploy Drupal's Captcha module, and configured it demand answers to math-based questions as part of the account creation process.

Only new users will see the captcha; returning visitors won't have to answer the question to log in. It's also protecting the "contact us" form; anonymous users will have to answer the question, registered users will not.

Now to see if it actually stops the spammers...

Content’s been a little light around Nuketown lately, between the holidays, being crazy business at work, and the three seasons of Stargate: Atlantis that my friend Cory lent me. This has create a pent of demand in the writing portion of my brain, which is screaming for more work. To that end, I’ll be endeavoring to get back to a daily schedule on Nuketown, writing at least one new post a day throughout April.

It’ll be a mix of blogging, reviews, essays and podcasts – in short, everything you expect, just more arriving more frequently. I’m hoping that combined with the new and improved comment system, it’ll help liven things up around here a bit.

I've installed a new comment system on Nuketown. It used to be you needed an account on Nuketown to post a comment; now anyone can. What stops the site from becoming a spam-infested hell is a module called Askimet, which checks the messages against a central spam catching server. It flags the incoming spam, and prevents it from being posted.

There's still an advantage to being a registered user -- you can post without having your comments moderated. Also, the site will automatically sign any of your posts for you. Anonymous users can post comments without an account, but I need to approve anything before it goes live.

I'd appreciate it if folks could post a few comments replying to this post so I can see how well works.

It’s been a quiet fall around Nuketown. I didn’t realize just how quiet until this morning, when I was surfing around the archives and saw just how many days I didn’t post in September, October, and November.  Granted, November was lost to writing the novel, but the earlier months weren’t all that much better.

Discovery Channel has Shark Week. I want Nuketown to have a Monster Week. I thought about doing this last summer, but simply didn't have the time with Luke having just been born. This time around though, I really want to due it.

The idea is that for one week, Nuketown will be all monsters, all the time. I'll have written reviews of seven classic modern era monster movies, some editorials on what makes a good monster movie, reviews of a monster book or two, links to monster goodness around the web, a DVD-style commentary track for one lucky film, and perhaps an "Actual Play" session featuring adventurers battling some monstrous horror using the Savage Worlds rules. It'll be an homage to the creature features of old ... but focusing on flicks released after 1975.

I'm going to be upgrading Nuketown to the latest and greatest version of Drupal at some point over the next two days (hopefully tonight, given that I've laid in supplies of Mountain Dew and fried chicken, and the family won't be home until late). I'm testing it on local version hosted by ye ol'PowerMac first, but if something unexpected happens when I update the live site, well, you've been warned.

Should the worst happen, and the site goes down, emergency updates will be posted to The Atomic Age, my Blogger backup blog.

I've pulled together all of my fatherhood posts from the time Jordan was born until now, and grouped them into a category called, simply enough "Geek Dad". These posts have proven popular over the years, and they've been languishing in obscurity since the redesign. Now they're back and easy to find -- just go to the "Blog" section and look for the "Blog Categories" list in the right-hand column.

Yeah, it had to happen eventually. I've created a MySpace account, partly as another way of promoting Nuketown and Radio Active, partly to play with something new, and partly so I know what the hell I'm talking about when I'm asked about it (or pontificating on my ol'soapbox).

MySpace has given rise to some of the most butt-ugly pages the Web has seen since those ancient days of 1997 when the infamous marque and blink tags still roamed the Internet. It's not a place I intend to spend a huge amount of time hanging out on, what with Nuketown needing to be fed and cared for, but it will be yet another outpost of the ol'thermonuclear burg (like The Atomic Age and might just land the site a few new readers.

After six months of hard work, a year's worth of speculation, and a decade's time spent on the Web, the new Nuketown is online. The redesigned site features a new look that evokes earlier iterations of the ol'thermonuclear burg, while updating it with a slightly glossier feel. New features abound on the site, which is powered by the open source content management system Drupal.