[XILED]

This entry was written @ 4:52 AM on June 03, 2008 using Notepad++

My internet connection has been up and down all evening and I’ve
given up on my usual memtracking via Google Reader, Twitter, and
FriendFeed. I’ve decided instead to try to do something useful with this
time. But what?…

One is that I could shut down my computer (gasp!!) and take this
keyboard apart in hopes that I could stop the ? / key from sticking.
Problem is that I’ve never taken a keyboard apart before. I realize that
this must be a shocking admission from someone who claims to be a geek
but still, its the truth. I guess I’ve just never had a reason. Another
of course is that I could write, which is what I’m doing.

The main problem for me there is that other than technology I don’t
really have much to write about. It seems that the muse of fiction hasn’t
visited in quite some time. I suppose one has to exercise those muscles
from time to time to prevent atrophy, which is why I’ve been thinking of
giving Ficlets try. Of course that brings me back to the same problem. I
want to use Ficlets as a sort of fiction OpenCourseware. A place to jump
off from for story ideas. The strict 1024 character limit Ficlets makes
it almost like an english assignment and I feel my fiction was best when
I was forced to write daily by my wretched old english teacher. Of course
this time I would be in charge of myself and I’m a terrible boss. :/

The other problem with me using Ficlets is that its yet another
online service. I believe now that when I did away with my feed reader
that I made a mistake. My reason for doing so was sound, nobody wants to
read an rss feed twice and I need to read them in Google Reader so that i
can share and or note them. This is a vital part of building a community
around [XILED]. It’s all a part of networking. Yet at times like this,
without an  offline rss reader, I am without access to the feeds at all.
The error was in not having a backup. I should have had FeedReader
archiving posts even though I wasn’t using it. Hindsight…

But how am I to backup Ficlets? Sure I can back up my Ficlets and my
favorites and my favorite ficlet authors all via rss(fail once again).
But as for using the service as an idea factory, how am I to back that up?

Screw it, time to take this keyboard apart.

Update: I haven’t worked on my keyboard yet and 12 full hours later my internet is still b0rked. Centurytel, YOU SUCK.

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I was just at Plaxo editing my public profile when I thought about how many pages I’ve had to fill out that look like this:

Many of them are now incomplete because I’ve joined other sites and not updated them. How many more will I fill out before some sort of XML based profile list is universally supported? What format would be best? How do we convince these sites to adopt the idea? Answers anyone?

• » Tags: Coffee_Powered_Musings, social bookmarking sites, social media, social-networking
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I’ve added Disqus to [XILED]

My main reason for adding it was that I’ve decided on this go ’round I’m going to really try to build a presence on the web. There are a few ways you can do this but I consider most of them lame, i.e. link-exchanges. For any lasting effect links are not the answer, people are. Links live in servers housed in data centers. People live in communities.
I think using Disqus will help me build a community much more easily than the standard wordpress comment system. Disqus users will have a user account on my blog already which makes it easier for them to comment. That also makes it easier for me when I do db backups because without the comments the db *should* be much smaller.
It allows users to leave video responses via Seesmic, which makes commenting even easier. No Seesmic account? No problem. You can register a Seesmic account in the comment form without ever leaving the site. That, is awesome.
Also for those of you getting ready to protest about my claim that links don’t matter I know that they are vital part of attracting visitors. Disqus helps out there too. When you install the Disqus wordpress plugin you create a community page at Disqus. Mine is here.
There are also talks of FriendFeed integration which means that the community you build using Disqus will be even larger. Any way I’ve looked at it I see nothing but advantages to Disqus integration. Only time will tell for sure, but I think I’ve made a good choice here. That’s all for now, so let me know what you think.

• » Tags: Coffee_Powered_Musings, comments, community, Disqus, FriendFeed, link exchanges, Seesmic, video comments, video responses, web presence, [XILED]
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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
  Comments (3)

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
  Comments (7)

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
  Comments (2)

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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