Recently in Site Information Category
I know posting has been slow recently, but I'll be back in a few days. As my guitar teacher always said, "don't fret".
Yesterday morning shortly after 8am I was contacted by an intern from CNN about a blog post I had written in May about an NRSC fund-raising letter disguised as a survey. Apparently reporter Carol Costello's husband recently received a similar letter and CNN wanted to do a story about it but couldn't use an employee's husband as a primary source. They were having a hard time finding anyone else who had received the letter until the intern came across my blog post.
After talking to producer Bob Ruff, my wife and I agreed to cancel our museum trip and instead go downtown to a local CNN affiliate to film a segment about the letter for Carol Costello's appearance on Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room. An amusing way to spend an afternoon, sure, but the real lure was that Bob Ruff agreed to have the name of this blog mentioned on-air and to have the URL displayed at the bottom of the screen while Jessica and I were talking.
If you watched the segment you'll know that Master of None was not mentioned in any way, nor was the fact that we're bloggers at all. My URL was not shown and no one made any mention of how they found us and made contact with us. We mentioned the blog during the interview, but they cut it out during the editing process. Carol Costello told us that she and some others had read parts of my blog after having been given the URL, so there's no question that she knew what was going on.
The behavior of Bob Ruff and Carol Costello was extremely unprofessional, disrespectful, and dishonest. My wife and I spent the useful part of a whole day to provide CNN material for their story, and I was promised some national exposure for my blog in return. My blog may seem trivial or meaningless to CNN, but it's a big deal to me. I treated them and their product with respect and professional courtesy, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to receive the same in return.
Update:
CNN doesn't seem to understand the whole internet thing yet.
Update 2:
John Murdoch got the same letter and was similarly irritated.
Several people have told me about problems they've been having leaving comments. Apparently sometimes people will log in, but when they hit "submit" to leave a comment they'll be told that they aren't logged in. I'm working with TypeKey to resolve the matter. For the time being, reloading the page generally fixes the issue and allows you to log in properly and leave a comment. Sorry for the inconvenience!
If you try this and it works (or doesn't) please let me know.
At least one reader has reported a problem leaving comments using OpenID. I left a test comment using TypeKey and it worked fine. If anyone else is having problems leaving comments please shoot me an email at plasticATgmailDOTcom. Be sure to include the system you're trying to use to sign in (OpenID, TypeKey, etc.). Thanks!
I rarely use Internet Explorer, but I'm forced to at this hotel and I see that two of the columns on the front page of the site appear to be overlapping. Does anyone else see this, or is it just a visual artifact caused by the hotel browser/connection/whatever?
"Hotlinking" an image is when a web designer embeds an image tag into his webpage that pulls an image from another site rather than making a copy of the image and hosting it himself. It's lazy, and it "steals" bandwidth that the person hosting the image is paying for. The image appears normal on the hotlinker's site, but it's being loaded from the host's site without any credit being given. That's not cool! And so, I've been forced to protect my images from hotlinking by modifying my .htaccess script.
The site seems a lot faster and cleaner to me since I changed hosts and it has been getting plenty of hits, but comments have completely flatlined. I've tested the TypeKey login and it works just fine, plus there are several other options now... and yet no one has anything to say. Is there a technical problem with the commenting system? Is it too hard to use? Should I enable anonymous comments?
Update:
It appears that MT won't send out the verification emails required for people to create accounts on my site. That's annoying. For now just use TypeKey, because I know it works.
Someone else please leave a comment so I know the site is working!
If anyone can tell me why the content in the left sidebar is pushed down on individual entry pages and on the most recent comments page but not on the main index, that would be great. Here's the stylesheet.
The individual pages have ad blocks that appear to be doing the pushing, so how can I avoid that? The ads are inside divs that hold content, and the other content in those divs don't push anything down. The recent comments page doesn't have any ads at all! Argh.
Update:
Fixed it. It helps if you close your div tags.
As my regular readers know, my website had grown absurdly slow on Yahoo's hosting service. So, I decided to ditch them and upgrade to Movable Type 4 at the same time. It's taken several hours to get everything working, and as you can see we've still got an off-the-shelf template. Fortunately I've got several days left of vacation to get all the details sorted out.
If you notice anything that doesn't work, please let me know.
I haven't been too impressed with Yahoo's hosting service. I'm considering switching away, but I before I do that I'm going to try to speed up load times a bit by removing some external loads. Let's see if this makes a difference.
Here's an advertising opportunity for someone: I get tons of drug-related spam for products such as viagra, prozac, cialis, propecia, soma, xanax, percocet, ephedra, tramadol, ultram, and hoards of others. I don't even know what most of these drugs do, but if someone wants to pay me I'll be happy to advertise them! I'll even let you use the proper spellings.
But I'll be back tonight and regular posting will resume. For security reasons I don't broadcast my vacations in advance. Your loyal patronage is appreciated!
Comments may have been broken for a little while, but they should be fixed now. Somehow MT's CGIPath got set to a wrong value. If you still have problems, clear your cache and reload the page.
I made some minor stylesheet and formatting changes earlier this morning. I added a category link to each post, and made the title of each post a link to the individual archive. The date-stamp has also been moved from the bottom to the top. The category archives (which I doubt anyone ever visits) have had post bodies removed in favor of titles only. Any opinions?
I hated it when I picked it, but for whatever reason I took it and now I'm stuck with it. Changing a domain name seems to cause Google to forget all about you. Sigh.
Not that many people are linking to me, but I shamelessly "borrowed" the button technique used by Newsbusters and applied to my posts.
Can someone with a blog try sending me a trackback? I'm not sure if they're working properly. Thanks!
Update for Mark:
Ok... there have been intermittant problems with comments due to DNS resolution, but those should all be solved by now. If you can't log in to Typekey or can't comment, please send me an email! plasticATgmailDOTcom
I've moved the site to a new server since the owner of my old server has decided to shut down. I've imported my entries, comments, and templates, but I'm sure there will be issues to iron out.
