Tix?R?Us_Blog

Free Blogging Course

2008-06-02T15:10:00.000-07:00

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

The best blogging techniques.
How to get traffic to your blog.
How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

Yeah I really will let y'all know what I think.

New Entrecard Features

2008-05-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

Entrecard made a major improvement today. Now you can have multiple blogs in the same account.
Each one has its own credits, but you can transfer credits easily from one to the other. They have also made multiple smaller improvements to the site, such as letting you choose between view profile and go straight to site. They also have added a RSS feed for your top droppers.

This is good news for me, and the timing is also good, as I'm in the process of decommissioning this blogger blog and factoring it into more targetted focused blogs.

Entrecard also have just published an Ebook that explains their service including these new changes.

After being in Entrecard for about a month what do I think? I think it generates a tremendous high bounce rate while inflating your visitors statistics. Most people just drop and run, and I'm sure that there's an auto dropping script that people won't publically admit to using. However if you take time to smell the roses you find some interesting blogs in among all the crappy ones and you might get a few subscribers.

What more does entrecard need? A ban list and an expand the top droppers.
The ban list would just flag that blog and remove it from my automatic list of tops if it was there.. After visiting a particular blog I decide I really hate it and never want to drop on it or see it again, let alone advertise on it. If I try to it says you have banned "Charlie's Crap Blog" Do you wish to unban it now? and if you did it would not be banned any more. Your drop list could go through and automatically open 10 blogs at a time, and it would also keep track of where you are.

My own wordpress blog(s)

2008-05-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

This blog is going to fade into obscurity to be replaced by my new collection of
mini-blogs under the cool domain of dorkage.net. ( Well, if you're a dork like me you think that's
cool.) I am just testing the trackback system with this post. The miniblogs I have so far are

Red Hot Dork Chow -- about food dorks eat to stay healthy and sustainable

Dorkage Goes Personal -- personal stuff

Dorkage in the Hood -- happenings in my local area

Hot Dorkage -- The main Geek blog.

I haven't styled them yet, they are all on the Wordpress default for the moment.
Best thing is, they are all running in a single database on a single copy of the wordpress software.
I've populated some of them selectively with posts from this blog.

Be nice to your System Admin

2008-05-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

My plans to post a Geeky Goodness series have been seriously derailed by..... well, let's just call it a "situation." I have no desire to rant on about how horribly I've been treated, or how the whole situation is so incredibly stupid that if it hadn't f**cked[FOOTNOTE] me royally it would be hilarious. I know you don't care.

Meanwhile ..... I have no desire to turn my blog into one of those collections of other people's youtube videos that's otherwise content free. But once in a while among all the crap on youtube I find a well done vid that makes a clear point. I enjoyed this vid and thought you might too. I found it on AsktheAdmin. Of course he didn't create it either, but I like his sense of humor.

[FOOTNOTE]If you read my blog regularly you know that I rarely use vulgar language or obvious censored versions of it. When overused, vulgar language becomes a form of hyperbole that impedes communication. But sometimes there is no other word. When I use it I mean it.

Something about me a normal Google won't find

2008-05-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

At Portland Barcamp this weekend, I caught the tail end of a session on patents. I didn't know that Google has put all patents online. Sheesh! I gotta get out of my tracks and explore more. If you want to search for patents you go to Google and then hit the even more>> menu option at the bottom of the more menu. At the left you can see a light bulb icon beside "Patent Search" OK... so you just type "Colleen Dick" in the simple search bar and voila,
MY PATENT!

How do I happen to hold a patent? A long time ago I implemented cascading bandpass filters for speech on an embedded Texas Instruments speech chip --the same chip that powered the Speak 'n' Spell toy. We had to listen to this mechanical voice over and over to test it and we noted that it really messed up certain foreign-derived words that were not in its Exceptions Dictionary, particularly names. Particularly, the name of the founder of our company..... NOT good for demos!

