Direct link for the feedreaders.

A couple of things. First, I understand how he can pooh-pooh Dawkins and Hitchens, since to him that's old news. To me, it wasn't. I used to believe, but it was through the efforts of those two, as well as Jonathan Miller and others, that I finally managed to wake up and realize what sort of LARP I was inhabiting.

Also, education is terribly important. Speaking as someone who survived public education in Alabama, I can tell you there isn't enough of it happening there. Cosette constantly refers to a Bible class she took in college that treated the book as literature–I think that would be immensely helpful for most people. Hell, for me just reading The Five Gospels was helpful. But I think if you educate people–not just about the world and science but also about their own belief system–it'll go a long way towards waking people up.

Anyway, great vid. Found via Brian Denham by way of Andy Diggle.

It was already on my nerves because it seems to be incredibly slow. Even on my new spiffy mega-mondo desktop it feels bloated–it's got that bad-comedian-in-a-fat-suit slowness going on. I was all excited at the prospect of a 64-bit iTunes…but after running it for a while I wondered why it had gotten slow again. Then I discovered that the installer was the only 64-bit part. The regular iTunes was still 32. Now I'm not a technical guy (not anymore–I don't count myself in that particular club) but why in the hell would you want the installer to be 64-bit? The only reason I can come up with is that the 32-bit version wasn't playing nice with a 64-bit OS.

Anyway, so that was annoying.

Now I found today I had somehow turned on a feechur I'd never witnessed before nor desired: that of "album ratings." I have MP3s that I've pulled in from God knows where–a lot of old-time radio files, audiobooks and other things. As a result, I am missing a lot of artist and album titles (which I use this previously mentioned method to go through on the run).

iTunes, of course, treats that whole "unknown artist" and "unknown album" as one album. And today I was greeted by a lot of tracks with "phantom stars." I've seen them described as "white stars" or "hollow stars" as well. Here's what they look like:

oooh, spooky

After my initial attempts at exorcising my machine did no good–and screwed up the monitor with the blessed tap water–I started rooting around on Google and found this is a lovely feechur of iTunes called "Album Rating." It will basically take the individual ratings of tracks, average them, and assign a rating to the album as a whole.

I found the solution here. Basically you have to open up the "Album Rating" column in your main library (right click the top and select it so it appears) and then un-rate the album.

Here's what I don't understand: why do people feel the need to make feechurs mandatory? Why is there no switch in here that I can throw to disable this bit that simply doesn't work with how I use the program? If there is one, I haven't found it. Just like I can't turn off the threaded conversations in Gmail–and thus can't use it as my primary e-mail client. Why must these companies be so goddamn narrow-minded and try to force us to use their stuff only the way they want?

I will say this: for as much as Firefox sometimes gets on my nerves, at least it appears to have a whole slew of plugins and settings and hacks that will let you do just about anything any way you want it.

Companies: give us the control panel. Don't add a damn thing without giving us the ability to turn it off. You're just annoying us.

Okay, rant ends. How have you been?

Here, watch the damn thing first so I don't spoil it.

Direct link for the feedreaders.

Okay, so first, I like the way he establishes the idea of questioning authority. Or how there's a time and place for authority, like the OSHA->OCEAN comment–which is fantastic. And how when trying to do the right thing–like with the castration story–we have to be careful we're not doing more damage than we intended. Self-questioning is important, and not just when performing animal husbandry.

Real work is needed–and I believe that we should all work smarter and not harder–but sometimes hard work is warranted. As for the idea that we need people who can work real honest manual labor…I agree. I also think that you'll see their compensation rise if they're that needed. Hell, I don't know about you, but every time I've called a plumber or electrician, I've felt they were well paid for their activities. And I'm one of those people who would rather pay more for quality and customer service…and I've had pretty good luck with that. I don't think we need some kind of mandate to increase pay for these occupations…I think the money will go where the experts are. And those who seek discounts will sometimes get what they pay for.

Anyway, the talk is fascinating. As are most of the TEDTalks out there. Thoughts?

So when I look at somebody's Twitter, there are a few things that just shut me down and I won't follow them back. That's not to say if I'm not following you back you're not a lovely person and you probably help feed orphans or kittens or orphaned kittens or something, but you're just not my cup of orphaned kitten tea, if you know what I mean. (Or it could be that I've been getting a lot of followers recently and I missed you in the shuffle–dreadfully sorry about that, if that's the case.) Anyway, a few things to watch out for:

1. If your updates are protected, then I can't make a judgement call on you. In fact, what can you possibly be saying on Twitter that is that confidential? I mean, honestly, I'm as paranoid as the day is long and I don't have my Twitter secret.

2. If you have no updates, then again, I can't make a judgement call on you. Now Twitter actually sends out a quick thumbnail sketch of your number of followers, number of people you follow and your number of updates. So if I don't know you already and you follow me but have said nothing, I probably won't bother to even click.

