Archive
Pro blogging tip
Memo to self: If you publish a draft, even for a few seconds, WordPress will immediately publish it on the RSS feed.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 48,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 18 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Been busy
Sorry I haven’t written anything recently. I’ve been busy as the dickens.
2010 in review
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
WordPress’ iPhone app was written by 5-year olds
How badly can you build and QA an application? If you’re WordPress, you can do a bang-up horrible job with your crap iPhone app. It changes titles, inserts and removes newlines, and applies other wonderful transforms to your blog’s posts at will.
It’s a pity Apple doesn’t allow negative stars in a review. The WordPress app is less than worthless.
Busy life
I haven’t written in over a month because…
…I’ve been busy with home remodeling.
…Our Weimaraner, Ersala, left us after a little less than 16 1/2 years on this planet.
…Work’s been preventing my hands from turning into idle tools.
…I’ve been tweeting instead of writing short blog posts.
This blog’s readership
Yikes. Y’all should find something else better to do.

page view history
Posterous vs. WordPress and TypePad
Chuck Taylor and I are working on an early stage business idea. Wanting some help to move it forward, we submitted it as a proposal to Y Combinator. Per their instructions, the application included videos, which Y Combinator required to be submitted through Posterous. (A reason why they required the use of Posterous might be that Y Combinator funded Posterous…)
In the end, they didn’t select our application. (Oh well.)
Between my experience using Posterous, positive ink on ReadWriteWeb, and reading a few glowing articles and tweets, I’m left scratching my head. Posterous is OK, but I don’t understand why someone would use it instead of systems like WordPress or TypePad.
Read more…
Fisher Communications and KOMO vs. Reality
On Friday, TechFlash’s Todd Bishop published an interview with Fisher Communications’ Troy McGuire and DataSphere’s Gary Cowan. It’s about what you’d expect from a Q&A puff piece; videlicet, it’s a tube steak, not top sirloin.
But there’s meat in the comments, where local bloggers call Fisher out on its theft of local content, and lack of true regard for “community.” It’s worth a read, as are following the links to detailed complaints with Fisher’s behavior.
———
Update @ 9/16/2009: Another excellent commentary on Fisher Communications’ unethical behavior can be found on the B-Town blog.
Blogging vs. Tweeting
I’ve noticed that active tweeting has resulted in fewer potential blog topics. Why? In Twitter, I can comment on something very quickly. Composing a blog post takes much more energy.
For example, I love Python Essential Reference, and I pre-ordered the fourth edition. (David Beazley is The Man!) I recommended PER on Twitter (and even had a Twitter conversation about it, which I cannot find now because Twitter search sucks like a Hoover), and therefore didn’t feel an impetus to write a post about it. I had quickly and easily satisfied my urge to recommend the book, via Twitter.
Blog spammers’ new tricks
Like many bloggers, I use Akismet to screen comments for spam. In the past month, I’ve noticed two new kinds of spam that are cleverer than the usual gibberish. Akismet didn’t classify them as spam, but it did at least classify them as questionable.
One new spam type contains extractions from other sites that contain one or more capitalized words from the blog post. I guess the rationale is that capitalized words are likely to be proper nouns. (If they also filter out words beginning a sentence, they’re virtually guaranteed to be proper nouns.)
For example, say a post contains the word, “Django.” The spammer extracts capitalized words from the post, selects “Django”, and does a web search for it. They’ll then extract a couple of sentences containing that word from the search results, and use them as the spam text.












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