We were laughing at the way the thing pronounced our founder's name one day at lunch. See the patent and use your imagination and you can figure out for yourself what the joke was. I said to my team, "we need to allow the user to add stuff to the exceptions dictionary." So we kicked around a few ideas. I thought about how you would architect it, and that afternoon I spec'd out a rough requirements document for it. It was almost a joke, because we knew our boss would never approve of building anything useful, and certainly nothing proposed by an engineer. We weren't in marketing. All product ideas have to come from marketing. That's the way corporations work. And marketing could not wrap their heads around this one.

That specs document languished on the file server for nearly a year. Meanwhile I was off on maternity leave and had not been to work for two or three weeks. What I didn't expect was a Saturday morning phone call at home from one of the company patent attorneys. When a lawyer phones YOU before you've even sucked down your first Joe of the day your first thought is I deny everything! But he was all about the audio editor specification. He informed me that the company was seeking a patent on it, and as per my conditions of employment all monetary benefits from it would be assigned to my employer, but as the original inventor/designer I would get the honor of having my name on the patent, I remembered having written it, had no trouble digging up the theory of operation (because to me it was obvious) and thinking it might be a good idea. He asked permission to drive over to my house immediately and interview me. Sheesh maybe he thought somebody else was trying to patent the same thing to do it that quickly on a Saturday! It must have been about a 60 mile trip for him, but there he was about an hour later. There in my humble dining room with my little baby, he asked me a number of more detailed questions about how the program worked etc. Based on that he wrote up and submitted the patent in legalese as you see it now.

Well of course I asked someone from my team what was going on. My work mates informed me that this new manager had come onboard and started poking around and found my spec. Furthermore, this manager was championing my audio dictionary editor, had found someone in marketing to determine that there was a need for this functionality, and had already allocated several members of his team to work to productize it. I thought great, cool. Why does everyone seem to dislike this guy?

I soon found out. Apparently this ambitious new manager had initiated the patent process on my phonemic editor. He had proposed himself listed as the inventor but the attorney had smelled a rat. I'm guessing the manager was not answering the questions like the real inventor would. My buds told me the lawyer had been snooping around in the cubes and asking people questions about it. They just produced my original document for him. The name on the document and the time stamp clinched it.

It took months, but when the patent finally came through, the patent attorney took great pleasure in visiting Cubeville and hand delivering a copy to that manager's desk. Nobody told him that his name had been rubbed out and replaced by mine (hehehehe) I wish I'd seen the look on his face when he opened that! Not another word was ever said about it; I received no recognition for it in the company (monetary or other,) but it certainly dresses up my resume!

Does your blog have unsavoury "friends?"

2008-05-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

You are known by the company you keep. If your blog links to a bunch of dicey websites it could tarnish, if not ruin your reputation. Courtney Tuttle put me onto this little tool that evaluates your linkees. Check out Bad Neighborhood.

I was a little surprised to see that one of the sites I linked to that I thought was a blogging site had a lot of dicey keywords in its earlier posts that raised the red flag, and a couple of my posts even had tags that set off an alarm. In the case of one post I had the word pharmaceuticals --I guess that's a taboo subject now-- and if you want to find the other one you can run bad neighborhood against my blog -- I'll leave it in for you. Other than that, and a surprising 404 (which will be history shortly) no real shady characters around here. Your mileage may vary.

Print your Blog!

2008-04-27T16:02:00.000-07:00

FeedJournalgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Yes you read it right... Print your blog. Of course you could always just print the web pages, but this widget delivers my recent posts as a high res PDF, and it can do the same for your blog. When I don't have time to write a full blog post, I just spread something cool like this. Of course this is the free version--you have to pay for your lovely graphics and logos to be included. My insight and prediction for the future: This sort of company has a limited life span. PDF-izing features will be incorporated as part of the next generation of blogging software, just as they are in the current generations of MS Word and Open Office (like MS office suite only FREE in case you never heard of it.)