The biggest change is that commenters will have to register (once) with Typekey in order to post... hopefully this should reduce the 30 minutes a day I generally spend deleting spam. Please email me if there are any issues!
And thanks for reading.
Since it's election day, let's answer the question that's really keeping people up at night.
Searcher GD emailed me to say that as of today my site contains a page that qualifies for quite an interesting Googlewhack. What's a Googlewhack? It's simple: a search on Google consisting of two words with no quotation marks that returns only a single entry. As you can imagine, Googlewhacks are very rare. I won't tell you the words in my own Googlewhack lest I destroy the phenomenon when this entry itself is indexed, but click here to see my Googlewhack via Tinyurl; the words are great!
Leave a comment if you don't like the Bravenet polling system and have another to suggest.
Update:
The poll made pop-up windows... super annoying. Bye bye Bravenet polls.
I want to put polls up on the site, but I don't want to pay money and I don't want any ads. Considering all the freeware out there I can't believe that no one has written a free polling system in Flash or PHP or something... but I can't find one. Any pointers?
I've got a huge dataset of spam from the past few years of running my site. Unfortunately the Movable Type interface I've got available at the moment won't let me upload the whole Excel spreadsheet, but I'll be happy to email it to anyone who wants to see. Here are some highlights.
Top ten filter strings that have blocked the most spams:
51175 - <h1>32347 - texas-hold-em
20657 - texas-holdem
17727 - qualitypornlinks4u.info
14717 - free-online-poker
13310 - payday-loan
11606 - hey.com
9204 - free--online--poker
6601 - 00120.com
6304 - pornlink4u.info
Five filter strings that were created on 1/1/2005 and caught a spam today, 8/24/2006 (a useful span of 600 days):
2944 - viagra2216 - (diet|penis)[\w\-_.]*(pills|enlargement)[\w\-_....
700 - hydrocodone
382 - freewebs.com
175 - xenical
Total filter strings: 8144
Total spams caught: 417,385
Filter strings that never caught a spam: 63%
The top 14 filters caught 50% of the spams -- that is, the top 0.17% of filters caught half the spam.
Median number of spams caught by a filter: 11
Mean number of spams caught by a filter: 131
Standard deviation of number of spams caught by a filter: 1307
Defining rate as spams caught divided by useful span, the filter with the highest catch rate is "free--online--poker" with 9204 hits in 4 days, for 2301 spams per day. The filter with the highest rate with a useful span of over 50 days is "qualitypornlinks4u.info" with 17727 hits in 62 days, for a rate of 281 spams per day.
Bloggasm has posted an interview with highly-acclaimed blogger and technological visionary Michael Williams.
We had some technical troubles there for the past few days, but my awesome server admin, Rodney, figured out the problem and now we're back in business. Apparently the site was under some serious hack attack by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Let's Cede California to Mexico Committee (a.k.a., the California Legislature), but we've managed to prevail and are back online.
Interesting bits I'd been wanting to post about but couldn't:
- Newly elected leader of the U.S. Episcopal Church Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori dismisses parts of the Bible she doesn't like using facile, intellectually dishonest arguments with no basis in history or theology.
- Even more crazy, Matt Labash recounts his visit to Oz with the munchkins of the Daily Kos.
- Crazier still, The Secrets of Scientology.
- In awesome news, Hong Kong scientists discover that leukaemia is caused by a virus, which may allow for some new treatments for all sorts of cancers.
- Fred Barnes explains why it's too bad Jeb Bush won't run for president.
Update:
Looks like the site is still intermittent, so bear with us.
I added links to the bottom of each post that allow you to recommend a post to digg. So, try it out.
Has anyone else noticed the front page of my site sucking up their CPU? I can't imagine why it's happening, but when I load the front page of my site the CPU utilization of Firefox goes to 100%. Even if I then close the window displaying my site, the CPU usage doesn't go down; I need to completely exit the browser and restart it. It's very frustrating, but I can't figure out what's causing it. Please let me know if you see anything similar!
Gregory Cole, aka Flap, has generously taken over the Bear Flag League administrative duties from Kasey Traeger and is discontinuing the mailing lists in favor of a new Bear Flag League forum. It's a logical progression that makes sense considering how much the League has grown and how much traffic the email lists tend to get. So if you're a member of the League, it's time to make the switch and go register at the forums; if you're a visitor, you're welcome to swing by too!
You know, I'd have a lot more time for blogging if I didn't have to spend so much time deleting spam. It would be pretty awesome to set up a website dedicated to publicizing personal information about known spammers, such as their addresses, phone numbers, pictures, etc., along with similar information about their family members. If anyone wants to collaborate with me on such an endeavor, shoot me an email. Maybe "real life" social pressure can be brought to bear on the spam epidemic.
Not that many people except spammers care much about how I arrange my trackbacks, but I've decided to follow the model used by The Volokh Conspiracy and simply link to the Technorati search page for each post. It takes a few seconds to come up (and it's usually empty) but theoretically this will still allow people (including myself) to find related information. However, I'm not sure if it will help Google propagate PageRank.
Well, following in the footsteps of the larger blogs, I'm going to have to disable trackbacks on all past and future posts. The signal-to-noise ratio is simply too low for them to be worth it. Almost all of my recent trackbacks have come from Murdoc's weekly Linkzookery, and as much as I appreciate them they aren't worth the ~1000 spam trackbacks I have to delete every week. So, the trackbacks are going away. Too bad, they were a neat invention... but with all the blog connection tracking sites that are around these days it's easy to find who is linking to you by other means.
Thanks again, spammers.
I've barely had time to post because of all the spam I've been deleting recently. Spammers should be shot, I'm not even joking. Even with MT-Blacklist I can spend almost an hour each day just deleting spam comments and trackbacks, and I hate it so much. If I ever meet the people who are spamming my site I will punch them in the face.
I get a lot of spam on my site, and most of it makes a sick sort of sense, but tonight I saw something that really made me laugh: "sex-dog-gay".