3. If you talk about something I have no interest in. If I go to your Twitter account and all of your updates are about your fungi farm, then I'm probably going to not follow you, once I wake up from falling asleep reading about your farm. If your fungi farm is from Yuggoth, though, you might have my attention.

4. If you talk about something and I can't tell what the hell it is you're talking about. I literally have gone to somebody's page and seen nothing but smiley faces and "You know it!" replies and so forth and so on. I would take fungi over that, seriously.

5. If you are so completely marketing-centered that it's bloody obvious you just want to sell me something. I'm talking about those Twitter accounts that have seven updates and they're all "I used to be an exec but now I breed emu in my back yard make $$$ I'll show you http://bit.ly/emupower"–if that's you, then I have very little interest in following you.

6. If you are so completely marketing-centered that you tried to hide how marketing-centered you are but did a piss-poor job of it. I mean seriously, if you're going to try to sell me stuff, at least entertain me. And if I had a dime for every Twitter account I've seen where it's Emu Power! bits sprinkled with supposedly motivational quotes from famous people, I would have, on my account right now, "I used to be a shmoe who ran a website but now I get dimes for reading lame Twitterz http://tinyurl.com/lamepower." Or protip for people who do that, at least get different quotes…I think there must be a quote RSS feed somewhere that they've all piped into their Twitter. Blah.

If your bio amuses me, if you graphics amuse me, if your post amuses me, if your attitude amuses me, then I will follow you back. But if you've got none of that going for you, I'm afraid it's going to be a one way street. No offense, though. Good luck with the orphans and kittens.

Man, this is great tea.

The answer is honestly probably not. But the main question you need to ask yourself is: what are you trying to accomplish?

Most people just want a place so that they too can be heard. Read. Whatever. If you just feel like blogging about your cat, then perhaps you don't really need your own site. You might be fine with using your Facebook account, or even that old standby LiveJournal or just going and getting a mycatrocksyourface.whatever.com at some place like WordPress.com.

Seriously. They're free, there's no infrastructure for you to support, and your cat's three fans can read up on its latest adventures and whatever you dressed it in this week.

However, let's say that your cat is the inspiration for your webcomic and you've set your cat up as a character–as though he or she were the one editing your webcomic. And let's say that someday you'd like to turn My Cat Rocks Your Face into the next webcomic-into-real-comic breakthrough hit. Then yes, you might want to get your own domain and roll that way.

Where you get your own domain hosted is an interesting question. If you don't want to involve a lot of money up front, then I would say go to some place like Dreamhost, because they are ridiculously cheap. They also, if you are not technically savvy (and your cat is content to be the star and let you, its agent, do all the work), have one-click installs of stuff like WordPress so you don't have to deal with it. They even now have one-click "easy" installs–you get less ability to customize, but you also don't have to know anything about WordPress or PHP or FTP or PCP or any other acronym that you really don't want in your life.

There are other cheapy hosting services out there and I can't really advise you on all of them. Your best bet is to get a referral from somebody you trust who's done this before. But just be aware: if you get some $9.99/month deal for a crazy amount of shared hosting space, then you shouldn't be surprised if you run into problems. Remember: you're paying thirty cents a day, basically, for scads of bandwidth and cycles and whatnot. And the Get What You Pay For axiom is in effect. Please do not be one of these total asses who freaks out if your server goes down for an hour…an hour which cost you somewhere around a few pennies. You're probably sharing that server with 500 other sites (or something) and if you're the nice one of the bunch, you'll go further.

If you're just starting out, you might be fine with this setup. Once your cat has become the star of its own animated My Cat Rocks Your Face series where he's voiced by Paul Welker or something, then you can no doubt afford a serious production-level (translation: doesn't go down that often) site. And you can probably afford to pay somebody to learn all of those pesky acronyms as well. Because again, you shouldn't be running a serious business on $9.99 hosting if it's acting like $9.99 hosting.

Some other odd thoughts on this:

1) Know when you've outgrown your current hosting plan. Watch for notices that you're using up too many cycles. And by cycles I mean computer processor time not, you know, the unicycles your wacky cat will enhance with artificial intelligence in the young adult novel My Cat Rocks Your Face, Vol. 2: Cat Goes Carny! WordPress is excellent at eating resources, so utilize any online help the hosting company comes with, utilize your friends who are more tech savvy, and squeeze whatever life you can out of it. But if you start to have downtime that is unacceptable in your opinion, move. (I'll probably do a later post with WordPress plugins you need. Not that are nifty, but that you actually need.)

2) Your hosting company might let you upgrade. Some companies will offer shared hosting (the cheap stuff), virtual private hosting (the better stuff) and then a dedicated server (the expensive but worth it stuff). So before you're dead in the water on your resources–but maybe starting to enter the doldrums–investigate and know what your options are.

