Unreasonably Unreadable

Wordpress 30min Install

2012-05-15T11:02:00.003+02:00

Domain and Wordpress in 30 minutes

In this post I will describe what I just did: grab a domain name, install Wordpress and get blogging in 30 minutes. This all assumes you have access to your own (Ubuntu) Apache webserver and some basic skills. If you don't have that, Google's your friend. If you want me to write a tutorial on how to set up your own webserver, leave a comment.

1. Get your domain name

Go to Go Daddy to get your domain. I used the search bar to find an available address (not so easy these days) and skipped through all the extra offers they wanted me to take (I didn't fell for that) until I reached the checkout screen. In another tab window you can search for Go Daddy coupons! You can get .com domains for $6 at the moment. Enter the coupon code and finish the order.

2. Configure DNS and Apache

In Go Daddy, go to my account, domains, click launch and then below DNS manager click again launch. Change the first entry (under 'A (Host)', item '@') to the IP address of your server. Save.

Now on your server, create the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/yourdomain (you may name it differently but then mind the next step). And fill it like so:

<virtualhost *:80>
 ServerName www.yourdomain.com
 ServerAlias yourdomain.com *.yourdomain
 DocumentRoot /var/www/yourdomain
 
 <directory /var/www/yourdomain/>  
  Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
  AllowOverride All
  Order allow,deny
  allow from all
 </directory>

 ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
 LogLevel warn
 CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
</virtualhost>

Note that /var/www/yourdomain may be something different, but than you should stick to that in later steps as well!

Now go to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled and type sudo ln -s ../sites-available/yourdomain 009-yourdomain

Now restart apache sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

3. Get Wordpress

Note: some commands might require sodu!
Go to /var/www and create a new folder: mkdir /var/www/yourdomain
Change group to www user: chgrp www-data /var/www/yourdomain
Go to /var/www/yourdomain.
Get Wordpress: wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
Unpack: tar xvfz latest.tar.gz
Now I like to do: mv wordpress/* . and then: rm wordpress -r
Change group to www user: chgrp www-data * -R

4. Make database and configure Wordpress

Open mysql prompt: mysql -u.... -p (you should know your username and password...often this boils down to root / root). Type: create database mydomain (other db name by your chosing is ok, mind later on though).

Open your webbrowser and go to www.yourdomain.com. Should work... Enter mysql database name, password, location (often localhost). Continue configuration. At some point you are stuck. Copy paste the configuration text into /var/www/yourdomain/wp-config.php and continue (in the browser). You should be able to finish the process now.

5. Install stuff without ftp

Finally, set the permissions on /var/www/yourdomain/wp-content:

cd /var/www/yourdomain/wp-content
chmod g+w .
chmod g+w * -R

And in my case, I also had to edit /var/www/yourdomain/wp-config.php:

cd /var/www/yourdomain/wp-content
vi wp-config.php
Add this line: define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

Note that this is not safe if there is other websites on your server that you don't trust

Wrap up

You should now have your blog available. You can install plugins and themes right from the Wordpress admin console in your webbrowser, from a white beach in a sunny place. If you have questions or additions to the above, feel free to leave a comment!

Got Chrome?

2011-06-22T22:55:00.002+02:00

Browser War
Browsing the web has become part of our lives. Everything favoring this activity has improved: computers, internet, number of websites, features of websites (from animated GIFs to petabytes of HD video), online services and applications, etc. Needless to say the market of webbrowsers is an interesting one to be in, to such an extend that browsers are offered for free.

This has resulted in 'browser wars' ever since Microsoft's Internet Explorer pushed away Netscape (remember all the fuzz when MS integrated IE in Windows XP). Nowadays, war continues, but new parties have entered the battlefield. The user benefits but developers are left in a forest of different standards (or different interpretations of the same standards, which to me seems as an contradictio in terminis).

Reality doesn't always make sense
It's not necessarily browser speed, user friendliness or aesthetics that determines market shares. Currently there's a bunch of browsers (versions) lagging behind that are still being used quite frequently, and there's browsers that are quite up to par but not equally popular.

Chrome
Chrome was developed by Google (based on existing stuff) and is aiming at speed, realizing browsers have to act more and more as 'platforms' for quite sophisticated software (Chrome OS even aims at a computer solely based on a webbrowser). This has urged other vendors to do the same (optimize the hell out of their JS engine). Opera is doing well, Firefox is catching up, Safari is as well and Internet Explorer... well IE itself might be catching up, but the users are much less so because they are not always installing the new browsers. This will become even worse now IE9 will not even be available for Windows XP or Vista, while especially XP will be around for quite some time (is my guess, especially in less developed countries).

Chrome
Looking at usage, Chrome is the one in the rise (see picture). Its growth curve even seems exponential. Internet Explorer on the other hand, is going down down down. That's reality and it seems to make sense this time. Opera on the other hand has less market share than it deserves based on the specs.

Versioning
One problem for web developers, apart from browser vendors, is browser versions. The rendering of a page might differ between versions from the same vendor just as much as between two versions from different vendors. Chrome, however, has a very sophisticated update system. Small patches (containing only the differences between the old and new version, taking into account that it are binary files containing executable or library code) are pushed to the client as they come out. When I looked at my website stats I first didn't believe this, because I saw multiple Chrome versions with high usage percentages pop up. But when I took into account the release dates of these versions, it turned out that almost all Chrome users use the 'current' version.

Google Chrome Frame (IE Plugin)
Google came up with something brave, clever and slightly backstabberish: the Google Chrome Frame, "[..] an open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome's open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer". From the developer perspective, it works like flash: if the user has it installed it works transparently, otherwise the user is directed to a download page through which he/she download the plugin very easily.

Conclusions
If you are still using IE and you are not using Windows 7: go Chrome! In other cases: at least consider Chrome! It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux (32 and 64 bit). Those who want to be exclusive: consider Opera.

Stat Stuff & Meta Update

2011-05-29T18:47:00.002+02:00

No new is good news
No news is good news, or, as the English King James I wrote in 1616 'No newis is bettir than evill newis.' Anyway, I'm doing fine thanks! I hope the same holds true for Murlu (murlu.com). I was following his blog already for a while, for reasons I blogged about before. After leaving his job, cranking up the posting speed, and then leaving for Japan, all went silent: his main blog since march, his traveling blog since april. His Twitter feed continues, but all tweets since April appear automated. That's odd isn't it? And Spooky.