The point of trackback spam is to create a link with valuable keywords from a highly-ranked site back to whatever site the spam is trying to promote. But... but... sex-dog-gay?!
Whoever sent that spam to my site apparently thinks the phrase captures a valuable niche in the search market, but I have a hard time imagining someone sitting down, surfing to Google, and thinking...
"sex" -- Ok, common enough, maybe too common... I need to narrow it down!
"dog" -- Better, but we're not quite there yet...
"gay" -- Perfect! Now we're in for some good porn!
Sickos.
It seems that I've got two different standards for deleting comments and approving comments on old posts. Movable Type has a feature that allows me to pick time span after which comments to a post have to be approved before they'll show up, and I seem to have a higher threshold for actively accepting such comments than I do for deleting comments on open posts. That is, there are many comments that I wouldn't delete if I found them on an open post, but that I also won't approve when someone tries to add them to an old post. Assuming that the costs of approving and deleting are negligible, why should I have different standards?
Ben Bateman has the quote of the day from a comment to my recent post about Overt Discrimination:
It's illegal for individuals to discriminate on sex and race in their business dealings, because they're probably bad people who would discriminate in the wrong ways. But it's good for government to discriminate on sex and race in its business dealings, because government will favor the correct sex and the correct races. So the idea that anti-discrimination law expresses some general theory of justice is simply preposterous. It's just a spoils system.
The new spam strategy is to post spam comments full of real, non-spam links with just a fwe spam links scattered about. That forces me to pay attention when I ban domain names so that I don't accidentally ban a site that some real commenter might actually want to link to. Argh. How I hate spammers.
Based on the recent acquisition of Weblogs Inc. by America Online, my blog, Master of None, is worth more than $120,000. Any takers? If you act fast I'll give you a 50% discount off the retail price.
My blog is worth $120,811.56.
How much is your blog worth?
Since I'm busy preparing to get married, expect some (obviously high-quality!) reposts and meta-posts this week. To kick it off, here's a list of the top 50 keywords and search terms that lead people to my site. Draw whatever conclusions you want!
| Count | Percentage | Word |
| 21532 | 3.74% | john |
| 13634 | 2.36% | kerry |
| 12175 | 2.11% | nudist |
| 11553 | 2.00% | kerrys |
| 10246 | 1.78% | divorce |
| 9094 | 1.58% | the |
| 8073 | 1.40% | michael |
| 8042 | 1.39% | and |
| 7777 | 1.35% | first |
| 7277 | 1.26% | williams |
| 6512 | 1.13% | pictures |
| 6503 | 1.13% | wife |
| 6348 | 1.10% | child |
| 4422 | 0.76% | dancing |
| 4291 | 0.74% | camps |
| 4254 | 0.73% | marriage |
| 4124 | 0.71% | california |
| 3610 | 0.62% | robots |
| 3516 | 0.61% | for |
| 2998 | 0.52% | sony |
| 2894 | 0.50% | roxx |
| 2887 | 0.50% | lara |
| 2660 | 0.46% | none |
| 2435 | 0.42% | ever |
| 2410 | 0.41% | funniest |
| 2284 | 0.39% | joke |
| 2278 | 0.39% | children |
| 2271 | 0.39% | photos |
| 2247 | 0.39% | master |
| 2246 | 0.39% | nude |
| 2187 | 0.38% | tax |
| 2176 | 0.37% | how |
| 2140 | 0.37% | marriages |
| 1971 | 0.34% | house |
| 1927 | 0.33% | phrases |
| 1856 | 0.32% | tagalog |
| 1773 | 0.30% | women |
| 1773 | 0.30% | haunted |
| 1734 | 0.30% | medieval |
| 1693 | 0.29% | what |
| 1630 | 0.28% | camp |
| 1571 | 0.27% | why |
| 1543 | 0.26% | abortion |
| 1490 | 0.25% | voting |
| 1486 | 0.25% | you |
| 1433 | 0.24% | sex |
| 1396 | 0.24% | jessica |
| 1369 | 0.23% | lynch |
| 1363 | 0.23% | with |
| 1312 | 0.22% | people |
Gosh it's hard to turn down inappropriate ads. Only slightly inappropriate... $10... argh. I probably won't be able to sleep tonight... Alexander Hamilton....
I haven't posted much today because I've been researching a topic that's too top secret to write about at the moment. You'll get more than you care to know about it in a while, so just hang on.
I've updated my RSS feeds to be more feature-rich. You can use these feeds with an RSS aggregator, most of which are free.
RDF RSS Feed (RSS 1.0)
XML RSS Feed (RSS 2.0)
(HT: Ben Hammersley and Learning Movable Type.)
I haven't changed the layout of the site for a while, but I've been wanting to try this. As you can see, the left sidebar has been shifted to the right of the main column, giving me two sidebars on the right. Why bother? Because Google only indexes the first 101k of each page, and it seems wasteful not to get as much of my text as possible. Plus, I'm hoping that the Adsense ads will be targeted better if I front-load my text. I was getting way too many ads for "Venus and Serena Williams" just because the "About Michael Williams" link was the first thing Google saw. Furthermore, the JavaScript code that loads the Bear Flag League list can be slow sometimes, and now you won't have to wait for it before seeing content.
So, comments? Is it usable? Ugly? I haven't seen another blog with this layout before, which makes me think there's a reason. Before I rebuild all my individual indexes with this new format I'd like to hear what you all think.
Just to save some annoying people some time, you should all be aware that I delete "pre-fabricated" comments when I see them. Some readers/spammers have taken it upon themselves to submit comments that are just long, pre-written essays on barely-related topics, many of which are lifted directly from other blogs, such as Kos or Atrios. I certainly don't mind people posting links to just about anything they want, but please don't cut and paste essays.
I got a phone call from Google today asking if I'd like to join their AdSense program, which I found a bit odd... but I decided to try it out. So now there are "targeted" ads in the right sidebar, and it's actually quite entertaining to see how they change depending on what I post.