Geek Events In the News

2008-04-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

Note: This clipping is strictly for entertainment purposes, is 100% fictitions and facetious, and has no connection with any news media or individual living or dead bla bla bla...... You can get your own fake clipping like this free from getclippings.com.

Zend Framework Chronicles Part I

2008-04-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

Ladies and germs, this blog is going to take an extreme turn in the geek direction, which was, after all, it's original charter. Geeks will eat it up, but if you don't care for dorkage, I can actually be quite normal at times, and you should read some of my other posts by searching for non-geeky keywords. The decision has been finalized to rewrite the legacy style code of TixRUs to leverage the power of frameworks without forcing it into the rigid confines of a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal, that you then have to find modules for or program your own. The framework has been selected. And the winner is..... (drumrolllllllllllll)
ZEND FRAMEWORK Zend Framework seems to suit my needs. I considered CakePHP and Symfony, both strong contenders, and CodeIgniter, which some people love, and I had downloaded and played with a few homegrown ones as well. But the bottom line is Zend is backed by big bucks, it aint going away, the documentation is excellent, there are ways to make it integrate with Smarty, (which I am heavily invested in), it has a great deal of action, a large userbase, bla bla bla. Zend Framework is considered a heavyweight, and it has a learning curve. In my experience most things with learning curves tend to be worth it in the long run.

So today I installed it on my brand new virgin virtual server (that was a piece of cake, no wait, was it a piece of zend?) Anyway it was EASY. Then I went through
Mitchell Hashimoto's very nice video presentation and got the whole thing going, with a few curse words tossed the way of my stark unpadded webserver config file along the way.

I won't tell you where my new server lives for the time being, because I don't have the directory structure set up quite the way I want it yet. But in the next installment I should be making it a little bit more secure, and if you want to follow along with me and see a bare bones scaffolding start to look like a web app it might be interesting. I'll be tweeting about it as well.
That's it for today.

RSShugger: a clever way to get publicity

2008-04-19T08:05:00.001-07:00

RSShugger is yet another blog directory I have found. It's not Web 2.0 -- it's pretty old school and refreshingly simple. Hey not everything has to be a widget. Rsshugger is not huge yet but I predict they'll grow. They request an honest review, so here it is: The usability issues I see is that 1) the control panel link is not a top tab. It's up at the upper right ONLY and I had to look for it a little. 2) sometimes it's not spelled out what's going on and the verbiage leaves the casual reader in the dark. I can imagine what the backend of this looks like and figure it out, but to most people the back end of a website is a mystery. 3) when you submit your blog feed it isn't at all obvious that anything happened because it reposts the same page. And another thing is that they toss register links on the pages displayed to the already registered. But these glitches aren't hard to iron out and I'm sure Rsshugger will evolve.

Gee, I'm thinking, what a trend! Maybe I should make my own blog directory on the theory that sometimes you can make more money selling pans to prospectors than you will prospecting yourself. On the other hand, I think this whole "make money off your blog" thing is a fad that has already peaked. 10 years ago everybody was trying to "make money off your website." Essentially the same ideas were used, only now, with Web 2.0 it's easier. If truth be told blogs are nothing but websites, when you get right down to it. A few folks will make lots of money, the rest will quickly get sick of not making money and give up. As for me, I just want reads when you get right down to it. When all these wannabe blog tycoons go away, that will leave the rest of us focus on the core of blogging, which is really just a 21st century way to have a journal. Anyway, it's easy to join Rsshugger and we'll see how it "pans" out. [Horrible pun, I know, totally intentional.]

What Type of personality are you?

2008-04-17T23:47:00.000-07:00

Well there I am, summarized for all the world to see into a neat little bar graph. If you want to see how you stack up, go ahead and click the widget. It will take you to mypersonality.info where you can take the test yourself. It's fun, fast and free and you'll get a nice little widget souvenir like mine for your own blog.

