Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).
This caught my eye for two reasons.
(via Lane)
link rot n.
The natural decay of web links as the sites they’re connected to change or die.
Calpundit has an excellent summary posted on how to link to New York Times articles without having the links succumb to link rot. This should be required reading for all bloggers, IMNSHO — citing sources is important, and it’s best if the sources don’t later disappear.
Update: Even better than Calpundit’s method (as good as it is) is the New York Times Link Generator! Just feed it the URL of a NYT story, and it will generate the link rot proof version of the URL for use in your weblog. Thanks to Aaron Swartz for providing this, and to Jason Kottke for pointing it out in Calpundit’s comment thread.
Calpundit also breaks down the most archive-friendly (i.e., least susceptible to link rot) sources:
Prompted by the Localfeeds Seattle service (which gives me an RSS feed of weblog posts from people close to me in the real world), I’ve just added my GeoURL location identification to my main page — I had it on my old Long Letter blog, but hadn’t thought to put it in here on Eclecticism yet. Silly me.
This post is mostly here to give me an excuse to post the GeoURL button, which allows me to see who’s near me in the real world.
A wonderful story from The Onion: Mom Finds Out About Blog!
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as “horrifying,” Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.
“Apparently, Mom typed [Widmar’s employer] Dean Healthcare into Google along with my name and, lo and behold, PlanetKevin popped up,” Widmar said. “I’m so fucked.”
In an e-mail sent to Widmar Monday, Lillian reported in large purple letters that she was “VERY EXCITED :)!!!” to find his “computer diary,” but was perplexed that he hadn’t mentioned it to her.
Upon receipt of the e-mail, Widmar mentally raced through the contents of his blog. He immediately thought of several dozen posts in which he mentioned drinking, drug use, casual sex, and other behavior likely to alarm his mother.
Luckily, something I don’t have to worry about it. I already know that Mom reads (and comments on!) my weblog, and by now, she should be quite aware that I occasionally imbibe alcohol (though not the “beers so dark they’re served with a knife and fork” that she and my brother enjoy), I experimented with drugs for a few years (and stopped quite a few years ago), and that I take every single one of my multitudes of daily sexual encounters with random strangers very seriously, and not casually at all.
(via Lane)
Nifty — I have no idea what the selection criteria is (quality? frequency? content? entirely random?) but it seems that I’m being highlighted as “Feed of the day” on Feedster. So…hello to all of you who wander my way!
It seems I’m not the only person in the blogosphere who’s recently faced surprising consequences due to the content of their weblog. Shelley Powers, aka Burningbird, had a rather interesting conversation with the ~~IRS~~ [California franchise (tax) board]{.underline} this morning…
The person I talked today was compassionate, and extremely helpful — but she was also very thorough.
Before she responded to me by calling me, she mentioned that she gone out to my weblog, this weblog, and read the entries scattered about in it where I talked about my financial situation. She mentioned about reading that thanks to unemployment, I can at least keep my car; about the other things I put online that I didn’t think I would hear back from the mouth of a member of a representative of a governmental tax organization.
I’m not faulting her or shouting out cries of ‘government invasion of privacy’ just because she was thorough. What privacy? I put all this online for anyone to read. Am I going to blame the government, or my creditors, or anyone else for that matter because they read what I write?
She’s since gone back and deleted any posts dealing with her financial situation — and I don’t blame her one bit. It must have been quite a startling revelation when she heard that from the lady she was talking to.
More and more, we need to face the fact that barring password protection, there is no such thing as a “private” weblog. Once the information is there on the ‘net, and available to be read, you can bet that it will be, and not always by those you expect it to be. Some people might say that anonymous blogging is the answer, but I’m not convinced of that — for more on that, read the conclusion to my Fifteen Minutes of Fame post. Best to just accept the fact that anything you put out there can can be found, assume that it will be found, and post accordingly.
(via Scoble)
Since getting Slashdotted, my bandwidth has been going through the roof. On an account rated for 5Gb/month of data transfer, that on a normal month would use roughly half that amount, I hit about 90Gb of data in the last five days of October, and over the first four days of November have already hit about 40Gb of traffic. Crazy.
After realizing this, I did a bit of investigating, and realized that each of the posts that have been getting the most traffic (Even Microsoft wants G5s and Of Blogging and Unemployment) have picked up so many comments that they were up to ~300kb each! At that rate, each page would only need to be loaded three times to produce 1Mb of data transfer — and with the amount of traffic I’ve been getting, that number grows quickly.
