Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
1 (one) 40 GB Apple iPod: Approximately \$500.
\$500 divided by 50¢ apiece: 1000 people.
Attempting to get 1000 people to PayPal me 50¢ apiece:
Of course, the real question is whether gangsta rappers are going to chip in…
Update: Just to clarify, this isn’t my project — at the moment, I’m quite happy with my 10Gb iPod — rather, this is Phil’s.
Today marks my three-year anniversary of weblogging. Technically, I’ve actually been at this for a bit longer than that — since sometime in 1998 or 1999 — but at that point I was just updating a static HTML page by hand, and much to my dismay, I lost my archives of those pages some time ago. So, for all practical purposes, I’m just dating back to my first archived post, from Nov. 25 2000.
I’ve been slowly working on moving all of my old archives over into my TypePad account for the past couple months, with a goal of having them all online by today. Thankfully, that happened, and I now have all three years of archives — 1,949 individual posts (an average of 1.78 posts per day) — online and available for perusing.
As I’ve worked my way through them all, I’ve highlighted a few at the top of my archives page as “Greatest Hits”. These aren’t necessarily the most-visited posts on the site. Rather, they’re posts that I find notable or especially worth visiting for one reason or another. Here’s a rundown of what I consider the highlights of the past three years:
I’m sure there are more goodies buried in my archives that are also worth dredging up from time to time. Some may be of more interest than these, most will be of less. These are just the ones that I find to be most worthy of calling attention to. If you’ve read any of them before, feel free to either just move along or take another look. If any of these are new to you, I just hope you like what you find.
Here’s hoping I’ve got another three years of this — or more — left in me.
Dave Shea at Mezzoblue is working on a CSS Crib Sheet/Best Practices/hints and tips post. Lots of good information and suggestions in those posts for writing good, clean CSS.
(via Dori)
Mike is doing some brainstorming on how to predict and cope with bandwidth spikes when a post or page suddenly becomes a popular destination.
When a blogger’s work becomes successful enough to, for a moment, graze the underbelly of commercial publishing, it threatens the very low-cost predicate of the publication itself.
>
Setting aside for the moment the absurdity of the situation, which is clear, it seems to me that over the past few years we’ve seen this exact phenomenon occur over and over again. I’m guessing, now that media people have integrated the blogosphere into their information gathering practices, we’ll see it with greater frequency and to more devastating effect over time.
As I recently discovered, this is a very real worry. I’d joked in the past about the “perfect post”, that one blog entry that suddenly exposes a site to the world and brings in all the traffic that so many people wish that they had — but actually stumbling upon that “perfect post” has made it very clear just how much of a double-edged sword that can really be.
In Mike’s ruminations on how things like this can be coped with, he mentioned something that sounded like a possibility…
…I think there is a proactive business opportunity for the right business to defray these transient bandwidth costs, probably in the form of short term ads on the sites that are experiencing the bolus. […] I will note that it might even be cooler yet if this feature enabled Google keyword ads. Maybe it should be an independent service, or a program that the keyword service provides for bloggers, who are currently more or less specifically discouraged from using it.
I applied for Google AdSense at one point, but they turned me down. While it was a bit of a bummer, it wasn’t much of a surprise, as Google doesn’t seem to want to accept most weblogs into their AdSense program. It seems that if you run a very tightly-focused weblog on a specific topic (such as PVR Blog or Daring Fireball) you’ve got a good chance of being accepted, but less-focused weblogs (such as mine, yours, the one you’re going to read next, or the other 99% of the blogosphere) will be denied. Unfortunately, the exact methodology or reasoning behind the approval/denial process is more than a little unclear.
There’s a far more serious problem with AdSense, though. The approval system is capricious, even arbitrary. It’s understandable that Google wants to make sure sites aren’t just ad farms, and it’s in everyone’s interest that quality be maintained, ideally by human verifiers. Nobody wants to see those sad Red Cross PSAs that take the place of house ads on poorly-indexed sites.
>
The human verification process at Google, though, is uncharacteristically opaque. I’d assume they factor in the ads which would run on a site before approving or denying an application, and if I take a look at , I see some of value. Ads specifically targeted to weblog software, Manhattan computer repair, New York hotels. These all seem relevant and valuable to me, but I’ve been repeatedly rejected.
>
It’s not just sour grapes on my part. Take NYC Eats, a great little niche weblog. Aaron’s brilliant little AdSense senser shows , which makes sense since the letters “NYC” by themselves cost two dollars a click. But no AdSense approval there. The problem is the wording in theprogram policies:
>
In general, we do not accept personal pages, chat sites, or blogs into the AdSense program. However, if a site contains targeted, text-based content and/or provides a product or service, we may consider it for participation.
In a perfect world (well, my perfect world, that is), of course, Google would open up their AdSense program to the weblogging world at large. While their AdSense ads might be a little random on the main page of a site due to the random nature of the main page posts not giving clear, concise keywords to work with, if a site design includes individual archive pages than each individual post should have enough keywords to target a specific ad category (my Mac-specific posts would get Mac-centric ads, my political posts would get political-centric ads, and so on).