I have taken these things before, including the full Myers-Briggs (which is way bigger, way more official, and 4 choice questions, and not free, I'm sure, though I never had to pay for it. The results are always the same. I am in a tiny minority -- the Introverted Intuitive Thinker Perceiver. This is what the site says about us:

"INTPs are logical, individualistic, reserved, and very curious individuals. They focus on ideas, theories and the explanation of how things work. They are especially adept at discussions and debate. They have the ability to focus intently on a subject. They appreciate and respect intelligence in others."

I was told once that INTP's are only about 3% of the population. This site says that 4% of males and 1% of females fall into this square on the grid. That makes me a very small minority. I have the same problems as any other minority -- I don't fit into mainstream culture. So can I please have some minority funding? PLEEEEEASE? Right, like that's gonna happen.

Just for fun I added the multiple intelligence tests. Woops I almost said multiple personality. Well big surprise. Music is my top intelligence. And I feel a great need to do more of it.

How much is YOUR domain worth?

2008-04-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

My Site is worth
$88,572

How much is
your site worth?

This is FREE domain valuation from your friends at dnscoop.com. They use data from Alexa, Google, your domain registrar, and other sources. We are apparently a Google page rank 5 -- that's darn good considering the limited amount of traffic we get. On the other hand we have a phenomenal conversion rate! When people come to TixRUs, they are pretty set on buying tickets and they successfully convert more often than not. Google favors sites such as TixRUs that are provide a great deal of useful content, even though our SEO is only what little old me can do here and there.

Ning makes top 20!

2008-04-17T10:22:00.001-07:00

I nabbed this graphic off a-stat-a-day
Did you know we have a ning site of our very own? So if you visited it before these stats were compiled, your visits were included in these stats. And if not, it's not too late to join it!

On digital abundance...

2008-04-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

he web is my platform; I shall never lack.
She maketh me to surf abundant (though often vapid) content;
She leadeth me to streaming media; she restoreth my cache.
She guideth me in the path of abiding by the TOS for my conscience's sake.
Yea, though I tread a fine line of legality I will fear no lawsuits for my poverty and my five wits are with me.
Thy large redundant data warehouses and distributed availability comfort me.
Thou preparest a bounty of digital goodies for me in the presence of corporate lawyers.
Thou annointest my blog with widgets; but my hard drive stayeth small.
Surely twitters and readers shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell with Scoble in the house of the rich bloggers forever.

Twitter -- the birdsong of 500 lb. canaries with bullhorns?

2008-04-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

What is the deal with Twitter? I just don't get it! I'm with Kathy Sierra on this one. (For those who don't know, Kathy Sierra is one of my all-time heroes -- a brilliant educator, writer and blogger who shut down last year due to misogynistic death threats. Would the bullying have been so egregious, or would it even have happened at all if Kathy had been a male? We'll never know, but you should really check out the link. Kathy makes her points eloquently and there's no point in me paraphrasing it. Let her speak for herself beyond the cyber "grave" of self-banishment.)

I wouldn't have given Twitter the time of day except that my very good friend John Sechrest suggested I get on. So I did, thinking hmmm... maybe there's something I'm missing. But no, not really. It's all about the tweeting -- posting your stream of consciousness into the world. Now there's normal sweet little songbird tweeting, but it can easilly escalate and approach megatweeting, which evokes image of a 500 pound canary on steroids blaring nonstop with the aid of a bullhorn. Some people feel compelled to share their every fleeting impulse. Look at me! I'm eating breakfast. Look at me I'm waiting for the bus. Look at me I'm listening to [fill in latest inane band.] Don't these people have anything to, like, do?

The mind boggles as to the datamining possibilities from the Twitter stream. Could you offset it all by timezone and see if certain keywords come up more at certain hours? Could you crosstab the complexity of the vocabulary with the frequency of posting? Clearly you could break it down by geography. Could you mine the streams according to demographics and sell it to advertisers? My guess is somebody IS. What a great source of free MARKETING data!

