[XILED]

I am writing this to report content theft of the worst kind. Via FriendFeed:

This Crap is nothing more than a copy of Go2Web2.0 with NO CREDIT GIVEN TO THE AUTHORS.

Not only that, but the bastards want you to pay 17$ for it. Spread the word about this folks. Please go complain at Scribd about this. Further more, if you know this guy, whip him like a rented mule.

And to the perpetrator of this crime — just go die, you worthless fuck.

• » Tags: Coffee_Powered_Musings, content theft, Go2Web2.0, rants, scribd, thieves
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I just went to MyBlogLog for the for the first time in quite a while and my appreciation has went up for it ten-fold.

The widgets are much improved since last I checked them out for one thing. I think the Lifestream widget is teh awesome. No more scraping all those pieces of javascript together, now I just add my services into MyBlogLog and let them do it for me. What impressed me most though, and hopefully you too, are the stat reports. Check it out:

Report Results :: Details [Where readers came from]

Report Results :: Details [What readers viewed]

Report Results :: Details [What readers clicked]

And that’s just the free service. If I had the cash I’d sign up for the payed service, but alas, I’m broke. This kind of information is invaluable to any webmaster, but even more so to those who have no access to the Apache referrer logs on the server that is hosting their site. If you fall into that group, or even if you don’t, you really should consider signing up. If the widgets and stats aren’t enough to get your attention then consider this post. The real value of the many social sites available today isn’t in traffic from inbound links. The real value is that they allow you to build a far reaching community. MyBlogLog is no different.
You will notice that all the links you see are to my old site and there are two simple reasons for this, neither of which can be blamed on MyBlogLog:

1. This site is new and not well indexed yet, I haven’t even done a formal submission to Google. I figure I’ll let that take care of itself for now and concentrate on writing and community building.
2. As I stated at the beginning of this article, today was my first visit to MyBlogLog in quite some time so I hadn’t inserted their tracking snippet into my template.

And no to those who will ask, this is not a paid post. MyBlogLog is a property of Yahoo! and they don’t need my lowly pagerank to increase their signups.

• » Tags: blogging, Coffee_Powered_Musings, community, data, MyBlogLog, statisitics, zeitgeist
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From is twitter dying?:

It seems that everyday now there is a problem with Twitter. Not too long ago I heard John C Dvorak say that if the public jumps on twitter it will go down. Is that what is happening? Today their main database, db006, went down. I always know something is wrong when Twhirl wont let me get tweets even if I haven’t gone over the limit.

It seems from the comments that people are pretty understanding when it comes to twitter downtime. I tend to agree with them, to a certain point. Free services such as Wordpress.com have brought expectations up on free services. Although, the downtime can be quite frustrating.

Why can’t they just get some decent hardware and produce some better uptime? I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to raise some money.

Lets take a closer look at this:
“Not too long ago I heard John C Dvorak say that if the public jumps on twitter it will go down. Is that what is happening?”
Fearmonger.
“It seems from the comments that people are pretty understanding when it comes to twitter downtime.”
Look again, people are acting like children. Everything is normal.
“Free services such as Wordpress.com have brought expectations up on free services.”
11,000 nails per hour. That’s an old article. How many hits per hour you think it gets now? My money is on more. You think wordpress gets that kinda traffic? Doubtful. If for no other reason than the posts are usually longer than a tweet so people take longer to read them.
“Why can’t they just get some decent hardware and produce some better uptime?”
You are confusing the issue. They are in the middle of an almost complete architectural redesign. Also, can you imagine the size of the db? I can’t. You ever do a backup restore of a db larger than ~100mb? It takes a while.

I don’t mean to pick on you dude. Truth is, I picked your post because it was the first in the link list on man down. Please don’t take all this the wrong way. I think most of the panic we see about this outage is due to twitter’s new policy of trying to be more transparent about service problems. And for the record, I doubt twitter is dying. But what do I know.

• » Tags: Coffee_Powered_Musings, decentralized twitter, discussion, Fearmongers, john c dvorak, panic, rant, twitter
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This post began as a potential comment somewhere on 0xDECAFBAD but I couldn’t really decide which post it belonged on so I have decided to post it here instead. I know that l.m.orchard occasionally viewed my old blog thanks to MyBlogLog, so I’m hoping that he might stumble across this one. If so perhaps he will see this post and respond. As an added bit of insurance I’ll be sending him the link via del.icio.us :D.