Referral spam killed the fun
What is odd as well, is referral spam. I blogged about it before, mainly focusing on one player that went pretty far and made things worth diving into. Then at some point my Blogger statistics went crazy with tons of weird sites. Here's my all-time top list of referrers:

getrxpills.com
edprescriptiondrugs.com
antibiotics-shop.com
basicpills.com
god-sersy.livejournal.com
9pillsonline.com
condition.dn.ua
deluxetravelua.com
amoxil-pharm.com
e-pharmacy-online.com

I don't recommend visiting any of those. It sure killed the fun of tracking Blogger's statistics. Google's Analytics however is not disturbed by all this (funny fact: they're both owned by the same company). So I've slowly switched to tracking that and webmaster tools, and reactions and follower counts both on Blogger and Feedburner. As long as Blogger doesn't do anything to defend against this, Blogger stats are plain useless, and a waste of programmer's time!

Back in town
Basically, Google Analytics showed an increase in visitors over time, even without new posts arriving. This encouraged me to return to the front line. Both my own activities and things happening in the outside world give rise to lots of stuff to talk about. A lot of my time recently went into the development of a Facebook application. Developing an app for Facebook, and learning more about this humongous beast of a website along the way, was surely an interesting process. Now there's the question: will it blend? Will our ideas, our technical implementations and - most important of all - our user's interests and demands mix into something sustainable? More about that later!

Post Scriptum
In other news, my first offspring blog wasn't really going anywhere. And my priorities have been such that a second one has not aired (yet). My company's doing fine although the Facebook activities are actually out of it's scope and hopefully will result in another one launched soon.

NoFollow

2011-02-16T19:11:00.000+01:00

Having links to your blog or website is important on the web. Not just because people may actually click on them and end up on your site. The mere presence of a backlink to your site by itself may increase your search result ranking (this is not the only parameter though!). And this simple fact is like pandorra's box...

Link spam
Some time ago I had created a website for a friend, very basic, very local, custom made. I had added a guest book (old school) and even though it was handcrafted it got picked up by spambots at some point in time, posting pages and pages of links and garbage. A simple captcha-like solution was enough to stop the madness. Captcha's indeed have conquered the web as a response to spambots and the like. But nowadays spamfighters have another weapon at their disposal..

rel=nofollow
By adding rel='nowfollow, to a link, as attribute inside the anchor tag (a-tag), a webmaster can prevent 'PageRank' attribution to this external link. The behavior is quite established amongst all major search engines. Whether the searchbot actually follows the link depends on the search engine. Note: Google nowadays does subtract the would-be pagerank from the total amount you can give away (ie other links on your site do get less as if there was no nofollow, but the nofollow link doesn't actually get it).

Why is this important?
Apart from being effective against spam(bots), the nofollow attribute is also important when you are seeking ways to (legitimately I presume) promote your own site. Since version 1.5 WordPress adds nofollow to all links in user-submitted content (ie comments headings and contents) by default. This may be relevant if you want to acquire links to your site by posting comments on other blogs (as is suggested in numerous videos and blogs elsewhere). Using the tool SEO Quake (which has plenty more features you may want to turn off for your own surfing convenience) you can quickly identify which links on a site actually have the nofollow attribute.

The future of the web?
It is interesting to think about where this is going. More and more sites and platforms are making use of nofollow, as backlink seekers' strategies evolve. Ultimately, this may at some point degrade the informative value of ranking algorithms because 'true' links are also removed from the equation. It is therefore not surprising that the amount of 'PageRank' is not the sole determinant of search rankings anymore. As more intelligent systems emerge, this ratio will most likely keep decreasing over time. What to do then, if you want to promote your website? Content, my friend, is King. Social media, my friend, the Queen.

PS:: this was, in hindsight, part three in an otherwise unintended series of html tags that play a role in search engine optimization :-D

Canonicalization

2011-02-10T18:18:00.000+01:00

So how big do you think your site is? 100 products and some general pages, say 150 pages? Think again. Are both www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com useable and displaying the same content? And both index.php and '/'? And shoes.php, shoes.php?sort=price, and shoes.php?sort=date? Or even
www.youroldsite.com and www.yournewsite.com? And do you care about SEO and your search engine ranking? You might want to continue reading...

Duplicate content
To Google (or any other search engine) the above pages are in principle all different. It does however, often recognize this fact and display only one in the search results. Still, you could do better.

PageRank diffusion
If sites A and B link to yours, that's great. You got some backlinks. Depending on their PageRank, you will get some PageRank juice as well! Twice! Nice! But wait, closer inspection reveals page A links to www.yoursite.com/index.php, site B to yoursite.com/index.php. To make matters worse, you find a third site that links to yoursite.com/ (no index.php). Every individual page in that list will start with zero PageRank and gets a little but only from either page A, B OR C! So, you might have three backlinks, but the PageRank is divided over the three 'different' pages. If only there was a way of Google to stop this madness! Luckily, there is...

Link rel=canonical
With the canonical tag, a page can say to Google 'I am insignificant, please ignore me and see me as duplicate of ... (page in the href part of the tag)'. You can even do this for pages that are not 100% identical (but still are very similar). And it even works cross-domain. Remember you are always 'giving away' your PageRank (but if it is to a page of your own, that can be very beneficial), so the tag should be in the 'inferior' pages. Google will also take the 'canonical' (or 'master') page as the one actually shown in the index. Remember this is just a guideline for Google...it can always decide to ignore your effords, if big'ol search bot feels like it ;-D

Here's the tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.someplace.com/heresthemotherofallsimilarpages"/>

Meta Description

2011-02-09T18:46:00.002+01:00

Adding meta tags to your webpage is no longer the number one SEO tip. I think the meta keywords are literally dead. Google at least claims it now ignores them. For the meta description tag however things are a little different, and I attribute some value to it.

What is the meta description tag?
Meta tags are HTML tags you place inside the section of your web page. As the term already suggests, meta tags say something about your page. The meta description tag is supposed to contain a short description (a few lines or even just 200 characters as I read somewhere as a guideline) describing your page. Google and other search engines use this tag to summarize your page in the results list. In other words, if you supply a meta description tag, this is litterally used as the short snippet of text below the link to your site in the search results.

Here's what a meta description tag looks like:

<meta name="description" content="Blah blah blah my site about blah blogging and SEO and blah"/>

Humans
Search engines are computers, and ranking happens by algorithms. Whether people actually click on your link within the list of results is another. Try and observe your brain as you yourself scroll to pages and pages of search results and try to figure out what actually triggers you to click on them. Most likely, the contents of the short description was part of your decision process. Well, that is why the meta description tag matters.

What if I have none?
If you have no meta description tag, Google will try and 'make' one for you, based on a combination of a few snippets of your website text. Sometimes this may work out fine. Often, you can do better!

Meta description vs Ranking
So, the meta description tag is important for your click through rate (CTR). Does that in turn also affect the ranking of your site in future searches? Apparently, the answer to this question is not readily available. Bing supposedly admitted to incorporate this information and Google most likely does as well, in one way or the other. The overall effect though will probably be quite marginal compared to all other ranking parameters.

