Into the Void

This one showed up in Google AdWords.

No thanks. I already have quite enough.

eBay PMS Google AdWords

Click map to see directions.

Google Maps: Philadelphia, PA to Liverpool, UK.

The 24th leg of this trip is brutal.

Googlism for: banth

Thought I’d look up my nick. Apparently I’m pretty damn scary.

So you’ve decided to start a blog. Blog, of course, is the nickname for a Weblog. Blogging has been described as “grassroots journalism”, in that it is closer to the events described and has more immediacy than a magazine or even a newspaper.
The Blogosphere is the world of weblogs, the cycling and recycling of news and commentary that occurs as bloggers analyze and spin information found on mainstream news media and on other blogs.
A Blogger, then is one who blogs. Bloggers have been described with syllogisms such as
blogger : journalist :: tick : sheep
and
bloggers : journalists :: dung beetles : elephants
Here are a few hints to get you started.

Define your purpose

This is simple enough. You want to attract readers who have the same interests as you do, and you want to keep them coming back. Your blog can be anything from an online “Dear Diary” to a political editorial column. Decide in advance what you want it to be.

Know your intended audience.

Are you blogging for teens or for customers? Spelling, capitalization and punctuation really matter if you are trying to create a professional web presence. If you’re writing for hackers or then it’s quite ok to use smileys and l337-speak.

Choose a look and feel that matches your purpose.

Themes are available for many blog programs. A theme is what creates the color scheme, type font, and layout.
If you’re sharing photos with friends and family, by all means make the site friendly and laden with cute graphics. But if you are sharing technical information with engineers, keep the layout clean and the wording concise.

Decide where to put your blog.

Whether you use a blogging service or maintain your own page depends on your technical level and how much mojo you’ll get from hosting it on your own domain.
Hosted blogging accounts can be set up quickly and require no maintenance. The data can be hosted on their site or it can be published on yours via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is a quick-and-easy way to find out whether you get what you want out of blogging.
Blogger is a popular general-purpose blogging site, now owned by Google. It gives you the option of exporting your blog to your own web page if you have one.
LiveJournal is probably the most popular host. It is centered around personal diaries, and is used to create a community.
TypePad is another popular hosted weblogging service.
If you are technically inclined, you may decide to use blogging software. This usually requires that your web host provide MySQL and PHP capabilities. It also allows you greater control over the look-and-feel of your blog, and gives you the ability to add custom functionality.
WordPress is a free, state-of-the-art personal blogging tool that you maintain on your own site. It is easy-to-use and very customizable.
Moveable Type is another popular weblog platform for businesses and organizations.

Use categories and tags to organize information

Blogs are presented sequentially, latest first, and older articles are no longer visible on the front page. To help visitors locate information about a specific topic, create a category and tag your posts. Robotics enthusiasts might tag articles with categories “software,” “hardware,” “man-machine interface,” and/or “kick-butt end-effectors.”

Get your blog noticed.

Your first thought might be to get listed with the search engines. By all means, list your site at dmoz.org. Most of the other search engines get their data from the dmoz database. However, search engines take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to crawl your page. This is too slow if you are publishing time-critical information.
Fortunately, there are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. By sending a ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated. I have WordPress set up to do this automatically every time I write a blog entry.
Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the Blogosphere. Search for your interests on Technorati, subscribe to blogs that interest you. Technorati will let you know whenever they’ve been updated.
Feed Burner allows your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed, and formats into html. Feed Burner now offers a mobile feedreader for Pocket PC.
Ping-O-Matic. Ping-O-Matic automatically pings multiple services including those listed here so that the services can notify your subscribers that you’ve updated.
gada.be is a new blog metasearch engine that searches several popular search engines all at once. You can set up an RSS feed with your search results. Its most interesting feature is that it’s set up so that you can put the search term in the subdomain, i.e., http://blogosphere.gada.be/. Remember to tag your posts!
Read other blogs that interest you, and follow up on them. Feel free to leave thought-provoking, relevent comments on their site, then blog your reply, including a pingback.
List the blogs you read on BlogRolling. This service will let your readers know when you have added a new entry to your blog.

Get your fine self noticed.

This is where social networking sites come in. The idea is to create a virtual community where folks who share your interests can meet you.
Post your books on Bookcrossing. Check for books you might want to read. I got into this because I have far too many books, and a good portion of them aren’t likely to be re-read. I can’t just throw them away!
Share your bookmarks on Netvouz and tag them so that folks who share your interests will read them and look you up.
Create a list on 43 Things.
Share your photos on Flickr. It helps you integrate them into your blog, so do it to save server bandwidth. It allows you to email pictures from your phone right to the web for an immediacy that wasn’t possible just a couple of years ago. A similar service in the UK posted photos from the London tube bombings as they were happening.
ning looks interesting. Apparently users get to write playgrounds, apps for interacting with others.

