Archive for March, 2007
Firstly, let me say welcome to the new server. If you’re seeing this, than you’re reading dotCULT on a newer, faster server that might actually load in under 5 mintues now.
Last night was poker night. That means there’s usually 5-10 drunken guys in in my basement telling lies and playing cards. When Matt and Jesus (pronounced “geez us” not “hey zeus”)…… yes I play poker with Jesus what’s wrong with that?
Anyway, Matt and Jesus got up to leave, then came back in a few seconds later and scared the hell out of my cat with this giant german shepard. Thankfully, he ended up being a nice calm dog (or maybe being around Jesus had something to do with it.) Apparantley he was just wandering around in my driveway.
Jesus said it came up to them when they were leaving, so they put it in my yard while they looked for the owner. Matt had already called the number on the tag and got a voicemail.
“What’s the number?” I said. “It’s warm out, the dog can stay in the yard tonite and I’ll try his owner tomorrow, at least he won’t get run over by a car.”
“it’s 386-,” he started.
Then it hit us, and we both announced “That’s a home phone number – let’s Google it.”
Sure enough, typing the number into Google gave back the guy’s name and address. It was just 2 blocks away. Imagine his suprise when he opened the door to Matt saying “Hey John, I found you dog.”
Thanks Google – without you John’s dog would probably be at the pound this morning.
March 30th, 2007
Just a heads up. I purchased a new server from 1and1.com and then promptly cancelled after them basically just saying “here’s a fresh linux install, ip and root password. have fun.” That’s great for some people, but not for me.
So instead I headed over to GoDaddy and got a dedicated box through them. This time I paid the extra $9/month for Cpanel – much better! (please don’t bother posting the Plesk > * comments here… it’s not!)
Anyway… I moved Feedbutton.com and NoSlang.com over to this newer faster server, so you should see a huge improvement in Feedbutton. Unfortunately, the feedbutton stats had grown to be well over 2 gigs of data, so I decided to make some database optimization changes. You’ll still get the exact same stats, but it won’t take up as much space on my server now.
Sadly though, it means that all the Feedbutton stats were reset. Sorry about that. I guess it gives everybody an equal chance to be on the most popular page though. Check it out.
Anyway.. I hope to move dotCULT over tonite, so this will be the last post until I can get it moved over and the DNS properly switches. (as a bonus, I now get to use jonesy.biz as my name servers)
That’s about it. See you on the new (faster) server…
March 29th, 2007
You may have noticed that many of my sites weren’t up this weekend. We had a hard drive fail in one of the boxes hosing dotCULT, NoSlang, Feedbutton, and some other smaller sites.
The hard drive has been replaced, and everything looks good now. I’d like to say I’m sorry about the outage, I’m doing my best to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I’ve ordered a 2nd server, and will be slowly moving sites to this newer, faster, dedicated box. I’m going to keep the old box set up too, so that way if anything ever happens I can just flip the DNS switch and have another copy live.
Anyway, I’m sorry about the downtime – espeically to the loyal feedbutton users. I promise I’ll do my best to keep it from happening again. Thanks for understanding.
–Ryan
March 26th, 2007
I was looking at some of my MyBlogLog Stats for txt2day and I came across something that I just didn’t understand.
Take a look:
(note: I blocked out my actual visitor stats, as I don’t want to share them… sorry!)
What are these links? This isn’t a referrers list, it’s a “what readers viewed” list. Which means whatever these pages are had my mybloglog tracking code on them.
Of course, clicking them takes me to an error page. I’ve also noticed that that IP is an AOL IP.
Any idea what’s going on? Is this simply a cached version of my website, or a saved offline version?
If anybody knows exactly what these are, please do share.
Thanks.
March 23rd, 2007
Those of you who regularly read this blog might be familiar with an article I wrote last month titled What The Hell is cpsrvd. It was basically just an example of how to write a useful SEO article.
I was searching for information about cpsrvd and realized that I couldn’t find everything I was looking for in one post, so I wrote one of my own. That’s always been a great SEO strategy. In fact, it’s how NoSlang.com and TextMemos.com were created.