In an attempt to try to slow things down a bit, then, I’ve had to both disable any new comments on those posts, and disable the display of the comments I’ve already received, which brought each of the two pages down to around 60k. Turning TrackBack pings off brought the page size down even more, to around 6k each — far better. If things die down, I hope to be able to re-enable at least the display of the TrackBack pings, if not the comments (some of them are pretty entertaining, if not rational) next month sometime. Until then, though (and quite possibly permanently), they’ll have to stay ping- and comment-free.
Earlier this week, I discovered that my site design had been appropriated without acknowledgment or credit by a third party. Upset about this, I posted about it. Some of my readers were able to provide me with an e-mail for the likely party, and I e-mailed them. I also cc:’d an administrator at the school.
While this action resulted in the site being first removed and then redesigned, it has been pointed out to me in the comment thread to that post that I managed to do this person essentially just what had just been done to me — a mistake that could have easily been taken care of quickly and quietly became more public than had ever been expected or desired.
What can I say — they’re right. I shouldn’t have been so quick to take the actions that I did. Already overstressed and overwhelmed from the attention my site has been getting of late, I reacted too quickly and without enough thought.
The following is the latest in a series of e-mail messages I have been trading with the person in question, expressing my apologies to him.
Thank you very much for accepting my mistake, please notify me of the appropriate amount of money I should paypal to you in order to repay you for bandwidth my site took by using an image served from your server.
Don’t worry about that — chances are it wasn’t terribly much, and as I’ve been getting an insane amount of traffic lately due to my recent experiences with Microsoft, my bandwidth limits are so ridiculously shot at this point that any traffic you might have added would be just a drop in the bucket.
It has been pointed out in the comment thread for my post that I may have jumped the gun in cc:’ing your academy superiors in my initial e-mail without first seeing if you would remove the site on your own. In retrospect, I should have given you the chance to remove it on your own — the only defense that I can give is that as there was no current e-mail address listed when I found your site, I was not certain I was contacting the right person, and at the time I found your site, I was somewhat overwhelmed from the attention my site had been getting and was somewhat touchier than I usually strive to be.
In my experiences with Microsoft (detailed earlier on my website, though it’s entirely possible that that is how you found my site in the first place), I made a mistake, and was immediately given the most extreme punishment possible. I then turned around and essentially did the same to you. For that, I most certainly owe you an apology as well.
I do hope that this hasn’t caused any major problems for you at the Academy (and as such, will also be cc:’ing this apology to the same contact person at the Academy that I did my initial e-mail). We’ve each recently made mistakes that have become more public than we expected or would have wanted them to. Hopefully each of us can learn from this in the future.
Again, good luck to you, and best wishes.
Everybody makes mistakes. Of late, I’ve been making my mistakes loudly and publicly — not something I’d really recommend to anyone. ;) Hopefully I can stop this trend before it gets any worse!
One of the many things that I’ve enjoyed about the numerous comments I’ve received over the past few days is that I’ve gotten quite a few compliments on my site design. As I’m generally not much of a designer (trust me on this one — my previous attempts were not horrid, but certainly not great), that’s always a nice compliment to get.
However, there is a potential downside to this that I hadn’t foreseen — that being people ripping off your site design.
Even better (or worse, depending on how you look at it) is how I found out. Normally, things like this aren’t always easy to spot. I found out simply because as I was looking through my referrer logs, I noticed a link that I hadn’t seen before — not uncommon over the past couple days — only it didn’t seem to be pointing to one of my pages. Instead, it appeared to be pointing to itself. Odd.
So I bounced over to take a look. Imagine my surprise when I found my very own site design staring me in the face! I was not at all happy. Then I pulled up the source code for the site — and started laughing. Just to give you an idea:
meta tags still hold all of my information: this site’s tagline, RSS feed, and FOAF file.title arguments are still the same.The best part of all of those, though, was that he’d not altered the CSS stylesheet at all — so he was hotlinking the banner image of the Seattle skyline that I use (while it was displaying on his site, he was still pulling it off of my images directory here on TypePad)!
So, in an effort to be polite, I searched around the site for an e-mail contact link so that I could ask him to take my design down. Unfortunately, he hasn’t provided one. So I’ve been forced to resort to slightly more drastic means.
A quick recode of my stylesheet to replace my banner image here on this site with an identical one, so that it won’t be disturbed, and a little bit of quick and dirty Photoshop work on the image that he’s linking to, and instead of my skyline graphic, he now has a banner proudly displaying to the world that ~~his site design was stolen from me~~.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. But this — this was just clumsy, stupid, and poorly executed. I hope he finds another design soon. Just watch your referrer logs — his next design just might be yours!
(In addition to my screenshots, Phil has provided .pdf screencaptures on his site — thanks!)