Fonts for Web & Blog

2011-01-30T19:41:00.002+01:00

Fonts on the web
Originally there was only a limited set of fonts available to website builders. Even now, the fonts readily available in a web browser differ per platform. Even those that do not aim at advanced typography want to have some control over their fonts, for both 'titles' and 'content'

CSS font stack
To overcome the problem of differences in available fonts in various web browsers, css allows a web designer to define a 'stack' of multiple font-families. The browser simply use the first font that is available. The downsides of course are: 1) still a limited set of fonts available, and 2) your page will look different in every browser, especially when using less supported fonts.

Text as image
For titles (ie non-changing pieces of text), one can present text as an image. These images are created upfront in an image editor. This allows you to use every font you can find. Even nowadays this is still often done for titles and such, but has 2 downsides: 1) Google only indexes text, 2) inflexible: for every change in text or font you have to go back to your image editor.

Custom fonts
Nowadays, it is also possible to add custom fonts to your website. This functionality is available in 'most browsers'. This may sound discouraging, but as a web designer, this is often the best you'll get anyway and because of font stacking (see above), it is really easy to present a very practical alternative.

Options
For those who want to do stuff manually, I gladly refer to this post. As often, there's workarounds needed to increase the spread of browsers that will understand you. In such cases, it is nice to make use of frameworks that do this for you.

Google font API
Google font API is such a framework. It is accompanied by a set of freely available font directory. All you have to do is include a css file from Google's server, and you can use the font in your css font definitions as any other font:

<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

You can define multiple font families (ie 'fonts'), as well as font styles (such as regular, bold, italic, bold-italic).

Blogger fonts
Let's look at Blogger, then Wordpress.com. Blogger enables you to change HTML and CSS, so you are free to go. I realized along the way, though, that Blogger makes it even easier! In the template editor, under 'advanced' you can not only select 'commonly' used web fonts such as Arial and Georgia, but also all (?) available free fonts from the Google font directory. Awsome!

Wordpress and TypeKit
Here we go. Wordpress.com. Here I even needed it more, because I haven't found a way to increase my font size without paying for custom css. TypeKit is really well integrated into Wordpress. The tool itself is quite nice, but due the the degrees of freedom it wants to offer you, quite complex. If you want to stick to 'free', you are limited to 2 fonts and 1 website. For me it was enough to test things.

You have to subscribe to TypeKit, and enter your TypeKit id in your Wordpress dashboard. Then you can use the TypeKit website to select a font and css tags the font should be attached to (if you are lucky, and the template you chose is already in the list, TypeKit does a lot of the work for you). If you publish and wait (they say it may take a few minutes), you should see the changes applied to your blog.

So, although you are limited when keeping it free, it is possible to use TypeKit to change fonts to non-web fonts in Wordpress. In practice however, I found this quite tedious, and previewing is not an option, due to the delay after pressing the publishing button.

Closing remarks
So all together, you can add 'custom' fonts to your webpage, or blog. In Blogger it is super easy, in free Wordpress.com unpractical but doable using TypeKit. Google font API is your friend if you have your own website. Realize however that a full font, including different styles and with extended character sets can become quite big files. Adding 4 fonts to your page can really add up. So be selective in which styles, characters and fonts you really need.

Google's Webmaster Tools (vid)

2011-01-27T19:24:00.000+01:00

Google posted a video on Youtube giving some tips about using Webmaster Tools for SEO. Frankly this tool doesn't become too exciting until you are already getting a bunch of (search) traffic and/or inbound links, but it is still a really nice tool. I blogged about it a little bit before, but this video does a much better job discussing the ins and outs of the tool (wonder why that may be...;)

Offspring Update

2011-01-22T12:10:00.001+01:00

So at the beginning of this year I set some goals. One of them was to try out various niche blogs. The first one is up and running for a while now and I have used it to experiment with various ways of promotion. This involves Twitter, Twiends, Facebook, Farmville (yes really), Bit.ly and comment-posting.

This post
For bit.ly I wrote a post already. For Twitter, Twiends and Facebook I will write separate posts but only when I have a better understanding of these platforms. For now, I'll update you on what I tried so far.

Facebook & Farmville
First, I created a Facebook page, and started playing Farmville. Why? Because Farmville is popular and Farmville requires neighbours. People are actually willing to crap their friends list with random Farmville players if their true friends don't actually play the game. External websites promoting this didn't really work (should try and make one myself!), but posting on Facebook Neighbour fanpages (there's a bunch of them) did. If you want to speed things up a lot you can actively add others.

Twitter
Next, I created a Twitter account and started to follow other people by searching for things like 'need inspiration' and posting links to my blog. Roughly 10% actually followed me back and it did generate a few hits and even a retweet. But this doesn't really scale up. Actually Twitter's rules are against aggressive following. And against advertising. Aggressive unfollowing is even worse. Furthermore, I don't really feel comfortable harassing people like this.

Twiends
In came Twiends. It is an odd website where you gain credits by following others, visiting websites, watching vids and liking facebook pages (you can also buy credits). You can trade these credits for people returning the favor. I followed a bunch of people that offered many credits and then started to like facebook fanpages like mad (you need an 'approved' facebook page for that, which wasn't a problem for me because I had a lot of friends already because of Farmville). In the end, I quickly had 300 followers on Twitter. The sad thing is that most of these are quite hollow (like mine). A few weeks later there's still 200 left, but posting a link to a blogpost doesn't result in any visit. It may however, help to get started (ie if you follow a random person and have 100's of followers, he/she might be more prone to follow you back?).

Facebook again
Back to facebook, I now created a fan page (tried a group first because I didn't know the difference, as I said I'm mainly doing this to learn by doing) for my blog. I invited my 'friends' and switched my Twiends strategy from getting Twitter followers to getting Facebook likes. See where this ends up...

Closing remarks
In a nutshell, I'm working on and over the boundaries of what I would normally find acceptable. For now I am far from convinced by anything I have seen. What did generate some visitors was commenting on other blogs and the postaday2011 Wordpress tag I added to my posts. My goal was to write a post every other day, so I need 30 by the end of February. I've been posting every day for the first two weeks. I think I'll spread the other half over the remaining time. Also, I will try the commenting-strategy a little more actively. Although less scalable (I do read the post).

Bit.ly

2011-01-16T21:34:00.001+01:00

You must have seen them. Short urls. Perhaps you even used them? I want to discuss a few of the interesting sides of bit.ly. As a cliff hanger: the last part is my favorite ;)

What's bit.ly?
Nowadays, the movies you download with a usenet/news server can easily be 8 Gb. Or more. Just one example of how a we're not counting kilobytes anymore like we did in the days of 2400baud modems. Still, somehow, there is a huge demand for short urls. Readability is not a necessity (something I can relate to). Sole booster of this demand must be Twitter. Somehow in this day and age of streaming video on your cellphone, Twitter managed to grow big with an application that limits your posts to 140 characters. And now tons of inventions are popping up to find ways around this limit.