I have NEVER, nor will I EVER hook twitter up to my cell phone. I find that damn phone infuriating enough to use-- just torquing my way through the select and click menu is painful so I am not gonna inflict any more of it on myself. Oh, and never mind texting. Speaking of bad ideas: I think texting is a great way of leaving a brief message, especially when you want to transmit an email or a phone number, but I think it's a horrible way to do normal ordinary communication. What is the attraction? At least in Europe it makes sense because in Europe you pay for mobile service by bandwidth, and clearly texting is low bandwidth. In USA we pay extra for text. Texting with a phone is cumbersome and slow, though I guess with practice you can get good at it -- still I defy anyone to text as fast as I can talk when I'm on a roll.

Let's face it, I am basically an introvert, and, like Kathy, I need blocks of time free of interruptions to really accomplish anything. Twitter can tweet merrily along without much from me.

How Commerce Works

2008-04-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

I was intrigued by this depiction at a meeting I attended yesterday. I'm told the original purpose
was to illustrate "How a woman's brain works" but that statement is not verifiable. You can go gaga looking at the little blue balls moving around. Not sure how well blogger handles Iframes' either.

Pimp your Blog II: Entrecard, Blogcatalog, and mybloglog

2008-04-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry kids, there's no picture in today's post. I've just been playing with three blog pimping services Entrecard, Blogcatalog, and MyBloglog.

Entrecard is a widgetified version of the old Link Exchange that they used to have in the 90's. You provide a graphic and they use it to build you this widget which you paste into your site. Then people visit your site and they "drop their card" on your widget. You get credits for this. You can "drop your card" on other people's widgets too. And you can "sell" the space on your widget to somebody else and get credits that way. Blogcatalog is a social network that's focused on blogging. They have forums, friends, shoutboxes, etc. Oh yes and LOTS AND LOTS of widgets. MyBloglog and blogcatalog are very similar. They also allow you to list your id's on other well known social networks such as Digg.

Entrecard and blogcatalog generate a lot of action--people wanting to pimp their "friends" list or buy "advertising" on your blog. You could spend all day keeping up with this. You could spend so much time pimping your blog that you don't have time to write in it. So you take a step back and get back to writing in your blog. Which, of course, is distracting you from your day job in the first place.

Can anyone say "saturation?" The majority of the blogs out there are not that great, even with brilliant professional layouts, they still need to have to have something worthwhile to say, and have the skill to say it succinctly. I don't trust the great unwashed to pick the best writing at all, especially on the web--Epinions, (started in 1999) with it's crazy web of trust and hat and stamping system saw to it that gushy repetitive prose was ranked highly, while clear, terse and to-the-point writing was penalized.

I am not going to devote a lot of effort to the communities. I don't really think there are that many people out of the 6 BILLION on the planet who really care about a quirky and eclectic blend of tech musings and entertainment. However, I will make some effort in the next few weeks with Blogcatalog to winnow the blogs to ones I really like, such as TwoWriteHands, a series intensely personal vignettes from a young lady who writes well, those that offer solid info and not just rehashed twaddle, and those that don't promise to make you rich or make you thin or buff or give you the biggest willie in your class if you'll only do whatever helps the blogger, be it buy this or that product, or add him/her to your friends or whatever. That's ME.

As for the other 99.9999999%, it seems that extremely crass blogs are wildly popular. Crass blogs are interesting for their one-time shock value, but for me they get old really fast. However, I have learned that whatever I hate, most people tend to like, and whatever I like, most people can't wrap their heads around. The popularity of crass blogs supports my theory that most of homo sapiens are pretty degenerate. There is great contention for the most nasty, the most depraved, and so forth. Of course really crude, funny, or disgusting pictures help too. I suppose that one way to get rich is to pander to the human animal's baser nature.