If they don’t want to do that, though, what if Google set up an agreement with TypePad (or other for-pay hosting sites) in which, in order to offset the cost of bandwidth spikes, Google AdSense ads could be (semi-)automatically added to a site when they reached a certain bandwidth point (90% of their available monthly bandwidth per their agreement, for example)? Each auto-generated template could include code something along the lines of <$MTAdSense><!-- include "/ads/google/adsense.inc" --><$/MTAdSense$> that would be automatically triggered by the TypePad servers when bandwidth exceeded whatever the cutoff point was. Any revenue generated by clicks on the ads would automatically be siphoned to TypePad and applied to offset the costs of the extra bandwidth usage during the spike.
There could even be a toggle in the TypePad preferences that allowed a site author to insert a “registration key” if they were accepted by the Google AdSense program that would enable the AdSense ads on a full-time basis. In this case, Google would send any revenue to the site author as per their usual setup, instead of sending it to TypePad.
Just an idea. Workable? I haven’t got a clue — barriers include the coding of the feature (while I’m no program-level coder, it doesn’t strike me as being too terribly difficult of a feature to enable), inclusion of the feature into already-existing weblogs (not difficult for TypePad Basic, Plus, or Pro levels using the auto-generated templates, Pro levels using advanced templates would need to add the requisite code themselves), and — most importantly (and possibly most difficult) — Google and TypePad (or, of course, whatever other hosting service that might be interested) negotiating the partnership. Still, if it could be worked out, I think it could be useful and beneficial to the blogging community at large.
Earlier this week, I started noticing something odd. It had finally been long enough since my fifteen minutes of fame that traffic was starting to come back down to a more normal level. Oddly, though, for the past few days I’d been getting a lot of hits from the article in the Seattle P-I about my situation. Obviously, it had been linked somewhere with a decent amount of traffic — but where?
Today, the mystery was solved, thanks to an e-mail from Mike: It turns out that Blogger has posted a new tech support article entitled “How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog” which links to the Seattle P-I article.
Do you blog at work? Do you check your referrer logs and surf the blogosphere all day from your office? Do you think it might be funny to mock your co-workers publicly, or that it could be a good idea to post photos of sensitive corporate information on your blog? If only Blogger Support could have reached this unfortunate Blogger sooner. Folks, this doesn’t have to happen to you.
These days, many companies are blog-friendly because they recognize a valuable tool for communication and the sharing of ideas when they see it. However, as with any public medium, care should be exercised from time to time. Here at Blogger, we want you to keep your job and as always, ending your blog should be a last resort reserved only for woeful situations. Fret not gentle blogger, we’ve put together this document to help you keep those paychecks rolling in.
So, apparently I’ve been immortalized by Blogger’s tech support crew, which is resulting in a fair amount of traffic moving from Blogger to the Seattle P-I, and then from their article back to me. Well, hey, any traffic is good traffic, right? ;)
Additionally, I got this in my e-mail today:
From: sinta
Subject: Your blog on CNN
Date: November 22, 2003 11:53:20 PST
To: Michael HanscomHiya Michael
Just want to point out to you that your blog was shown on CNN Global Business just today at 7:30 Swiss time :) It just finished a few minutes ago. They talked about that Microsoft incident you had a while back :)
Just thought you’d like to know ^_^
Bestest regards from Switzerland,
Sinta~http://www.lockload.com
The one and only He Says, She says double blog.
Apparently, my story is (for the moment) the Energizer Bunny of blogging stories — it just keeps going, and going, and going, and going…
Update: Many thanks to Sudheer from in Beijing for sending me a link to the online version of the CNN piece: The Budding Blogs of Business! Here’s the relevant bit:
Microsoft has taken a benevolent attitude to blogging. But it balked when an employee revealed on his blog how the company had taken delivery of a shipment of Apple computers. He was quickly relieved of his duties.
New goodies from Apple today! The mid-range G5 is now a dual 1.8Ghz machine, the single 1.6Ghz G5 dropped \$200 to \$1799, and a new iMac was announced with a 20 inch screen.
VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH: [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent] [Littleton, MA, USA]
COMPUTERWORLD 17 November 2003
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
\”In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth’s ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading ‘Bored of the Rings’, a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called ‘A’. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P(“n”),R–;P(“|”))for(e=C;e–;P("_"+(u++/8)%2))P(“|”+(u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960’s technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago.\”
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating ‘VM will be available Real Soon Now’. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.
(via the usual suspects)
For the first (and quite likely only) time, I’m going to be able to attend one of the local Weblogger’s Meetup events, as my training schedule for this Wednesday has me off work at 6pm. Once I start my 1pm-9:30pm schedule I’ll be missing them again, but at least I can make this month’s.
So, for any local Seattle bloggers, looks like I’ll be seeing some of you at Uptown Espresso, Wednesday evening at 7pm!
(via Anita)
Looks like there’s a major referrer spam attack going on at the moment. The sites in question look like real weblogs but aren’t — instead, many of them have similar (or the same) content, comment and trackback links just link back to the home page, they have a hidden graphic that leads to porn sites, and many (if not all) of them are stealing their designs from other weblogs. Ignore (or block, if you can) any and all referrer links you might see in your logs from:
http://www.a-b-l-o-g.com/
http://www.akksess.com/
http://www.bongohome.com/
http://jennifersblog.com/
http://kwlablog.com/
http://www.malixya.com/
http://mikesplace.com/
http://www.saulem.com/
http://www.teoras.com/
http://www.websearchde.com/
http://www.websearchus.com/
http://www.worldnewslog.com/
http://www.wr18.com/
More information on this at A Preponderance of Evidence, MetaFilter, idly.org, milov.nl, and probably more.
This caught my eye for two reasons.
(via Lane)