Yes, but what is bit.ly?
Eh, yes, enough about Twitter, that's going to be another post. Bit.ly is a service that enables you to pack your lengthy url into something much shorter. So you can send it around using Twitter or what else. The user clicks the link, the request goes to bit.ly's server, is translated and the user is redirected to the original location.

Using bit.ly, and why
Using bitly is easy, go to bit.ly and paste your url. Press copy and your shortened url is on your clipboard. Alternatively, you can make an account at bit.ly and organize your shortened urls. You may use bit.ly for the aforementioned reason of wanting shorten a url. You may also want to use it if you don't want to 'spoil' to what domain the link is actually going to (goatse anyone?). A third reason may be that you want to gather clicking statistics.

Statistics
Making an account at bit.ly is especially useful because bit.ly provides a lot of statistics about your short urls. You don't have to be logged in for that, but it having an account is very handy to keep track of all your data. You can see click counts, referring sites, etcetera. You can even see how often (and when, where and by whom) your short url is (re)tweeted.

Interesting part
Now here comes the interesting part. At least, I found it quite interesting and I have used it a few times already to gain insight into how others are doing their online marketing. You can access any bit.ly link's statistics by copy pasting the link in your address bar, add a 'plus' sign and press enter. If there's more bit.ly links pointing to the same location there's also a bit.ly link that contains an aggregate of all data. This way you can, for instance, learn about the effectiveness of certain approaches without trying everything for yourself.

Wordpress.org

2011-01-12T21:51:00.003+01:00

In my previous post I did a little comparison of Blogger and Wordpress.com, both free online services to host your blog with lots of extras. Wordpress however is orginally an application you can install on your own server. This Wordpress is still alive, kicking and available through wordpress.org. I thought it was nice to evaluate this and share my thoughts on my blog. So here we go.

CMS or Blog?
Full fledged Wordpress.org is more than just a blogging tool. You can also make entire websites with it, comparable to Joomla and Drupal. So it is not just a blogging tool but can be seen as a full fledged Content Management System (CMS). For now I'm leaving Joomla and Drupal out of the equation by the way.

Basics
Wordpress is just a pack of files. It requires PHP and MySQL. Installing is quite easy: download, upload to your server (more about server specifics later!), edit wp-config.php: enter MySQL settings and copy-paste some salt'n'pepa, visit the site with your browser and easily complete the install from there. Now you have something that looks a lot like what you see when subscribing through wordpress.com. But in this case, this is really only the beginning!

Themes & Plugins
Wordpress can easily be extended with plugins and themes. Themes take care of the looks of your site, plugins come in all forms and shapes. Many plugins behave as a widget: a small piece of UI/functionality you can customize place in your (side)bar. The availability of themes is extensive, even if you don't want to pay. WordpressThemeBase has a lot of them and provides one-click browsing from one theme preview to the next. Wordpress.org also provides both themes and plugins. And if your not satisfied, just write your own (adjustments).

Installation of themes & plugins
Installation of themes and plugins can be done in two ways. First, you can upload them by ftp. Luckily, every theme or plugin is just a single folder that contains everything it needs. Further configuration can be done in your browser through the dashboard. Much more convenient is installing plugins directly from the dashboard. You can search, preview and download/install them really, really, really easily. That is, if this works on your host (this type of interaction requires a bit more 'freedom' which is not allowed by every host and sometimes may require a bit of tweaking from your side).

Wordpress.org VS wordpress.com
The huge amount of plugins and themes available if you install Wordpress.org yourself makes all the difference with Wordpress.com. I'd almost say Wordpress.com is bad publicity for what this platform is actually capable of!

Free
Well, this difference fades a little I guess if you are willing to pay for Wordpress.com, but you don't need to pay for the .org version either, do you? Well... you do need a host that serves your pages. Nowadays there is free PHP/MySQL hosting available, but do they work with Wordpress? I first tried Awardspace, 000webhost and Dreamhost Apps. But I wasn't pleased. The first two were slow and I couldn't get the installation-from-backend to work, 000webhost even banned me from my site for a day. The latter only provides a pre-installed version with a limited set of plugins and themes. They say you can edit your themes but I don't think you can upload stuff.

Space1 troubles
I also tried a payed hosting provider I am with (Space1), but their MySQL version was too old. They did provide an auto-install for an older version of Wordpress, but I fear that many plugins would be incompatible. And that problem would worsen over time since I also couldn't upgrade Wordpress (because of the MySQL version AND because their php safe mode didn't allow scripts to run long enough for an upgrade to run smoothly).

Finally
Finally, I came across x10hosting. It did take a little bit of guessing to get it uploaded and get MySQL running over there (there's a forum though, with lots of knowledge already available). But once that hurdle was out of the way, everything else worked like a charm, including installing themes and plugins from the dashboard in the browser! Perhaps there will be times the server is slower than it was when I was testing it, but for now it looks like a decent solution. Your url will be a little bit trashy (their words) like blah.x10.mx. But you can connect your own domain if you want to (if you have one). This is of course not much different from Blogger and Wordpress.com.

Perhaps, when the next offspring blog is coming up, I will try and use wordpress.org on x10hosting!

Wordpress

2011-01-08T12:32:00.004+01:00

As I wrote before, I used Wordpress to create my first experimental offspring blog using Wordpress (this one is using Blogger). For those that are about to put up a blog, or are just interested, here's a quick overview for you of my (first) experiences with switching platforms.

Wordpress
So Wordpress is originally this open source project that offers you a system you can install on your (hosted) server, it helps you to easily build a website or a blog. Since it is open source, and since there's a huge community around it (a necessity when using open source products, always look at the past and future release schedules and the activity of the surrounding community), there's a huge amounts of resources (templates, plugins, books, forums, etc) available. Nice! The project itself is free, but some of the extensions cost money (which actually presents opportunities for developers and designers! I'm taking mental note of my own remark!).

Two flavors: wordpress.com and wordpress.org
So what's with wordpress.com vs wordpress.org? Well, the latter (.org) is where you get the stuff that you have to install and configure yourself (see previous section). Wordpress.com is a platform comparable to Blogger, that offers you a pre-installed wordpress blog / site, including an url in the form yourblog.wordpress.com. The basic functionality is free of charge. The .com version is what I'll be discussing in this post! Maybe you can also install Wordpress (.org) on a free webhost (000webhost is the most obvious choice here), I must try that once and blog about it!

Wordpress.com
So I went to wordpress.com, spent some time in registration process (it's quite straightforward) and before I knew it my blog was online. So far, so good. And comparable to Blogger. Next, I needed a simple but effective layout. I didn't want to spent days designing something, because of the nature of the project.