I hate to be a spoilsport but only a very very few people are gonna get rich off their blogs. It's the same old hope springs eternal. Before blogs, every little three-chord wonder on the guitar had hopes of being the next Van Halen. Now you don't even have to practice a guitar or deal with a band -- just spew forth and they will come. Hear that faint popping noise? That's the sound of bursting bubbles. REALITY CHECK: There just isn't enough money floating around for everyone who posts up a crude picture and tells their friends about it to automatically end up with princely incomes. Sorry, but there JUST ISN'T. Think about it.

Social Bookmarking

2008-03-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

This is a really nice video explanation of social bookmarking. We have a bookmarking icon on our info pages currently, but look for a much cooler new bookmarking panel in Wazzup Local and Tix•R•Us in a version coming soon to a browser near you. Event presenters can use social bookmarks to get more publicity (FREE) for their events. Fans can help their favorite performers by social bookmarking the Tix•R•Us information page about it. Tix•R•Us has done its part by making the links much more search engine friendly. Instead of the old search-engine-unfriendly format our links are now of the "friendly" format. If your event is "Rusty Muggers plays at the Old Grungepub" instead of being eventinfo.php?linkid=5424 the link is now eventinfo/rusty-muggers-plays-at-the-old-grungepub-5424.
Search engines eat up URL's with key words in them. Suppose six people bookmark it. That's six more links. Suppose each of them has six friends. Furthermore, in addition to de.icio.us there are 50 other social bookmark sites in our panel. Of course no one but a freak would do them all, but a lot of people do two or three. Are you beginning to get the idea of the exponential potential for this technology? Of course the potential exists to spam these guys, so just one word: DON'T!

The new Tix•R•Us bookmarking panel is not yet available, but when it is, if anyone wants to know how it works, it's powered by script.acu.lous and it's Tix•R•Us' first adventure with this amazing package. You don't need the panel to bookmark; the panel just helps you do it more and faster. Please don't just sit there! Go out and power book mark! It both organizes your bookmarks in ways that make sense to you, allows your friends to multiply your efficiency, and helps the bookmarkees as well. That's a triple win!!

Move over Dilbert.... uh... (sort of)

2008-03-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

I was just surfing around the startupalooza website for who's coming to Portland and I ran across the toonlet site. I remember writing a Mr. Potato head stack in Hypercard many years ago and it was a lot of fun. I'd seen others as well, desktop toys for Windoze and Mac, all along the same line. Well, toonlet lets you give them moods and write captions and publish them for posterity, which is a step further. So I got into toonlet and created Calendargeek, an alterego for myself.

I don't really have dreadlocks but it was the coolest hairdo that fit the face. Some avatars are what people WISH they looked like, not what they really look like. I built Calendargeek to be expressive, not necessarily to look like me, or look like I wish I looked, and certainly not to be a glamour queen. However, I'm glad I don't look like Calendargeek. As far as I can tell, toonlet only allows one character to talk per frame. And it doesn't seem to let you edit the strips once they're "published." So given that, and since an awful lot of the time I feel like I'm doing a monologue anyway, Calendargeek is talking to herself and not to any other character, but you can listen in. Unfortunately in this blog layout it cuts off the punchline, and there's not much I can do about it. However if you click the strip you can see it in all its glory in its own home. Anyway, thanks for your indulgence. Toonlet is a lot of fun. Not sure quite what their revenue model is, but I'll stay tooned. Groan... sorry, just could not resist that one!

Amazingly enough, it's not Flash! It's put forth as javascript, but we all know (OK you probably didn't know but I did) that what lurks in javascript tags may or may not actually be javascript. However it appears if you "Use the source Luke" on the toonlet website it's all accomplished with css and dojo.

Pimp your Blog

2008-03-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

I'm sort of guessing anybody reading blog posts is halfway looking to promote their own blog, so this one's for you, kids. Blogrush is an interesting widget that is intended to mix up the gene pool a bit with regard to blogs. You basically place your blog in a category and then you put your own custom widget for that category on your blog. (See left pane.) The widget has links to other blog posts in your category. Every link is tagged with your blogrush id so that they know who sent a page to that other blog. You get points every time someone clicks the widget to see one of the related blog posts. When you have enough points then links to your blog will pop up in other people's blogrush widgets.