In other news, I need a new whimage to post in the upper left corner, since Valentine's Day was nearly a month ago. Anyone got any ideas for a great picture to post?
One of my good friends from church has purchased an ad on the right sidebar for his financial planning and wealth management investment services company. Eric Thorn is a smart, honest guy, and anyone who is looking to get their finances and future in order can benefit from his experience. He deals with everything from insurance to annuities to investment portfolios, and I'm sure he'll be able to help you craft a plan that's right for you.
As you can see, the ad space on the right sidebar has been empty for a week or so, except for the excellent folks running the online bingo ad at the top. As a good capitalist I've decided that the vacancy indicates that my prices were too high, so I've lowered them. Yes, never let it be said that Michael Williams doesn't put his money where his mouth is: I didn't go to my Congressional delegation and ask for a government bailout or insist that America impose tariffs on foreign blogs. Not hardly! I trust instead that the free market will provide a customer for my product -- namely, 1,500 pairs of eyes per day, most of which belong to readers who are young, affluent, and well-educated. Get it while it's hot.
I'd just like to point out that this site -- and my opionions -- are most definitely for sale. Please send some payola my way, ASAP. In that vein, I have a nifty online bingo sponsor on the right side bar. Check it out, it's pretty cool. And of course there's space for you to buy blogads as well, for quite a reasonable price considering the 1,500 hits and 1,000 unique visitors this site gets each day.
(And to you faithful visitors, thanks! Now if each of you gets 100 friends to visit each day, maybe I can start making the Glenn Reynolds blogad money....)
My site admins have installed MT-Blacklist, and so far it has managed to defeat all incoming spam comments and trackbacks on my Movable Type blog. Thus, I've re-disabled comment moderation, allowing everyone to comment freely once again. Many thanks to Jay Allen! Also, here's a great post of his on getting the most out of MT-Blacklist. Huzzah!
It looks like my mini-blog Into the Ether won't be making the transition to the new format. It was an interesting experiment, but I think it's time to call it quits. I'm grateful to all the writers who contributed:
Director Mitch
Justin Katz
Andrew Ian Dodge
Marty McKeever (whose site appears to be defunct)
R. Alex Whitlock
Jim Price
bitweever
seldom
Everyone should notice that advertising space is now available -- but hurry, supplies are limited. Reach thousands of readers a day for only a nominal fee! Also note that the ghosts of antebellum posts can be found lurking in the archives.
Google must be feeling terribly inadequate today! Since I upgraded my blog software and rebuilt everything, I'm sure it can't find any of the posts it had sitting in its index for who-knows-how-long. The host must be serving up 404s like nobody's business, which is certainly affecting the number of hits I'm getting. I wonder if I can get my web master to set up a redirect of some sort....
Heather from the late, lamented Wisehawk and the early, unlamented Heahaw told me how to fix my CSS problem, and now everything should be rendering fine on Internet Explorer. Yay!
Now if only TypeKey would work properly....
If anyone out there can tell me why the right sidebar is pushing the main blog content down the screen, please let me know. The CSS file I'm using should be visible if you want to take a look at it. I've tried everything I can think of, but it's not acting right in Internet Explorer (surprise!). Naturally it renders and displays fine in Firefox -- which should be reason enough for you to switch.
And no, I'm not going to put everything in a giant table. Unless I have to. Sigh.
Alright, we're back! Just a minor hacking incident, but my esteemed webmaster Daniel has gotten me back online!
I know, I know, you probably already heard about it from Drudge, but today is my birthday. To mark the occasion, Daniel also upgraded me to Movable Type 3.11, which means that it shouldn't take 500 years to post comments or rebuild the site. On the down side, we've got a bit of a generic appearance at the moment and I'm going to have to put in a few hours to re-introduce the features to which I've become accustomed. (Plus, I loathe the stupid calendar doodad on the right there; could anything be less useful? No.) So just wait a bit and we'll have the message-of-the-day back, and all the various comment reading tools, along with the whimages for the sidebar and the BlogAds for my pocketbook. Ah, glorious blog-wealth -- how I missed thee!
And so forth and so on. Leave a comment, wish me happy birthday, and toss an Andrew Jackson to Spirit of America in honor of me surviving yet another perilous year. (And next year is shaping up to be even more perilous, marked by innumerable floods, earthquakes, and volcanos. I tremble with dread, mixed with expectation. The good thing about disasters is all the post-apocalyptic looting.)
Two new California blogs are joining the Bear Flag League: Edwonk, three bloggers who write about the intersection of education and politics, and Paragraph Farmer who writes about "politics, religion, and other untamed subjects". Check 'em out.
As for me I'm still here, just a little light on the blogging recently as I've been distracted by other minor concerns. Good ones though! Been making new friends, which is always fun, and dealing with end-of-year stuff relating to my house and school and that sort of thing. I love the holiday season, but dislike how all my insurance payments, taxes, and school tuition fees seem to come due around the same time. Lots of paperwork, and lots of check-writing. If I may, I'd like to give a free plug to Paytrust, my online bill paying service. I've been using them for a couple of years now, and paying bills online is the only way to go. The level of service I have is $11 per month, which may sound like a lot at first, but when you consider that it includes the costs of processing, postage, and indefinite storage it's not a bad deal. I'd spent that much just on stamps and checks every month if I had to pay the old fashioned way, not to mention all the time it would take. (Note to Paytrust -- buy a blogad!)
Even with all the stuff in Ukraine I'm just not as excited about world events as I was last month. I don't know if anything will top November 2004! Well, I can think of a few things.... But anyway, December is shaping up to be pretty fine as well. My birthday is next week, The Day That Will Live In Infamy, and I'll be turning 27. Not a bad age, right? Time to start donating to SENS. Christmas and New Year's should be particularly fun, however, and I'm not feeling any of the common SADness that's apparently afflicting others so much that they need a map to track it. I'm hearty and optimistic! (Hm, it's a bit early for a looking-to-the-future-with-hope-and-nostalgia post.)