Templating
Just as Blogger, Wordpress.com offers you a choice of templates. These templates often have (a few) configurable options, such as changing the layout (1, 2 or sometimes even 3 columns), the location of the sidebar (left vs right) and the header image. In contrast to Blogger, I had a hard time finding a template that I really liked. In my opinion, most of the templates are rather crappy. 'No worries', I thought, 'I know CSS'. And I started to change some colors and text sizes, switching back and forth between a browser tab with the online editor and one with a preview.

Money
At some point I noticed a remark: to actually saving the CSS, I needed to pay money. I have to say I don't know how much, and perhaps it could be worth it, but once again this was totally against the whole idea of the project. Furthermore, Blogger does offer you the opportunity to change CSS. Also, Blogger offers you to go mad on the template's HTML, including whatever you want (such as Google Analytics, but more about that later). For Wordpress.com, if you want to go beyond the default offerings, you have to pay.

Posting
You can write posts in Blogger with an editor inside the browser, just as for Google's Blogger. You can embed pictures, videos, mark up your text, etcetera. You attribute tags and categories to your post easily. There's a auto-saving feature and version control. Also, you can schedule a post for later. I don't think Blogger has version control, but all other features it does have as well. However, I found Blogger's editor much more flexible, user friendly and intuitive. I've been having a hard time putting in extra newlines in the Wordpress editor, and inserting videos from another place than Dailymotion and Youtube didn't seem to work. You can edit HTML in Wordpress.com but if you insert an embedded vid or even a BR tag, and switch back or save the post, it's gone. I have to say even Blogger's editor is being a pain sometimes with inserting seemingly random tags that put more whitespace than I want, but this I can easily fix later in HTML mode. I've had much more troubles with Wordpress' editor. Both have a read-bore break-here tag, but the Wordpress template I chose templated the read-more link so hideously I decided not to use it.

Widgets / Gadgets
Blogger gives you lots of gadgets due to its compatibility with OpenSocial and iGoogle, and you can even create your own (see this post). Wordpress does have comparable functionalities and there must be a lot of cool things available, but not in the free online Wordpress.com version. Okay you have a few nice ones, and you could misuse the feed-reader gadget a little, but that's really it.

Useful stuff
Since you can not edit Wordpress.com's HTML, signing up for Google's Webmaster Tools could be a problem. Luckily, there's an option in the tools section in which you can set your identification code. So, this is actually a really nice feature! It does the same for Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center. I didn't even know these so this presents a great learning and blogging opportunity for later!

Community
Wordpress.com does seem to present more of a community. If you use certain tags, your post pops up in Wordpress site wide lists for those tags. I've seen a few people come in this way. Also, you can search all wordpress.com blogs. The comment system is linked to your Wordpress.com account, so your Gravatar (something else, maybe I will be talking about this in a later post) is visible and people are directly linked to your blog. This is actually the same in Blogger. It does present opportunities to generate traffic.

Pinging & Google
Both Blogger and Wordpress do the basic broadcasting to search engines such as Google for you.

Final verdict
Blogger vs Wordpress.com, without willing to pay for anything. I have to say: Blogger wins. Especially if you have some knowledge about HTML and CSS. Wordpress.org might be another story, but I'll have to come back to that later.

Offspring & Niche Blogging

2011-01-06T18:44:00.004+01:00

Well, my first offspring-blog of the year 2011 has seen the light. InspiritualBlog. If you asked me what it is about (someone did..), I will have a hard time explaining, but will come up with something like 'inspiration', a little bit on the soft side.

Niche?
Is that a niche? Probably not. By the way, I learned the other day that 'niche blogging' is actually (according to Wikipedia at least) a combination of 'blogging' and 'niche marketing'. According to that page, 'niche blogging is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market'. The bold-italic is by me, because that's what makes the difference with my original interpretation. What do other sources say about it? Well if you Google niche+blogging, most what you find is about making money anyway, preferably by sleeping. Another source mentioned the 'marketing' part only as an option down the road.

Niche??
In the process I stumbled upon a post about how boring niche blogging is, how nice it is to step out of your shed once in a while, and that this might be okay since many visitors will come for YOU. I think he has a point, although I have seen blogs were visitors would not come for the blogger him/herself. The latter will definitely be the case if you're going for the quick win. I think in that case a niche blog is still the way to go. Otherwise, he has a great point.

Murlu
Who is 'he'? He's murlu.com and I really liked his blog (layout-wise I have seen better though). It feels more 'real' than problogger.com. He has a lot of good content on his site, and (that's what I really like / appreciate), a high level of meta posts, for instance about his revenues.

Offspring
Yes, I was actually talking about this new blog I set up. I'm trying a few new things here, which gives me the chance to learn (the whole point after all) as well as a chance to write about it on this blog. So, coming up will be articles about Wordpress as a blogging platform, Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools and bit-ly as a nice tool with a hidden agenda.

A website's importance

2011-01-03T13:11:00.161+01:00

White Collars
In daily life, we value information partially based on the 'authority' of the messenger. In other words: if something is brought by Reuters Press, we value it more than when we hear it from a 15 year old who doesn't even know how to spell correctly. If your doctor tells you to do this or that, you are more prone to listen then when the old lady at the supermarket does so. Although there's cases when this strategy doesn't work out too well, it is normally quite an effective strategy. With so much information coming at us, we simply have to use these rules-of-thumb.

Websites
In the world wide web, these notions of 'authority' are important as well, in many ways. Some users may have the tendency to easily believe whatever is written on the web (which can be a problem all by itself!), others may be more critical, taking into account the source into account when evaluating the relevance of information. Search indexers help out here a lot by trying to sort information based on the 'authority' of the source. Webmasters try and make use of this of course, but that's not what this post is about.

Estimate it yourself
This post is about wanting to get a quick estimate of a site's reputation for yourself, when your existing knowledge leaves you clueless. This can be for various reasons. Perhaps you found information and want to know how trustworthy it is. Perhaps you want to know which sites could be most effective to partner with, to buy ads on, etcetera.

The site itself
A site itself can give a good first impression. Is it a blog? How lang has it been around? How long since the last post or your post of interest was submitted? Other clues you may get from the number of followers, the number of comments, the type of comments and maybe even the site's layout (be careful!).

Google PageRank
Google's PageRank is an indication of a page's importance, valued by its connectedness based on links to that page from elsewhere, especially from pages with high PageRanks themselves. This helps (it is not the only factor!) Google to sort search results, but by itself it can be informative as well! An individual rank is calculated for each page. This can be useful if you want data from a single page. If your interest concerns a whole site, you could lookup the PageRank for the site's homepage, but this ignores all links from outside that link to a any other page within the site.