The other thing about Blogrush is that it works like those Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) referral schemes that were all the rage in the late 90's and early 2000's. You can get referrals, and you get credit for basically any blog reading action that's caused by your referrals too. You've all heard the MLM line, join now before everybody in the world finds out about it and there are still blogrush virgins, so you can get this massive army of referrals and get lots of traffic to your blog. Some people believe that schemes like this are illegal. Indeed, the structure is the same as a pyramid scheme, which is totally illegal, but the intent here is different. As long as you're not moving money up the pyramid, it's OK.

Blogrush have very detailed statistics. It's worth it to join just to see those. It gives you an idea of how well-read your blog is. And it shows you all your referrals. For what it's worth, it's scored me a few reads.

Buzzbites

2008-02-12T08:45:00.001-08:00

Another widget you can make very easily! Go ahead, vote! it's easy.

Subversion saved my derrierre

2008-02-08T13:11:00.000-08:00

Man oh man do I ever feel like I got run over by a truck and lived to tell about it. I guess this is part geek blog, part personal, and part Tix•R•Us I won't bore you with the gory details but suffice it to say MAJOR server crash requiring a rebuild. That alone is fairly traumatic, but I've survived it before thanks to good backups. This time... well let's just say some stuff, OK a LOT of stuff, got blown away for all time that shouldn't have. The feeling you get from something so utterly devastating is beyond despair. I honestly felt like blowing the whole server up and retiring to a life of taking pottery classes. But I saw one of my favorite clients, Tina Green of the LaSells center, that night, and even though Tix•R•Us was temporarily unable to produce a seating chart for that night's event, Tina still had a smile and encouraging words. So I managed to smile too and buckled down to picking up the pieces after being treated by my daughter Jean, a Corvallis OSU Symphony member, to a program of Barber, Chopin and Sibelius featuring pianist Roberto Plano on the Chopin. While listening to Plano executing flawless runs, it brought me back to why I am in this business in the first place, and I emerged from the concert, once again my happy hopeful and determined self. Indeed, Tix•R•Us was back in business in relatively short order, thanks to Subversion Subversion may be my favorite open source software package of all time. I was able to check out a new copy of the Tix•R•Us web app from my handy dandy subversion repository and whip up a configuration in pretty short order, all things considered. Tix•R•Us got the upgrade a little before I had planned but I'll make it work. It was almost ready. And after all, that whole disaster was just zeroes and ones.

OpenID

2008-02-03T21:43:00.001-08:00

Did you ever get sick of making up a user name and password to each and every one of those websites where you have to have user names and passwords? A lot of folks try to simplify by using the same id and pass on every site, but that's dangerous, because if just one site is compromised or untrustworthy, the bad guy can guess your login at all the others. Wouldn't it be great if you had a SINGLE secure identity that was recognized all over the internet without requiring each site to know your password? Now you can --it's an Open Source initiative called OpenID. Right now the bottleneck is the relatively small number of websites that support OpenID login. I first heard about OpenID at the last SAO talk in January by Scott Kveton of MyStrands.

OpenID takes advantage of the fact that domain names on the internet are unique. So you can pick any domain or subdomain that you control and set it up as your openID. I decided that http://www.colleendick.com would be a very good identity for me, being as how it's my name and all, and if I ever forget that I got way bigger problems than logging on to websites. If you don't own a domain you can sign up for a blog on wordpress. They will give you a subdomain: you.wordpress.com, which is automatically set up as an open id. (Even conservative blogger has started doing it, as of about 10 days ago!) Great, but what about the password? Won't I still have to give the password to each and every site? And wouldn't that be dangerous, because if someone ever cracked my master OpenID password they could log on as me to every OpenID site. Yet making up a different password for the same name on many sites defeats the simplicity goal. So what to do?

