faq – Williamo's Blog

Subversion: This client is too old to work with working copy ‘XXX’

I thought I’d thoroughly read this article, but upon reading it again today, I noticed a key point I’d missed. If you can’t upgrade your SVN client, do a fresh checkout with the older client. I’m going to have to try this now…

This client is too old to work with working copy ‘XXX’

The full error message is:
This client is too old to work with working copy ‘.’; please get a newer Subversion client.

You will get this error message once you have used a Subversion client linked with a higher Subversion version, and then try to execute a command with a Subversion client linked with an older version, e.g., you used an 1.4.x client on your working copy, and now you try an svn 1.3.x client on the same working copy.

The reason for this is that Subversion 1.4 and 1.5 upgrade the working copies transparently on every command. But once the working copy format is upgraded, older clients can’t access the working copy anymore because they don’t know the new format.

The only solution to ‘fix’ this is to upgrade whatever clien

via This client is too old to work with working copy ‘XXX’ | TortoiseSVN

Flickr Explore FAQ (from Big Huge Labs)

This is a great reference on what Flickr Explore is, what Interestingness is, and how to understand both:

What is Explore?

Explore is a Flickr feature with the intent of showing you “some of the most awesome photos on Flickr.” Photos are automatically selected by computer according to a secret algorithm called Interestingness (see below for more about that).

Is Explore a showcase for the top Flickr photographers?

No. It’s for photo viewers, not the photographers. It exists so that, at any moment, anyone who wants to view interesting photos can go to Explore and have a reasonable chance of seeing something interesting. Does that imply that photographs not in Explore are uninteresting? Of course not. There are many, many wonderful photos uploaded to Flickr each day that aren’t selected for Explore. But to serve its purpose, Explore only has to include a small sampling of all of the photos on Flickr (currently at 500 per day or about 0.005% of the daily upload volume). And Explore tries to show photos from as many different people as possible to create a diverse selection.

Explore is for the viewers. It’s a way for Flickr to show the world a sampling of what is being shared there. It’s there for those who are new to Flickr, who are lost in the vastness of it all and don’t know where to begin. It is not a “best of” listing of photographers. It is not a popularity contest.

What is Interestingness?

Interestingness is what Flickr calls the criteria used for selecting which photos are shown in Explore. All photos are given an Interestingness “score” that can also be used to sort any image search on Flickr. The top 500 photos ranked by Interestingness are shown in Explore. Interestingness rankings are calculated automatically by a secret computer algorithm. The algorithm is often referred to by name as the Interestingness algorithm. Although the algorithm is secret, Flickr has stated that many factors go into calculating Interestingness including: a photo’s tags, how many groups the photo is in, views, favorites, where click-throughs are coming from, who comments on a photo and when, and more. The velocity of any of those components is a key factor. For example, getting 20 comments in an hour counts much higher than getting 20 comments in a week.

(continued via Frequently Asked Questions / Scout)

PostSecret: How It All Began

In January 2004, I started the “reluctant oracle” project. Every Sunday, I created an released a new work to be discovered. They were discovered by people serendipitously. The story found local, national and international media coverage.

The last message from “reluctant oracle” bore the message, “You will find your answers in the secrets of strangers.” The next Sunday the PostSecret began.

Cool story!
http://www.postsecretcommunity.com/news-faq/postsecret-story

WordPress.com: How do I get more views and traffic?

This is pretty self-serving, but could be useful to you if you’re a blogger as well:

How do I get more views and traffic?

If you feel like you’re not getting the amount of traffic to your blog that you’d like, there are a few things you can do to try bring a few more folks to your blog. Here’s a quick summary.

Bug your real-life friends

Almost everybody has 10-20 friends and family members they can coerce into reading their blog. Send them reminder emails when you update, talk to them about it when you meet in person, just generally encourage it as a new form of communication between you guys. Often having a really small audience of people you care about is better than having a million visitors and not knowing any of them.

Read and comment on other blogs

Use a search engine like Sphere to find the people who care about the same stuff you do. Then subscribe to their blog using a RSS reader like Bloglines and get to know them a bit. When you see an article that interests you click through to their site and leave a comment with your thoughts.

Link to other blogs

Just like you love getting links, so do other folks. (Remember, blogging is all about people.) When you link to another blogger or blog entry they’ll often find your blog through their stats, Technorati, or a pingback and come to see what you had to say. If you’re interesting, they may even subscribe to you and leave comments just like we suggested you do above.

(continued at http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/11/15/more-traffic/)

WordPress.com: How do I send out update pings?

This is really cool; I was trying to find a “fix” for the outdated instructions on Technorati.com to have my blog ping Technorati and found this article instead. Nice work, WordPress!

How do I send out update pings?

Many services like Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, Google Blog Search, and many others want a “ping” from you to know you’ve updated so they can index your content. In most blog software and blogging services you have to manually go to different websites to send let them know you’ve updated, and we’ve had a few questions from people who want to know if they have to do the same on WordPress.com.

Nope! We handle it all for you. When you post we send a ping to Ping-O-Matic – http://pingomatic.com – which then distributes it out to 15+ different services, all automatically. We want things to be as easy as possible for our users, so it’s another thing you just don’t have to worry about. 🙂

http://faq.wordpress.com/2005/09/28/update-pings/