Alexa Rating
The Alexa rating is based on a lot of user's actual browsing data, collected by a toolbar. Probably, the users that have the toolbar are not a perfect representation of the whole population of internet users. This may influence the results a little. Alexa Rankings are three months averages, so they change only gradually. In contrast to Google's PageRank, the Alexa rating is based on entire sites. Alexa also provides other statistics than rankings, by the way. Top 3 Alexa rankings: Google, Facenbook, YouTube. My blog: above 23.000.000. This guy's website: less than 2.000.

How to get it?
How to get the PageRank for a website? You could use Google's Toolbar, or if you're using Chrome browser (ironically) use PageRank Status from chromefans.org. The latter also gives you Alexa ratings. These are in any case accessible via alexa.com.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T17:57:00.005+01:00

It's a new year. Welcome! Wishing you the best for 2011! (Ouch, busted: I initially wrote 2010, thank god this is not a type writer).

Any resolutions? Here are mine (beta):
- Launch my company
- Launch the local job website that I am currently working at
- Get some exercises in my daily routine to train my back muscles
- Launch new blogs, for fun and learning

S.M.A.R.T
In my language we have an acronym called SMART. it translates quite reasonably to English, and I always thought that's where it originates, but I'm not sure anymore. Anyways:

SMART =
Specific
Measurable
Acceptable
Reasonable
Time-bound

Targets are SMART when they follow all of these guidelines. A SMART guideline is more motivating and easier to monitor and evaluate. Even the process trying to make a target SMART is beneficial: it encourages you to really think about your targets and look at them from different angles.

Problems (un-smartness)
My resolutions are not fully SMART. Are they time-bound? Well, perhaps coarsely because of the unwritten law that resolutions apply to the coming year only. But they definitely could improve time-bound wise. 'Launch new blogs': this lacks specificity. In an earlier I wrote I was thinking about 'one blog a month'. But is that reasonable? It makes no sense setting goals if they are not reasonable. This can even be demotivating.

My resolutions revisited
- I'll launch my company and will turnover (excluding VAT) 4k euro in the first year.
- We will launch the local jobsite in February, including 20 jobs, having 1k hits in March.
- Have a daily 15-min exercise routine running by the end of January to train my back muscles
- I will launch a new blog every two months, and post at least 30 posts per blog

Sounds perhaps less inspiring, with all the numbers and stuff, but makes it harder to cheat :-D

Meta
So this my last post in the December blog-month series. This means less posts on this blog, and more focused ones. So no more sandcastle building videos ;)

Monetization

2010-12-30T21:09:00.002+01:00

Yep, there's the M-word.

What is monetization?
For non-native English speakers like me, what is monetization? In short monetization is a more classy word for making money. Well, the original meaning is a little different (the process of attributing 'value' to a bank note, sea shells or gold) but in blogger's language it means starting to make a profit from something (that was previously free or unprofitable).

I have seen the M-word pop up already a number of times this month while getting acquainted with the world of blogging. I also have to admit that I find these posts, be it videos or writings, quite interesting / inspiring to read. That is probably part of why they were written.

How does one perform the beautiful art of monetization?
Ah. To know, you want? To be, you should. To understand, you must! And only the beginning, that is!

Seriously
Seriously. Would I be writing blogpost after blogpost, for free, if I knew how to make money out of it? Actually, maybe I would. I kinda like it. But still I don't have the answer for you my friend. I will try to find it though. And I will tell you all about it.

Droste effect, or the rabbit biting of it's own head
When you Google for money making, you will probably find these extremely crappy sites promising you loads of money. All you have to do is buy there (e)book, which is about how to make loads of money. The book you buy itself is then probably about making loads of money by writing a book about making loads of money and selling it to fools like..you. (No, not you, because you didn't buy the book). This stuff smells funny, no?

So how much different then, are blogs that make money by showing you how to make money? That depends perhaps a little on what they show you, and whether it works. And most importantly whether it involves doing something else than the original writer is doing.

I will stop here. It is just a shiver I had for a moment seeing people commenting on blogs to get people to their own blog (which is then on turn probably about getting people to a blog), seeing people follow people on Twitter to get followers, that in turn are probably only following to get more followers themselves. Probably to attract readers to their blog, which is then on turn probably about how to get more followers on Twitter.

See where I'm going at? How much of this stuff is just a self-containing bubble? And will it burst before I can do some serious monetization?

Time will Tell.

OpenSocial

2010-12-29T11:37:00.001+01:00

While working on my tiny my-2do gadget I came across something called OpenSocial. I had maybe once heard something about it but otherwise I had now idea what it was. I decided to dive into it a little for my own knowledge, and write about it here for others' knowledge.

API's
As you might have noticed, many social websites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, enable third parties to develop applications for their site. These applications can integrate into the social-ness of the website (ie get friends list and stuff) via so called API's (Application Programming Interfaces). The problem was that each site used their own API's, so unless they had too much time on their hand programmers had to choose.

OpenSocial: Open, Social, StandardOpenSocial is pushed forward by Google, but is for the web, not just for Google. It enables (web) developers to build applications for all social sites (that adapt to OpenSocial) at once. The developer now only has to learn about the OpenSocial API's to make an application work on all platforms.

Who's in?< Opensocial.org shows a list of social sites that are exposing the OpenSocial API's to developers. Interesting names are LinkedIn, MySpace, Hyves, iGoogle, Orkut. The big name that is missing obviously: Facebook, although apparently there is some adapter software you can use to run your OpenSocial app on Facebook as well.

Hit?
I could not find a video about OpenSocial itself that was less than 2 years old. Maybe this is because the original videos are still relevant enough? Also a lot of webpages discussing OpenSocial are of comparable age. Also, in the beginning, security issues came up.

Alive?
Is OpenSocial still alive? Yes, I think it still is! For instance MySpace announced this month it will be providing an OpenSocial .Net container and keep on supporting OpenSocial.

Interesting?
Yes, OpenSocial is interesting, at least for me, because you can reach a lot of people as a developer, and you can make use of existing platforms and libraries. Furthermore, the main techniques you have to know for OpenSocial are HTML and JavaScript. Check.

My-2do

2010-12-28T12:35:00.002+01:00

I wanted a todo list on my blog, that I could edit, and others could see, as a 'gadget'. I decided to make one myself. I won't give any details, that would become a multi-page tutorial, but I'll show you which components / platforms / techniques I used so you can for yourself decide what's out there.

Google Gadgets
Blogger's layout is very flexible. You can add gadgets (in my language, Blogger calls them widgets), made by Google, third parties, or yourself. These are defined / built like any other gadget for iGoogle. That was interesting for me for two reasons:

Because of this there exists a lot of documentation already, from Google itself and probably also in communities on the web. Auto-didactic as I am, this can make or break a project!
I could extrapolate my efforts to other Blogger as well as iGoogle users. Not a necessity but definitely an extra motivation: the effort / learning investment opens up a lot of new opportunities.