Anywho, thanks to everyone who's reading and linking to me. In a way you're not even the primary audience -- they haven't been born yet.
So lots of people have noticed that the ad space on the right is available for a low, low price, and if you sign up now I'll contribute my share of the loot to the Friends of Iraq blogger challenge. If you don't want to buy an ad but still want to donate to a worthy cause, go here. If you're a blogger and want to participate, join Team Bear Flag. My only mission in life is to beat Hugh Hewitt and his dastardly Northern Alliance, so drop the kids out of college and give generously.
Apparently now only the spammers can comment on my site. Fantastic. I disabled comments by invalidating a few fields, but the spammers are somehow accessing the databases more directly and bypassing the security code altogether. This makes me sad.
You screw up my site,
While my readers pour out tears.
I hate you, spammer.
Thanks for the offer,
But I don't play 'net poker --
Poke your eyes instead.
Oh comment spammer:
Your wee-wee is so tiny,
Use your drug yourself.
Yes, I know the anti-spam comment code is getting absurdly long, but last night I set it to length six and still had to spend an hour this morning deleting spam. One commenter has threatened to stop commenting if I don't reduce the length, but I'm sorry, I just can't deal with all the spam. If I don't get any more ads I'll slowly walk the length back down to what it was, but for now it's ten digits.
I sincerely hope my homeland security measures don't severely encumber your civil liberties. Keep commenting, please! But I had to make a choice, and I decided to tighten things up. Yes, that means that the comment terrorists have already won. Or something.
I'm getting a ton of comment spam all of a sudden... I wonder how it's getting past the security code? Anyway: my apologies. I'm deleting them when I see them, and they shouldn't otherwise affect the site.
Not everyone is familiar with blogosphere etiquette, so I'm saying this with a helpful spirit. It's generally considered quite rude to send trackback pings to a post without actually linking to it. If you want to call my attention to something you've written, just send me an email -- or better yet, link to my post. Don't send me a trackback if you're not willing to link.
NZ Bear's new-fangled link tracking ecosystem thingy reveals that the number of people linking to me has shrunk since 040817, which makes Link Whore Panda a sad panda. In order to rectify this situation I suggest you link to one of my recent brilliant posts, such as this piece on Special Order 40 or uh... hm... maybe I haven't written anything but crap lately. Ok, nevermind.
I just noticed that a few people have contributed to the Make Michael Rich Foundation over the past few days via the tipping links on the left -- thanks a bunch! Of course, we've still got a long way to go before Michael can join the ranks of the leisure-political class.
Ok, the comments are working again, thanks to my site admin Daniel (huzzah!). Comments made in the last few days were lost, but fortunately for America and the galaxy as a whole my brilliant articles were not affected.
Even though my blog traffic has been increasing, it's kinda sad to see that the vast majority of my visitors are coming from search engines rather than referrals... and many of the searchers are looking for porn. What's with that? I don't have any porn here. Is this unusual, or do you other bloggers notice a similar phenomenon? Eh.
In what is an obvious case of natural selection -- but not evolution -- Master of None is racing up the blog food chain. Thanks for your hits, links, and comments. Without you it blah blah blah!
Into the Ether -- which is published on the right sidebar of this blog and syndicated on several other sites -- needs more writers and more activity. To learn more about it go here. Basically, you can write short posts about anything you want. The point is to build up an ongoing conversation, a sort of stream-of-consciousness mini-blog. This other page has details on how to syndicate Into the Ether so that it shows up on your blog. It's easy (and free, of course), and will give you another source of frequently-updated content.
You don't need to be a blogger to participate, you just need to email me at plasticATgmailDOTcom.
As you can see, Road Runner's ad has expired there on the right sidebar, which means you have a great opportunity to reach 1000 people per day by advertising on this site. Sometimes more! All the proceeds go directly to the Make Michael Rich Foundation, so click here to help an unfortunate, non-rich Michael, and make a difference in someone's life. It's for the children.
... maybe it was all a wonderful dream!
Well the site's back up. The server harddrive crashed, and my blog databases were on the part of the disk that was destroyed. The most recent backup is from 5/14, so about five weeks of priceless material is gone! I sincerely hope that civilization can withstand the loss. Cypren tells me that he's instituted a new, nightly backup system, so this shouldn't happen again. He also tells me that if it weren't for the hacking attempt last month there wouldn't even be a backup from May, and I'd've had to go back to April.
On one hand, I feel like I should be really disappointed to lose all that material, but on the other hand I don't really think the past month was one of my best. So it goes. The most frustrating part will come when I want to link back to something I know I wrote, but I can't find it. That will suck.
Actually, it looks like Google still has all the old entries cached. Does anyone know how long they'll be stored there for? I suppose I could spend a hundred hours recreating all the lost entries.... Well, at least if there's one I really want it's not completely gone, the ghost of Master of None is still lingering, like the memory of an amputated limb.
My email has been acting screwy, so I'm a bit late in noticing that I just got my first paid ad, by a band called Atomship (on the top of the right sidebar where it says "Enter the rabbit"). They've got some samples of their music up on their site, and the first track that comes up is pretty rad. But even better, the second track is about Mothra, possibly the only monster ever based on a moth. I always thought she got short shrift, I mean, is it really fair to pit her against Mecha Godzilla? I don't think so. She's just a moth! She'd own vanilla Godzilla in a fair fight though.
Someone needs to make a song about Rodan.
What about the ROUSes?
Rodans Of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist. ARGH!
Until I post this, I've got exactly 1631 posts and 4863 comments: a comment multiplier of 3x! Considering how many early posts have zero comments, that's pretty great. Thanks for stopping by.
Also, I just remembered that my one year blogoversary was in March, so feel free to send me a gift or something.
Well, no one has actually bought an ad yet, despite the low low prices, so I'll give another couple away. If you want a free ad leave me a comment below and I'll email you the promotion code.