So here it is:
You are probably the only [former]yahoo employ I have ever had any sort of discussion with so I wonder if I could pick your brain about something. I’ve lately been kinda worried about all the data I have stored in various yahoo services (especially when I heard the M$ rumors). What do you think will happen when it gets swallowed up by M$ or some other giant? Yahoo has been pretty good about allowing the vision behind the companies it has acquired to continue. I’m uncertain if another company would have the same management philosophy, especially if that company happened to be Google or M$.

p.s. While this is directed at deusx anyone should feel free to respond especially if you have some inside knowledge of Y!.

• » Tags: aside, Coffee_Powered_Musings, discussion, management philosophy, Yahoo, yahoo services
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According tho the world bank, just 227 families own 47% of the worlds wealth. Here’s a poem about that.

MySpaceTV Videos: The Matrix by Paradox

• » Tags: Coffee_Powered_Musings, injustice, matrix, myspacetv, paradox, poem, WAKE_UP, world_bank
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A few days ago Jeff Atwood wrote Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?. The answer Jeff, is no. More and more today people with no experience in web design are starting blogs. Some might say they should go learn HTML but I disagree.

You started a blog because you had something to say right?

Just say it.

Many people would lose interest in a blog after starting it if the only way to proceed was to get assaulted by all those angle brackets. Not to mention losing your flow due to the “coding/prosing thrash” as l.m.orchard discusses here. If you read the philosophy behind markdown you will see that markdown was designed just for this reason.

Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.

In his article Jeff used four markup languages with some example text. Textile favors the use of abbreviations such as h1. and bq. While this is pretty readable I think it has a steeper learning curve than markdown. The use of > as a blockquote marker in markdown is probably understood by anyone who has ever seen a forwarded email. Wiki syntax comes out as very readable to me as well but it is clearly more suited for a wiki than a blog post, not to mention that it still uses angle brackets. And last but not least, BBcode looks like ass.

My point is that the choice is clearly yours. Just consider your options and your comfort level when posting. If you are constantly losing your flow due to having to sling angle brackets then perhaps one of the more friendly markup languages is for you.

p.s. It should be noted that I’m not currently using markdown because I haven’t installed it since the move (and also I’m using scribefire on my posts, and still loving it).

Technorati Tags: writing, prosing, markdown, markup

• » Tags: Coffee_Powered_Musings, markdown, markup, prosing, writing
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hehe. Just read this and thought I’d share it

• » Tags: Bones, Coffee_Powered_Musings, Gormagon, links, spoiler, TV
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Yesterday after writing this I decided to experiment with social bookmarking sites. This being a relatively new site with very little exposure I figured it would be a good case study for what even the lamest submission scheme could do for a site.
I bookmarked it on my del.icio.us, and submitted it to digg. As a result I got 41 unique page views, so that’s pretty cool. Another thing that seems to have had an effect was that I had tweeted earlier about a site redesign. Looking at technorati and google I see no links to here but that’s no surprise really given the lame submission i did.
My point is that for a new blog doing something this lame can attract some readers. I’ll be doing other lame experiments in weeks to come hopefully (because that will mean I have alot of spare time ) For now I’m doing some following on places like digg. This kind of thing can be helpful because quite a few will just choose to follow you back. This can mean more exposure for me in general and since my blog is really nothing but a placeholder for me on the internet it might gain some small readership.
And no, I don’t consider this underhanded. When I had to move my blog to a new host I had time to do one small post about the move. I generally saw about 200 unique visitors every month so this is just a way to supplement the lack of warning about the move.
On an unrelated matter, this is my first post with scribefire and I’m loving it.
That’s all for now folks.
PEACE.

• » Tags: case study, Coffee_Powered_Musings, del.icio.us, digg, experiment, links, page views, promotion, readership, scribefire, seo, social bookmarking sites, submission, technorati
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Widgets man, that’s where its at.
Screw all those plugins and making adblocks with the plugin-ui. All you need is a widget ready theme. Go to your adsense control panel and make an add. Then copy your code. Now go to your wordpress admin panel and select design and then widgets. Add a new text widget to your sidebar. Paste your adsense code into the text area of the widget and give it a title, something nifty, like Ads. Save your changes and you’re all done.

• » Tags: adsense, Coffee_Powered_Musings, text widget, widget, widgets, wordpress
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