XML + http-request

Gadgets are defined as an XML file. You can host them with Google (I learned that afterwards) but I hosted it somewhere else. The XML file contains information for the user-settings dialog, as well as the HTML of the gadget itself. You can spice this up with JavaScript, including access to dedicated libraries from Google (for example to get the current blog's posts). I decided to host the app itself at Google's App Engine. Because of that, the XML was quite simple: just an empty DIV and a few lines of JavaScript that used 'gadgets.io.makeRequest' to fetch the list from App Engine.

App Engine

App Engine is 'part' of the gadget system, it was just my choice for making the server-side part of the application. I could have just as well installed a LAMP stack (Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP) on my home server and host it from there. App Engine however offers a bunch of free resources and can scale up very easily. The main reason however is that I am currently learning App Engine.

I use Java (GAE/J) and decided to try out JDO persistence this time. Although others say JDO and JPA are comparable, I think there is more documentation for JDO available. Oh, I use Eclipse as my IDE, together with Google App Engine plugin, it makes life on App Engine a lot easier.

To get things rolling even faster, I decided to use the Google account login feature of App Engine. This means that I don't have to worry about the user system.

Structure

Currently the whole system is very basic: one applet to edit your todo list (there's one list per email address), another applet that exposes your todo list to the outside world behind a 'custom' url. This url was first baked into the xml. That's stupid of course so I rewired it so the todo list ID is configurable by the user.

Feature stuff

There's more to do: styling the edit page, making edits possible from within the blog (as long as you are logged in), multiple todo lists, styling the todo list, marketing, earning money, selling out, buying an Alfa Romeo Giulietta. :-D

Where?

Okay you want to be a beta beta beta test beta test test tester? Here's how to implement:

- Go to my-2do.appspot.com (and log in with your Google Account)

- Add items to your list

- Copy the ID to the clipboard

- Go to blogger, add gadget, use your own, paste this URL: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107797948841842070898/my-2do.xml

- Done

Let me know if this doesn't work or if you have cool feature requests :-D

Metagain

2010-12-27T14:02:00.001+01:00

Meta...again
I thought it was time for another meta blog post. There's only a few days left of December and with this post I am back on track for the one post per day goal. I admit some posts were shallower than others, but all together I do think it is a nice display of my current capabilities as a Blogger (leaving open whether these capabilities are any good). Let's look at how the Blog is doing.

Visitors
Woot, my site gets visitors! The transition from a total flatliner to getting-some-hits is very cool. I also have to admit that some promotional tweaking does help, at least in this phase. A few backlinks in other blogs (mostly comments I made myself I have to admit) and a niche subject that started to generate some hits did help a lot. Last two weeks I'm at +/- 15 visitors a day (multiple page hits per visit though), 20% are returning visitors: thanks! Really! Thank you! :-D

Tools / statistics
I have three tools I commonly use: Google Statistics, Blogger Statistics and Google Webmaster Tools. They all have their pros and cons. Blogger's statistics are real time, the other two are lag 1 or 2 days behind. I only recently discovered the cool things that Google's Webmaster Tools offers. Some features only become interesting when there's enough data available. One that works (for me) nicely at the moment involves Google's searches.

Pingywebedition
Apparently Google keeps track of every search, including the pages that were returned, their position, and which hits are actually clicked on. The only search query I see info for is pingywebedition. Although the amount of searches per day are around 50 (very low!), I have a CTR (Click Trough Rate, the percentage of times that my page is actually clicked when it is displayed) of 20% (this has been rising the last few weeks). This gives my roughly 10 visitors a day (each hitting perhaps a number of pages). Although these numbers are soooo low and insignificant in any way, it nicely shows how 'being big in a niche' can be better than 'being small in huge topic'.

New hits
Today I noticed I'm also being found once in a while now in searches for the Harmony Remote 650. Maybe this is coincidence, maybe some other factors play a role here that I do not fully understand (yet)! Don't tell, but I tried to push that a little more today by posting my review at a few other (relevant) blogposts. It is micromanagement, I know, and it is only worth the effort because of the learning experience. And the rush of rising graph's :-D

Next?
What's next? I had another idea today: start a new blog each month, niches this time, stopping what doesn't work or isn't fun to do, and use this blog as a meta blog about the whole process. That way, this blog would also get some focus (and less-than-a-blogpost-a-day). Haha, this is so me, not wanting to choose, even when I have to pick a niche, I think about picking 12 :-D Will let you know how this evolves!

Sand Castle

2010-12-27T13:04:00.001+01:00

Once in a while you find yourself in another YouTube video spree: by accident you hit a video of a certain subject and in the right side of your screen tons of related videos appear. There's a niche for almost everything, and sometimes it is rather funny to explore such a niche.

Here's how building sand castles is a metaphor for almost everything else, in life. Ai, cannot embed video, have to link to it. Sorry, here's a Failblog video instead.

PS: Wonder how I got there? A Blogger link about adding gadgets to your blog -> a 'how to' video about monetizing your blog -> a 'how to' video about building a sand castle (crappy style) -> some other sand castle building videos (I learned that water is key) -> the other video (I linked to) -> this video.

PPS: Had to write this (will explain later..): "Get a strike with a fuzzy decorative dice"

Christmas Part 2/2

2010-12-27T12:31:00.001+01:00

Where I live, Christmas comes in two parts, 'first Christmas day' and (surprise surprise) 'second Christmas day'. The first is preceded by Christmas eve, the important of which depends per family (and their religion). Having two days of Christmas is convenient to spread family activities.

One way
One way of doing things is: first day with the 'family-as-in-mom-dad-children', the next with extended family. The other option is: first day with her family, second day with his' (or vice versa), although the chain has to break at some point because 'her' brother might be spending the first day with his significant other's family (still not confused? ;-)

Another way
Others use the 2nd day to go shopping (comparable perhaps to Boxing Day activity).

Third day
Sometimes, very informally, a third day is introduced to spent time with friends.

Holiday
These two days of Christmas are holidays in the sense of getting off from work and school, but they always fall on 25th and 26th. Since Saturday and Sunday are already non-work/school days, this year is therefore very disadvantuous (had to Google that). Especially because the same goes for New Year's day (1st of January).

Grey Christmas
In closing, I want to introduce the term 'Grey Christmas', as opposed to 'White Christmas'. This happens if Christmas is decorated with over a week old snow, mixed up with sand, oil, salt and what more. That's not white man, that's grey!

Christmas Part 1/2

2010-12-25T12:35:00.002+01:00

Goodday all! Merry Christmas. It's sunny out here. But cold. There's still some snow left over from last week, so we can go beyond dreaming, regarding this white Christmas thing. Now we can all go and make peace, eat our bellies full and donate a few bucks to the homeless to wash away our guilt.

In other news, 40 people were killed in an explosion in northern Pakistan (probably a suicide bomber). Luckily, stocks and oil prices are doing just fine.