Master of None reaches over 1,200 people a day and you can too for only $25 per month.
So I stayed up until 4am last night trying to come up with a cool logo, and if you look in the upper-left corner you'll see what I devised. Not satisfied with merely one new image, I created a few pics for the permalink/comment/trackback controls as well (inspired by Samizdata).
Eh. I like them now, but I may get tired of them soon. We'll see.
Bill Hobbs wonders how another blogger who gets 368 visits per day can generate $3,000 in revenue each month. C'mon. I must be doing something wrong. I'd like to know how to turn each of you into 27 cents a month!
Meanwhile, back at the lab, our heroes consider the tremendous value of an ad that costs a mere $25 per month and reaches some 25k to 30k unique visitors.
I really appreciate all the people who are visiting my site each day. I write this stuff because I love doing it, but hearing stories about friends' mothers who come across the site and spend hours reading through the archives make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
To tell the truth, this site is pretty cheap to maintain. I've started accepting Blogads to offset the hosting costs a little, but mainly it's an experiment. The site reaches over 1,000 people each day (nearly 2,000 page views) and I wonder: so what?
So, this. I've put up two free ads do far, and I'm curious to see if anyone clicks through -- go ahead, the sites are both totally worth it. The ad rates are really reasonable ($10 for one week, $15 for two weeks, $25 for one month) and I'm eager to find out from some real advertisers how effective the ads are. My readers are from pretty desirable demographics!
Further, I need a little graphic for my site; something small and simple. Unfortunately, I have almost no artistic ability. If you click the link above you'll see my meager effort. I'll be happy to give free ad space to anyone who can design me a nice, neat little graphic (perhaps in the style of Invader Zim?).
Curious readers (and anyone considering advertising here) may be interested to know the last 20 search terms that led people to this site.
13 Apr, Tue, 23:07:06 Google: tagalog phrases
13 Apr, Tue, 23:07:20 Google: michael williams
13 Apr, Tue, 23:07:51 Google: appeasement cartoons
13 Apr, Tue, 23:08:01 Google: los angeles divorce
13 Apr, Tue, 23:12:57 Google: memory mechanism
13 Apr, Tue, 23:13:14 Google: what can hinder life on mars?
13 Apr, Tue, 23:17:57 Google: faith like magnetism
13 Apr, Tue, 23:30:46 Google: effects of atkin diet
13 Apr, Tue, 23:32:24 Yahoo: Michael Williams sports
13 Apr, Tue, 23:49:43 Google: AI self preservation
14 Apr, Wed, 00:00:40 MSN Search: abortions after the third trimester
14 Apr, Wed, 00:07:18 MSN Search: profit how do+airlines
14 Apr, Wed, 00:21:08 Google: "end a friendship"
14 Apr, Wed, 00:26:07 Google: "finding the one" marriage
14 Apr, Wed, 00:32:31 Google: MEDIEVAL PUBLIC SHAMING
14 Apr, Wed, 00:36:19 Google: Chernobyl dead zone map
14 Apr, Wed, 00:38:35 Google: dancing robots
14 Apr, Wed, 00:39:58 Google: "good 'ol burgers" and "Paso Robles"
Asute readers will glance to the right and notice that I've signed up for Blogads. Keen!
In the grand 'sphere tradition I'm offering not one, but two free ads to my loyal readers, one to each of the first two people who email me with "[free blogad!]" in the subject. Don't forget the exclamation point, because I'm only interested in people who are seriously excited about getting a free ad.
I estimate your ad will be good for around 100,000 hits in the first hour, so what are you waiting for?
Update:
My fellow Bear Flaggers Patterico and the BoifromTroy were the first to respond, so they get the free ads for two weeks. As for the rest of you, the rates are still very reasonable, and likely to give a good return for a nominal investment.
Hopefully these two guinea pigs will see some positive results and write a couple of nice testimonials for me....
I'm adding a link to the Perpetual Bear Flag League Roundup on the left. Now you have no excuse for not knowing what every single BFL'er writes every day.
My new miniblog, Into the Ether, is starting to fill out a bit, and I'm really pleased -- just glance to your right. Several of my esteemed blogging colleagues have decided to participate in the experiment so far:
- Justin Katz;
- Director Mitch, the (ex-(?))Window Manager;
- Seldom Sober;
- Bitweever, who hasn't posted yet;
- Andrew Ian Dodge and Marty, who also has(/v)n't posted yet.
I've got a few others lined up who sound interested, but I haven't got 'em completely hooked in. If you think you'd like to take part in the project, shoot me an email at plasticATgmailDOTcom and we'll talk.
(What's the big idea? How can Into the Ether appear on my site?)
I don't pay much attention to my Blog Ecosystem Rankings -- haha, right -- but it's interesting to notice how many more links would be required for me to move up in the world.
Here's a chart -- me me me, the world revolves around me -- with each site being ranked twice as high as the one after it.
| Rank | Links | Site |
| 1 | 2313 | Instapundit |
| 2 | 1453 | AndrewSullivan |
| 4 | 1420 | Talking Points Memo |
| 8 | 990 | Little Green Footballs |
| 16 | 670 | Matthew Yglesias |
| 33 | 562 | The Truth Laid Bear |
| 65 | 359 | Arts & Letters Daily |
| 130 | 250 | Wampum |
| 261 | 155 | Master of None |
| 522 | 96 | Semi-Intelligent Thoughts |
| 1044 | 53 | brainstorming |
| 2088 | 22 | commons-blog |
| 4176 | 6 | Contains 2 |
The slope isn't as steep as I would have expected. For example, if my number of inbound links were to double, my rank would jump from #261 to around #95, a 270% improvement for 200% the links. If my inbound links increased five-fold I'd leap to #13, 2000% improvement for 500% the links. Each link is more valuable than the one before it!
The question then is: is each link harder to obtain than the one before? One might argue that, since there are only a limited number of blogs to get linked from. However, the Ecosystem currently lists 8076 blogs, and even Glenn Reynolds penetrates only 29% of the market. There are plenty of blogs out there who'd probably link to me, if their owners became aware of my site.