Well, let's say I'm going to tell some website that I'm colleendick.com. How does it know it's me and not just someone saying they're me? It's because I control colleendick.com and I put two lines of HTML code in the main page that tells it who to ask for the secret password. So if I'm not currently logged in it goes to that site and asks me for the secret password. If I know that it logs me in to that third party site, where I stay logged until I shut down my browser. Now if I log in anywhere else as colleendick.com it will look at colleendick.com, check that third party site, and since I'm logged in to it, I'm logged into their site too.

Sam Ruby provides an elegant howto for OpenID here if you'd like to try it.

As I see it, OpenID has sort of the the same weakness as HTTP authentication, which is what it rides on: If you log in to a public computer and fail to log out, you'll still be logged in. Of course the hacker would have to know your OpenID and that wouldn't be quite as readiily available as poking in browser history, but still, it's a concern. And the other overriding concern is that
trusted third party has to be someone you totally trust.

Tix•R•Us is one of those websites that currently requires its own login for administrators. We are not going to support OpenID for the forseeable future because most of our administrators are not geeks, and at the moment OpenID is still in the geek realm. I'm guessing few if any of them would use it even if it were supported, but it's something to keep an eye on.

Feed Blitz Chiclet

2008-02-02T10:55:00.000-08:00

FeedBlitz Chiclet: What is FeedBlitz? And what is a chiclet (or chicklet, as it is sometimes spelled?) FeedBlitz is an outfit that creates and manages a subscription list for your blog FREE. And the term "chiclet" has come to mean any web third party dynamic thing that does interesting Web 2.0 stuff on the back end. Usually a chicklet is visually enhanced by placing it in or on a 3-d background resembling an old-fashioned chiclets brand of gum. Chiclets has been acquired by Cadbury Adams, in case you're interested. How it works: You tell Feedblitz the feed address for your blog. They provide a mechanism whereby people can request a notification via email --anonymously if they want!-- whenever the blog is updated. Feed Blitz also supports other notification methods as well, as it turns out.

I know email isn't very sexy, but it's a lot easier to get a non techie's head around email than RSS. "Get notified by email when this blog is updated" is something most people can understand. I know the youngsters are abandoning traditional email in favor of texting and IM, but the oldsters (35+) still use email, and I wouldn't want to leave that demographic in the dust.

What I did was steal the styles and layout that FeedBlitz uses for their little info panels and put their code on one. Unfortunately Blogger won't allow the whole chiclet in the post, but you can see the chiclet in all it's glory in the left pane, second down. Go ahead, give it a whirl and subscribe. You can always unsubscribe if you don't like it. No hard feelings.

I just found out another thing about the Feedblitz email. It actually contains a link in the email to a place that will read the article out loud (in a robot voice) for you, courtesy of Talkr. Well, I successfully captured the links, but there's even an easier way: If you sign up at talkr.com you can get it automatically installed at the beginning of each blog post. also radio.talkr.com allowed me to create the audo summary select that you see in the left panel. It too is dynamic. KEWL!

Dilbert Widget

2008-01-23T16:05:00.000-08:00

This is not related to Tix•R•Us, except that it's kind of Web 2.0-ish, and I *LOVE* Dilbert. People who do not work in companies do not realize how true Dilbert is, and it doesn't even have to be a very big company. The instant you have one person in an organization who does not behave rationally, it's all over. For example, going to all the bother of hiring an employee, and then setting them in front of a flickering old CRT monitor that gives them a headache by 10:00 am and turns them into a drooling idiot by 1:00 p.m. is not rational. Telling people they shouldn't move a file from any insecure network to a secure network but requiring it for them to do their job is not rational. This is the reason I own my own enterprise. When I found myself spending more time protecting my back, working around stupid workflows that I had no power to change, and trying to second-guess office politics than I did actually working, it was time to GET OUT.