Oh and here's this funny xkcd comic I saw today, very season-relevant. Since they posted the img-url with this text: "Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding)" I thought it was alright to do so :-D

Pingywebedition Q&A

2010-12-23T23:00:00.002+01:00

Why this Q&A?
My original post concerning pingywebedition.somee.com was originally centered around reference spam in general. That post got quite some attention and raised more questions, that could only be incorporated by means of a full rewrite. I didn't feel like a rewrite, so I wrote this post as an addition, and I did this in a away that easily allows additions later on. Got another question? Just leave a comment ;-)

Note upfront: the Q&A's below are based on the understanding that I have so far about pingywebedition. Since I cannot look into their systems, maybe I'm off or missing something at some point. I will update this section with any relevant new information.

What is pinging?
Pinging is a way to notify systems (such as blog search engines) that a blog has changed. This enables these systems to only check the modified blog when updating their databases. An analogy: Imagine you want to keep track of all CD's your friends have. You visit them all and make a long list. Then one day later (or even an hour later, or a minute) you wonder whether your list still up to date. You don't know unless you revisit them all. That is a lot of work, day in day out. Wouldn't it be great if they would just call you whenever they bought a new CD? That is the principle of pinging. Of course, the cost of 'visiting' is less (just a web request) but on the other hand, the scale (amount of 'friends') is much bigger (many blogs, many pages per blog).

Can pinging be abused?
Yes, ping systems can be abused. For instance, the pinging frequency can be too big (this would be analogous to one of your friends calling you every ten minutes saying he bought something new - but didn't). Also, the source of the ping can be something other than a blog (ie product vendors) or a fake blog that is only there to promote another site (ie increasing PageRank). This type of blog is called a spam blog (or splog). Spam ping is also called sping. But if you are just running a legitimate blog you don't have to worry about splogs and spings.

Is pinging useful?
Pinging could be useful yes. Blogger (if you use the right settings) will automatically ping Google's services and weblogs.com. Wordpress has such a function built into it as well. Since many other parties will use weblogs.com as a reference, you might wonder if you need to ping more services. If you want to, you could do this manually, or try and use a tool that helps you do that. In that case however, you have no control on what's going on. Chances are you are using a scattergun approach that is far from effective and a waste of your scatter ;-).

What IS pingywebedition?
Basically, pingywebedition is a site that offers an online mass 'ping' tool. That is all it does. To promote itself however it uses a few tricks. These have actually nothing to do with its core function. More about these tricks in later questions. Pingywebedition offers you a way to 'ping' a bunch of systems at once, for a lot of websites at once as well. That could save you a lot of work...if you had 100 blogs to ping. Do you? Probably not.

Why is pingywebedition showing up in my blog's statistics?
Requests are being sent to your blog that appear to originate from pingywebedition website. This is called referrer spam. It is a trick. A quite common one as well. Initially, referrer spam worked quite well because some websites published their logs ('statistics'), including the referral urls. This would then improve the ranking of the spamming url. I think in this case however, the site owner expects bloggers to inspect their statistics often, click the url and talk about it.

Does pingywebedition spoil my statistics and can I prevent that?
Yes, pingywebedition (or referrer spam in general actually) spoils your statistics. I you are using blogger, there's not much you can do about that. Maybe you could try and push Blogger/Google itself to improve their statistics or add filters. Or you could try to use Google Analytics. This is however much less fun because far from real time. Another 'solution' is to get so many visitors that the spam counts become insignificant ;)

Why / how is pingywebedition linking to my site?
In short: it is not. Seriously. If you reached pingywebedition.somee.com directly by clicking on the link that appears in your statistics page, it may seem to do so, but try entering the url directly in your browser window and see what happens. What's going on? Well, when clicking the link from inside your blogger statistics page, your browser is passing your blog's statistics page as 'referrer'. This is normal behavior. Servercode that renders the pingywebedition website breaks down this referral url and transforms it into a link to your blog. But this link is only for you to be seen...

The Social Network

2010-12-22T11:33:00.001+01:00

I watched the social network yesterday and thought I'd give it a review. This in the spirit of trying all kinds of approaches to blogging, this December. So, I liked the movie. There you go :-D Nah, there's more to it :-D

Real?

The Social Network gives us a reconstruction of how Facebook (no...spell checker wants me to write that with capital F) started, and what this did to the life of (co?)founder Mark Zuckerberg. Real (brand)names are used and the movie is based on true facts, but there's also some part of fiction in there. Where this thin line is, I don't know. Many won't. Poor Mark.

Yada yada yada

The conversations in the movie are eloquent and extremely fast paced. It reminded me of this TV show 'Gilmore Girls'. I feel sorry for those that have to subtitle this movie, or watch it in any other than their native language :) I liked it though, especially in cases where Mark's being a smart-ass in court.

Story

The story starts with Mark's girlfriend breaking up with him. This sets of everything else. At some point a second and a third timeline are introduced, displaying the two lawsuits Mark is in. This can be a little confusing if you don't have any knowledge of Facebook's story beforehand. Flashed back from the lawsuits we see the story unfold, the rise of Facebook, the fall of friendship. And then, suddenly, snap, it's over.

Tech talk

Do you remember the movie 'Hackers'? They hacked into the school systems and set off the sprinkler system. ever since, movies with computers involved are extremely unrealistic, and so are the computer screens displaying graphical animations of the hack. The Social Network also has a fair amount of tech talk, for instance when Mark is obtaining all the pictures for FaceMash. But this time it is quite realistic. It must be quite vague for the non-nerd. That is OK, you don't need to understand it to get the story, just be in aw :-D

Wannabe?

Emotionally and socially, you don't want to be Mark (at least as he is portrayed in the film). But economically? I have to admit there is some 'I wish' factor going on while watching this guy set up a multi billion company.

And since adding videos to a post is kinda addictive, here's the trailer. I hadn't seen it yet, it is quite original, because of how it starts (I'm not talking about the green screen thing).

Motivation and Inspiration

2010-12-21T10:53:00.001+01:00

Let's try to post a video! Wow, Blogger makes it freaking easy! Click video, search on Youtube, embed and done! So here's what I like as a replacement for my old Alfa. I can not afford it though :) I was never about cars, but nowadays I sometimes secretly dream about something decent to drive around in. The Alfa Romeo Giulietta keeps me motivated to get my company going. But the Alfa Romeo Giulietta is also inspiring, trying to be good in multiple areas at once (small, safe, affordable, sporty, stylish, etc) without major concessions.

Specialized or multi-disciplined?

In professional life you can roughly take two roads: specialize in one thing (know a lot about a little) or become less-than-specialized in a broad range of subjects (know a little about a lot). If you take these to extremes, you have on one hand people that know everything about nothing and on the other hand, people that know nothing about everything. Which is better?

I present you, the Alfa Giulietta :-D

Without heart, we would be mere machines