Will you be advertising on your blog?

If yes, by all means read The Edelman Blogger Study. This article contains quite a bit about how how the lines are becoming blurred in advertising on the web. It’s an exploration of people’s motivation and presentation, and how readers react. Definitely read this if you’re starting a corporate blog.
Even if your blog is a personal diary, you can still advertise. It is easy to earn enough to pay hosting fees, but don’t expect to get rich quick. There are a number of companies that will manage your advertising for you.
Do you buy books from Amazon.com? Well, they have an associate program that is easy to join and easy to use. When you review or recommend a book, simply add your associate id to the link you provide.
Google AdSense places that familiar block of targeted ads on your site.
Commission Junction enables you to host advertising campaigns from many popular companies. CJ keeps track of number of clicks, it keeps track of your visitors’ purchases, and it sends you a single check for all your commissions.

There you have it. You have something to say, you’ve defined your audience and chosen an appealing theme. By all means start that blog.

In a previous article I was babbling about subscribing to RSS feeds in order to reduce information overload. But let’s look at it from the other side now. Webmasters use RSS feeds to keep customers up-to-date. Customers use a feed reader to grab the raw XML from their favorite sites, and the feed reader formats it so that it is easy to skim.

How does that work? Do I have to remember to update the RSS feed everytime I update my site? Well, yes! That’s the point! However, it doesn’t have to be that difficult. Nobody has to hand-code web sites any more, though some of us still do. As a hobby. Yes, I know, geekess. Read on…

So now you’ve decided you want to be on that web thing too. There are lots of ways to share your information on the web. I’m going to talk about four of them: blogs, content-management systems (CMS), bulletin boards (BBS, “board,’” or forum), and wikis.

A blog is a web-log, a sort of a diary or journal. The software has a web-based interface and is pretty much transparent to the user. The user logs in to a regular web page and types what she wants to say. The blog software formats her Pearls of Wisdom and presents them to the reader in a pleasing format. Very nice. The blog software also creates an RSS feed automatically.
Whether you use a blogging site or maintain your own page depends on your technical level and how much mojo you’ll get from hosting it on your own domain. Hosted blogging accounts can be set up quickly and require no maintenance. The data can be hosted on their site or it can be published on yours via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is a quick-and-easy way to find out whether you get what you want out of blogging.
Blogger is a popular general-purpose blogging host, now owned by Google. It gives you the option of exporting your blog to your own web page if you have one.
LiveJournal is probably the most popular host. It is centered around personal diaries, and is used to create a community.
TypePad is another popular hosted weblogging service.
If you are technically inclined, you may decide to use blogging software. This also allows you greater control over the look-and-feel of your blog, and gives you the ability to customize.
WordPress is a free, state-of-the-art personal blogging tool. It is easy-to-use. Themes and plugins are available to customize WordPress and give it more features.
Moveable Type is another popular weblog platform for businesses and organizations.

A CMS is similar to blog software, except that it manages entire web sites rather than just your Dear Diary. It offers more features and better flexibility in formatting the pages. Again, data entry is web-based: authors log in to the software and start typing. CMS software also creates RSS feeds. If you’re interested in creating a web site or portal rather than just an online diary, a CMS may be the way to go.
SubDreamer is an easy-to-use CMS. It has a WYSIWIG editor and also provides an image manager. The best part for me is that it will integrate an existing forum, preserving membership information and re-skinning the forum to match. The only drawback is that it costs money.
Mambo is a free CMS. It’s more feature-rich but consequentially slightly more difficult to use. Skins and plugins are available. Did I mention that it’s free?
Joomla is a spin-off of Mambo. They are still almost identical.
PHP-Nuke is another CMS, an oldie-but-goodie. Because it has been around a while, there are many, many addons available. The latest version costs a nominal fee of $10 but I believe you can get a previous version for free. Heck, I donate at least that much for free software if they have a PayPal button and I use the software a lot.

A BBS or Forum is just what you’d think it is, a CMS of sorts that helps to create an on-line community. Members log in, find a topic or conversation that interests them, and leave messages.
Again, you can choose between using on-line forum site or using forum software. The forum software takes care of registration, private messages between members, and permissions. A BBS requires a bit more maintenance because access is usually more public.
Delphi Forums is a popular on-line forum host.
Again, if you are technically inclined, there are many forum software packages available.
phpBB is totally free. It is easy-to-install, easy-to-use, and requires little maintenance.
Invision Power Board is another popular forum application. Themes and plugins are available. However, it is rather expensive at $70 per year or $185 for a perpetual license.
VBulletin is a popular forums package suitable for medium-to-large size sites. The price includes tech support including installation.