Anyway, I noticed a lot of search traffic coming for the term “cpsrvd”. (which will no doubt increase after this article eh?)
Anyway, it wasn’t as much as I had expected from being on the front page of Google for that term. There was a small problem. Take a look, can you spot it?
Look at that title tag. It’s hideous. No wonder nobody’s clicking.
Luckily, there’s a great wordpress plugin called seo title tag plugin that lets you have more control over what your wordpress <title> tags look like.
Here’s that same Google results after the title tag change was spidered:
Looks like it’s not only more readable, but that it actually moved up in the results too.
Remember: your blog title may be great, but it’s not relevant to every article you post. Do your readers a favor and make sure you’re using great title tags. Sometimes, it’s all they have to go on when judging whether or not to visit your page.
March 21st, 2007
The New Yorker posted a coversation between adults as imagined by children but even funnier was the bottom part titled How College Kids Imagine the United States Government.
It got me thinking about a protest group I saw yesterday. Somewhere on Woodward and 9mile was a group of people all holding signs that said stuff like “Honk for peace” or “Honk to impeach Bush.”
While I like that they’re trying to encourage peace (to avoid a political debate, we’ll avoid my feelings on impeaching Bush), I had to question what good they were doing by standing there with their signs.
If you want peace, do something about it. You’re on the right track, but making me honk my horn isn’t going to make any difference in the world whatsoever. Most Americans already want peace – why wouldn’t they? The problem is, what can we do about it?
If you want to make a difference in the world don’t just stand on a street corner, do something about it. Go down to your local soup kitchen and volunteer, get involved with habitat for humanity or UNICEF.
Plant a tree, feed a homeless person, donate money, mentor a child, coach a team, help out at your church, launch a free web service, or if you want to voice your opinion write an editorial for your local newspaper.
I appreciate where you’re coming from, you have the right mindest – but I think you can better apply yourself to reach your goal.
There are plenty of ways to get involved and actually make a difference in this world; standing on the corner and asking me to honk my horn isn’t one of them.
March 20th, 2007
I’ve been having a weird problem with a particular DSL connection lately. It would seem that I can’t access certain websites hosted in the Dallas area. The bigger problem is that these are MY websites!!
At first I thought they were down, but not according to my live 3rd party web stats (and thankfully my Adsense earnings are still growing too.) It seems other people can access the server as well, just not me.
So I used a proxy site (looks like I finally found a use afterall eh?) and the sites load fine.
Next step: tracert. That’s where things got interesting. From my computer, all but 2 hops before the timeout are sbcglobal hops. From everybody else’s, the route varies sometimes.
This leads me to believe that our DSL is using static routing. That is to say, similiar to a cable or phone line there is only 1 path from computer a to computer b. It’s not even trying to route around the downed sbcglobal server in the path. When thinking about making a change, read this post about the benefits of business broadband.
It seems to me that this is contrary to how the internet was designed. Has anybody else seen this problem before?
March 20th, 2007
You may remember me mentioning that I broke my car a few posts ago. Well, after taking the grand am in for work, I was told that it would cost about $1600 – $1800 to get it fixed. It needed 2 new wheel wells, and some new shocks. I decided to just sell car quick for cash and get a new one.
So now it’s time for a new car! And a new car I just bought!
Here it is:
It’s a brand new 2006 Mazda6 s Grand Touring.
It’s got a 6 cylinder engine, heated leather seats, a sunroof, Bose speakers, cruise and climate control, 6 disk cd changer, and pretty much every other option Mazda offers. I also found some Cummins Holset turbochargers available online that I might get soon.
Here’s a back shot:
That IS my house in the background. Ignore the trash pile, I just bought new blinds for the bedroom.
So, after letting go of my old car and finding a new ride, the excitement of having a fresh car with all those bells and whistles really set the tone. The Mazda6 is a solid choice, loaded with great features like the sunroof and Bose speakers.