Syndicating my new mini-blog Into the Ether should be a piece of cake if you're running on a server that supports PHP. (You can do it with ASP and other scripting technologies as well, but almost all web servers support PHP, and it's the best.) There are only three things you need to do.
First, download the "rightbar.txt" file (use right-click and "Save As..."), rename it "rightbar.php", and put it on your web server in the same directory as your blog's main "index.html" file. This "rightbar.php" file contains the code that fetches and displays the XML stream for Into the Ether. Take a look, it isn't very complicated, and if you want to change the way it displays the mini-blog you shouldn't have any problems if you know a bit about programming.
Second, rename your "index.html" file to "index.php", if necessary. If you're using Movable Type, go to the "Templates" control panel and click on "Main Index". Where it says "Output File", change the name to "index.php". This is necessary because otherwise the PHP code we're going to put into the file won't be executed by your web server, and it won't work. You'll also probably have to delete your old "index.html" file so that it isn't displayed by default when people visit your site.
Third, copy and paste your main index into notepad, just as a backup in case something goes wrong. Then, before you save and rebuild, decide where you're going to want Into the Ether to be displayed. The easiest location is probably in one of your sidebars, so let's use that as an example. Locate the code for your sidebars in the "Main Index" box and insert the following PHP code:
<?phpThat code tells your main index where to display Into the Ether.
include('./rightbar.php');
?>
Now save and rebuild the index and reload your site to see how it looks! If nothing comes up you may need to configure your server to recognize "index.php" as the default loading page.
If your webserver is using IIS you can use PHP EasyWindows or some other such program to handle the PHP.
If you have any problems, email me.
I've decided to create a sub-blog called Into the Ether, and the goal is simple: coerce as many excellent bloggers as I can to participate by periodically posting small tidbits of commentary.
Into the Ether is available mainly as an XML feed, and it's incredibly easy for other bloggers to syndicate the feed and mirror it on their own sites. Thus, those who participate will be able to share some of their (short) thoughts with a wider audience and participate in a distributed-concentrated conversation with a select group of their fellow bloggers.
The syndication is simple. I've created a tiny php file that parses the XML feed for my own sidebar, and with a few modifications for formatting it should be easily adaptable to any other site that wants to carry the conversation. Posters are limited to 100 words and no HTML tags (for security reasons, mainly), and a URL is attached to every author so that readers can quickly find their way to a writer's homepage. Of course, further URLs can be embedded as plain text in any post, if desired.
Contributors will be welcome to write on any subject they choose, from just about any perspective. I reserve the right to make up guidelines ex post facto, if necessary. I'll be screening every contributor to ensure the quality of the final product, but I won't be reviewing every post. (Unruly, disruptive, or disrespectful behavior will not be tolerated, of course.)
If you have a desire to participate send me an email at plasticATgmailDOTcom. If you don't want to syndicate Into the Ether on your own site you don't have to (but I hope you do!).
Update:
Similar, perhaps to Elsewhere on the right side of Tech Central Station.
I just wanted to say thanks to all of you who have left such insightful comments over the past few weeks. I'm constantly impressed, and there's nothing I like more than good conversation. You're always teaching me new things and giving me new perspective, even when we disagree. Some days I can hardly find time to post anything because I'm too busy reading and responding to all the comments!
If there are any further comment tools you think would be useful, please let me know. Fomenting and facilitating discussion is one of my top priorities with this site, so if there's anything I can do to make commenting easier or more enjoyable, say so.
Some people have mentioned that it's hard to follow conversations on my site over time because blog posts are continually pushed aside. So here's a new tool to keep track of the discussions you're interested in: Recently Active Threads.
I'll put a link on the left sidebar. Don't forget there are also listings of the Most Recent Comments and the Most Commented-On Posts.
I'm going to Reno to visit my dad. I'll probably roll 'dem bones while I'm there, and just generally decompress from my typically insane schedule. I won't think about debugging Windows NT's TCP handler, I won't think about why our real time interrupt amplitude is spiking abnormally and screwing with our oscilloscope, I won't think about why animats with 10 hidden units don't seem to flock while those with 15 do, I won't think about learning rates or eligibility traces or exponential error differentials.
But don't worry -- my dad has an internet connection and I'll probably post something. I don't think I could prevent myself.
Meanwhile, visit some of the folks on the left, or read some of my *Best Of*. Check out the most commented-on posts, they're pretty interesting.
If you've got a blog of your own, take the extra time you'd otherwise spend reading here and link to me! Send me an email, I'll link back. Plus, I like getting emails, it validates my existence. As do links. And tips.
Ok ok, I'm done.
I'd like to say thanks to everyone who's been linking recently. I try to maintain a constant level of spectacularity at all times, but it's more fun when other people read it! And special thanks to the generous folks who've hit the tip jar.
I'm proud to announce that my "An Open Letter to Hawthorne Police Chief Stephen Port" was selected by the Watcher's Council as last week's best blog post in the entire world by a non-Council-member, receiving 333% more votes than the second-place entry. I'm glad to have these fellows watching those wascally weasels for us, so I'm adding them to the blogroll.
Thanks also to all the other people who have noticed my plight and shown their support. Lots of people linked to that post -- as well as to the various other nonsense I write here on a minutely basis -- and it's a great pleasure to interact with you all: makeoutcity.com; Deltoid, even though he thinks I'm foolish; AlphaPatriot and other supportive Bear Flag League folks like Xrlq, the Angry Clam, Patterico, Absinthe & Cookies (of course!), and Baldilocks; Say Uncle, who's got us all in check; The Smallest Minority; Hunter Amor; Who Tends the Fires (someone's gotta do it); John Hayes; Miller's Time; Hell in a Handbasket (sounds like California); Today I Blog, Tomorrow I Sleep; murdoc online.