I’m still trying to get my brain around the concept of a wiki. A Wiki is a collaborative system. Multiple authors contribute information, which is categorized and cross-referenced. The presentation is clean and simple, and it is waaaaaaay to easy to get lost surfing in one. The cross-referencing makes it fairly easy to find exactly what you are looking for, assuming you came in on a related topic. It also frees you from the site authors’ internal concept of how the information should be organized.
If you’d like to participate, find one of the many Wikis in your field of interest and try it out. I’m rather partial to the humorous Encyclopedia Dramatica.
WikiPedia is a great general-purpose encyclopedia site.
If you have the technical knowledge to start a wiki on a specialized topic, there are several easy-to-install, easy-to-maintain applications.
MediaWiki is the engine behind WikiPedia. It is free, and is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, feature-rich wiki implementation. It requires PHP and a MySQL database.
TikiWiki is another free wiki system. It has many excellent features and is easy to use.
Apache::MiniWiki is a small wiki implementation that doesn’t require MySQL. It isn’t as full-featured at MediaWiki or TikiWiki, but you can run it on any Apache server with mod_perl.

If you have something – anything – to say, by all means start a web site. It doesn’t have to be momentous or earth-shattering, but it’s a good idea to write things that others are likely to read. (I don’t follow my own advice.) You don’t have to get a domain name and servers and expensive software, at least not to start out, as there are a number of excellent free services.

So what are you waiting for?

Google flagged me on the 11th page of results for doing an exhaustive search. If I’m a virus, why do they want to see me again?
I hope this isn’t a ploy to force users to download their branded apps.

We’re sorry…

… but we can’t process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

Ever since I started my first web page back in 1995, I have been fascinated with the server logfiles. Laughing Squid provides access to my logs through the Plesk interface, so I get to scan them occasionally. It’s good for a laugh.
Huh? She laughs over server logs? What a geekess!
Well, duh! They’re, like, sooooo awesome!
Yahoo!’s crawler doesn’t sip, it slurps:

68.142.251.21 - - [23/Nov/2005:04:35:30 -0800] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0″ 200 440 ”-” ”Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”

But what does that jumble mean? It’s easy when you break it down and look at each part.
68.142.251.21 is the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the bot. This address traces the access to the bot’s Internet Service Provider (ISP), and sometimes even to the exact computer. One way to get more information is to use a traceroute program. If you don’t have one, try the online form at http://www.nwtools.com/. Cut and paste the IP address into the form, select “Lookup”, and there’s the host name, lj2411.inktomisearch.com. Try again, only select XWhois to find out who owns lj2411.
[23/Nov/2005:04:35:30 -0800] is the time and date of the access. Laughing Squid is in San Francisco, so the time is given in Pacific time or GMT-0800.
“GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0″ is the command string the bot sent to my server and the protocol it is using.
200 440 is a “200″ status code that the server sent to Yahoo! Slurp to tell it that the GET command was successful and the file size was 440 bytes.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp) is the identifying info sent by the bot. In this case, Yahoo! Slurp is crawling using a browser that looks to the server like a Mozilla-compatible program. Yahoo! Slurp is polite enough to give me a URL I can go to if I have questions.
msnbot seems to be crawling the site almost every day. I should take a half hour and calculate what percentage of my traffic is msnbot. In the meantime, I’ve set a time delay between requests, plus disallowed msnbot from large sections of the site for now. MSN has a separate bot that crawls the net looking for images, and since I’m not an artiste I’ll block that one altogether.
Googlebot isn’t so bad, in part because Google has webmasters post sitemaps that tell the bot exactly what’s on the site, and how often to check back. The details are on Google.
I also like to see who reads robots.txt before crawling. Polite bots read and obey the robots.txt file. There’s not much you can do at the user level if a bot ignores robots.txt.

In case you wonder where your comment went, well, my bad. I blew out the MySQL database last weekend. I was able to reconstruct my posts from cached versions on Google, and in some cases I was able to set the date to the same as the original. But I ran out of steam before getting the comments added – and I wouldn’t have been able to set up the user accounts anyway.
So that’s why.
I must get into the habit of archiving the database every week.

Go to Google http://www.google.com/
Type in the word “failure” – no quotes
Hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button

One day widder biddy Wussley is all so sad….
He sez:
“Nobody WUVs me enny more… I think I will just commit sewer pipes in a big nasty way and make my mommy all mad and everything!”

Google Groups : alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die
Very old ST:TNG humor. I almost named this blog after it.
*spoiler* don’t go if you liked Ensign Wesley Crusher or if you dislike skull fragments.