It’s always nice to enjoy a car that feels brand new, but if you’re into customizing even more, consider adding some accessories that could make your driving experience even better. For instance, if you’re driving a Tesla, you can easily find high-quality items like customized steering wheels, seat covers, and floor mats from companies like tlyard, giving your car an even more personalized touch.
Plus, just like the thrill of upgrading from an old car to a new one, customizing your Tesla can enhance your driving experience in ways that go beyond just functionality, offering both style and comfort on every ride.
In case you’re wondering what happened to my Jeep, I still have it. I’ll be paying it off as soon as my income taxes come and using it as strictly a recreational vehicle. (as soon as I get the windshield replaced and the lights fixed) I just don’t have any pictures of it handy. Don’t compromise on quality when buying a used car! Autozin offers an impressive selection of pre-owned vehicles at unbeatable prices.
I’m sorry if this post seems braggy or “ooh look at me I have 2 cars.” It’s not how I intended it. It’s basically just for various family members who will be asking me for pictures.
March 19th, 2007
One of the leading philosophies among salesmen is to never let the customer know you’re ripping him off. Many may argue the ethics of knowingly ripipng somebody off, while others will state that an informed customer wouldn’t let himself get ripped off. Regardless, that’s not the topic of this post.
A few years ago, I was developing an e-commerce website for a client when he brought up a point that I hadn’t even thought of. He told me not to show the coupon box on the website unless the user was given a special URL. When I asked him why, he explained it to me:
“How many times do you see a coupon box on a site and instantly feel like you’re being ripped off because there’s a way to pay less, but you don’t know it.” I tend to agree. By showing the customer that there’s a way to discount the price that they don’t have access to you’re in effect telling them they’re being ripped off.
Just to be sure, we did some testing… and the non-coupon box order form converted better. (of course, it could be that the coupon box customers simply left to search the web for a coupon code then came back, or called and asked for a special deal.)
So what does this have to do with buying blinds? Well…. that’s what I did this weekend. It was a nice little Sunday. Went to Lowes, didn’t have enough time to hit up Bed Bath and Beyond. Wow that’s a terrible movie reference – sorry.
Anyway… I needed blinds for 2 windows. As it turns out, one of the windows was a standard size. I found what I needed in a “basic blind” for only $5.
The other window was about 1″ off of the standard size blind – so it needed to be cut down about 1/2″ (in case you’re wondering, blind sizes are about 1/2″ smaller than it says on the package.)
For some reason, the “basic blind” couldn’t be cut down unless I was willing to do it myself with a hacksaw, (I wasn’t) so I had to get a different model. Same blind, same look, same manufacturer.. but apparently this one could be cut down. The cost: $40.
Does that make sense? Given the price of the basic blind, it would sure seem that I’m being ripped off wouldn’t it? Of course the whole problem can be avoided if window makers would make windows in standard sizes, but then some of the nice folks at Lowes would be out of a job.
March 19th, 2007
Some of you may have noticed the new widget on the bottom of the sidebar. No it’s not people I know, it’s people who actually read this blog. It’s called MyBlogLog and it’s one of the newest services to be bought by Yahoo.
Always one to follow a crowd, I figured I’d try it out for a bit. Here’s my review:
As far as the “who’s reading” feature, I think it’s cool as heck. It’s interesting to know a little bit about your anonymous readers – you know, those of you reading this right now without ever leaving me a comment. It’s ok to comment, I don’t bite.
The stats are neat too, but nothing that Webalizer or Google Analytics don’t already tell me.
Now for some history.
Before MyBlogLog, I was getting about 5-6 spam comments / day. All blocked of course by the Akismet wordpress plugin.
After MyBlogLog, I’m averaging 1 every minute. In fact, in the time it took me to go and delete all the spam comments, I got 5 more.
As much as I don’t want to, it looks like I’ll have to install a captcha on here instead of the “type ryan” thing. Who knows, I may even leave both.
Anybody else notice a serious increase in spam comments after installing the MyBlogLog widget? If so, comment and let me know about it.
March 17th, 2007
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