There are a lot of other people who've linked to me recently, and I appreciate it; I only have so much time in the day to read blogs, but I'm sure I'll get to you shortly. I cycle through all my referers every few days (and come on, it's not like you come here every day either!).
Here's a tip for bloggers (particularly those who use Movable Type).
As most computer users know, the [tab] key can be used to move between fields and links on a webpage. If you go to any page and hit [tab] repeatedly, you'll eventually cycle through every selectable item and get back to where you started. The order that you visit each item is called the tab index order, and each item has a number called a tab index. Basically, these numbers start at 1 and go up to whatever the total number of items is on the page.
If you don't specify any tab indexes on your page (and you probably don't), then the browser will try to figure out what order to go in by itself. Sometimes this works fine, but sometimes it doesn't. Movable Type blogs have a particularly annoying feature in that when you hit [tab] from the main comment text box, you're taken all the way up to the first link at the top of the page rather than to the submit button, which is probably where you want to go after you finish typing your comment.
This can be fixed pretty easily, and here's how. In your comments template (you know how to find that, right?) do a search for the word "form", and you'll find the form that's used to submit comments. There are five (or more) input tags in the form, and what you want to do is add a "tabindex" attribute to each one, indicating the order in which you want to be able to tab through them.
For example, here's how mine look (notice the tabindex attibutes, in bold):
<form method="post" action="http://www.mwilliams.info/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi" name="comments_form" onsubmit="if (this.bakecookie[0].checked) rememberMe(this)">You'll probably want to apply the same fix to your individual archives, since there are comments there as well.
<input type="hidden" name="entry_id" value="1139" /><table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0><tr>
<td width=180px align=left valign=top>
<label for="author">Name:</label><br />
<input tabindex="1" id="author" name="author" /><br /><br /><label for="email">Email Address:</label><br />
<input tabindex="2" id="email" name="email" /><br /><br /><label for="url">URL:</label><br />
<input tabindex="3" id="url" name="url" /><br /><br />
<!-- Security Code Check -->
<input type="hidden" id="code" name="code" value="12" />
<img border="0" src="http://www.mwilliams.info/cgi-bin/mt/mt-scode.cgi?code=12" align="left"> Enter anti-spam<br /> code below:<br />
<input tabindex=4 id="scode" name="scode" /><br /><br />
<!-- end of Security Code Check --></td>
<td valign=top>
Remember personal info?<br />
<input type="radio" id="bakecookie" name="bakecookie" /><label for="bakecookie">Yes</label><input type="radio" id="forget" name="bakecookie" onclick="forgetMe(this.form)" value="Forget Info" style="margin-left: 15px;" /><label for="forget">No</label><br style="clear: both;" />
</td></tr></table><label for="text">Comments:</label><br />
<textarea tabindex="5" id="text" name="text" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea><br /><br /><i>Only press the "post" button once -- it's slow, but don't worry.</i><BR />
<input type="button" tabindex="8" onclick="window.close()" value=" Cancel " />
<input type="submit" name="preview" tabindex="7" value=" Preview " />
<input style="font-weight: bold;" tabindex="6" type="submit" name="post" value=" Post " /><br /><br /></form>
If you look at my comments, you can use the [tab] key to see how this all works. It's a minor usability issue, but it does make leaving comments a little more convenient for your readers.
Mark O'Keefe quotes me and the site in his article "Do All Religious Paths Lead to the Same God? Bush Remark Renews Old Debate" in relation to this previous post.
Update:
Bill Hobbs points out that Bush was probably making a political statement rather than a theological one, and I think he's right. Although he caught some flak from the religious right for his statement, the fallout was far less severe than if he had given the opposite answer. That's not to say that Bush may not really believe what he said; in fact, I'd have to say that he probably does, since I've found him to be pretty honest in general. He could have demurred from the question as irrelevant or too theological, and probably not gotten much of a reaction from anyone.
I've noticed that when I write about religious matters, lots of people comment; posts about other issues, such as politics, current events, economics, blogging, writing, &c., don't get the same response. If you look at the page of most-commented-on posts, about 20 of the top 50 posts are related to religion.
I don't really write this stuff just to get comments or attention from people, but I am curious as to why you all respond the way you do. Is it because my writing on religious matters is more compelling, more controversial, more informed? Or is it because the topic is more interesting than others? In other words, do those posts get more of a response because it's a topic I'm good at writing about, or does the topic itself just draw more of a response? I hope I'm phrasing the question clearly.
In the grand tradition of self-congratulatory, incestuous award presentations, Wizbang! is hosting the 2003 Weblog Awards. I joke, but I think it's a great idea. There are tons of categories, so go take a look and nominate your favorite blogs.
Apparently you can nominate yourself, but who would sink to such depths? Even if your blog could be reasonably nominated for, say, Best New Blog of 2003, Best Conservative Blog, and/or Best Ecosystem Large Mammal Blog, it would be quite gauche to put yourself forward for such an honor. On the other hand, if some loyal readers were to generously choose to take a few minutes to nominate your blog, that would be an entirely different matter.
Just a friendly reminder that submissions to the First Annual Blog Scavenger Hunt are due December 1st!
I just wanted to say thanks to all the people who have been visiting recently, and especially to everyone who's been leaving comments and hitting the tip jar. Some of the discussions have been really great, and I feel like I've learned a lot in the process.
Over the past few weeks hits have been averaging over 1000 per day, which is pretty incredible. Even with the recent Instalanche factored out, it's been over 800 pretty consistantly. Of course, most of those hits may be from just a couple of people who like to point out when I'm an idiot, but that's ok!
Meanwhile, be sure you check out the First Annual Blog Scavenger Hunt, which I hope will serve to bring exposure to a lot of new (to me) blogs, and increase cross-linkage between different communities. The political punditry blogosphere (in which I'm most active, I suppose) is really dwarfed by the vast multitude of blogs clustered around other topics and hobbies, and I hope the Scavenger Hunt will be an opportunity to interconnect.
Welcome!