3) If you snag a domain name, make sure it's with somebody you're not hosting with. This is just some of my own paranoia here, perhaps, but it's an issue of Single Point of Failure. If you start to have difficulties with your hosting company, your domain names aren't in their clutches and you can point them elsewhere easily.

4) Try to avoid becoming technically savvy if you're not already. And I mean this with all honesty. If you can get away with not knowing, just don't know. Whether a family member has been roped into being your admin, or you can afford to pay for somebody to be your admin, or whatever it is…if you don't have to become a webmaster, just trust me: don't.

One last thing to be aware of: if you do start a site, remember: a site that hasn't been updated recently is worse than no site. So if you are trying to run some kind of business on a website, make sure you or somebody is on hand to deal with it.

There is a term in Twitter called "retweet" or "RT" for short. It's the only time I try to use the term "tweet," meaning "to post to Twitter," because "tweeting" just sounds…well, pretty goddamn stupid. Basically when you "retweet" you are simply passing along what somebody said. So if I had said "I wish I could get this flathead screwdriver out of my ear" and you RT'ed me, it would look like this

RT @Widgett I wish I could get this flathead screwdriver out of my ear.

This makes perfect sense to me. When you read that, you see "RT" and know that what's being posted isn't original. And then you see "@Widgett" and know, oh, that lunatic Widge said this. And then you read the rest.

Now some people have said you should credit the original poster with "Via" instead. So the Via post would look like this

I wish I could get this flathead screwdriver out of my ear (via @Widgett)

You probably see the problem right away. When you start to read that, you think the person Twittering it said it and is the "I" of the statement…until you get to the very end of the post and learn it was actually me who said it. And it doesn't seem like much to find that out later, but that changes the way you're reading the content. And confusing it, too: did @Widgett actually post that or did he just pass the info along to the re-poster who is now regurgitating that info?

There's nothing wrong with using RT and it actually makes more sense. And I know there's a whole line of Twitterologists who will tell you the proper way to structure a Twitter post and whatnot, but honestly, take all the time you'd spend worrying about that and work on your own content on your own site (or the necessary equivalent). Places where you don't have to worry about 140 character limits and if you want to name a source you can just name a source with a normal link.

All that being said, feel free to format your Twitter posts however you want. Just RT this one.

I'm kidding. Mostly.

I think he's got some good points there, specifically as to what advertising is when you boil it all away. It's an interruption wanting to sell us one thing when we're in the middle of doing something else. This is true. When you go to Needcoffee, there's a better than average chance you're probably not wanting to see an ad for singles dating service. So there's been a huge mismatch between what might be relevant for you to see vs. what you're actually seeing. I think this happens better online than it does in the real world–in "real life," I would constantly be amazed at the offers I'd receive via snail mail. For example, a special deal on replacing the siding on my house–while I was living in an apartment. It just takes a little bit of checking to know that my address was an apartment at the time–and yet here I was getting mail about an offer I simply could not use.

The internet knows where you are just by your IP, so I'm assuming you're not seeing the same ads I am in some instances. But still, it's not working the way it should. So while I agree with some of the author's ideas in that article, I think the answers are a little simpler and less advertisageddonish.

1. Advertising needs to quit being fucking annoying. Yes, I know some people are annoyed by ads on websites. Some sites proudly state that they're ad-free. Some sites give me shit because I have advertising. But believe me, I tried a donation model and it didn't work. And Amazon sales and other affiliations pay, but not enough by themselves. And I have enough traffic where I need a real server, and somebody's got to pay for that. So hence: advertising. If I thought there was a better way, I would certainly utilize it. And hell, if you can figure out a way to convince people to pay a dollar a month to get free access to Needcoffee–tell me. Because I've got enough readers where I would be in great shape. I don't have Boing Boing-level readers, but we do okay.

The trouble comes when advertising gets annoying. Because then it makes every site look bad. Pop-ups? Bad. Those flash pop-ups that sprawl themselves out between you and the content you came to see until you take an action? Ridiculous. Pop-unders? Baffling. Has anybody actually come across a pop-under that you didn't realize had even opened, looked at it and done anything that would make the advertiser any money? Ever? Or did you just close it. Think about it: somebody paid to annoy the shit out of you and make you not want to buy their product. Is it any wonder online advertising is supposed to be dying? It deserves to die if it's that dumb.

I don't allow any of that nonsense on Needcoffee. I was using these video ads that looked like they might do all right–then the company in question altered their code so that it had to auto-play with the sound up and didn't warn anybody it was happening. So they're gone. My rule is to not allow anything on my site that would piss me off were it in use on someone else's site.

But bottom line: online advertising needs to actually advertise and not annoy.

2. Clickthroughs make even less sense now than they did before. Ken and I have had this discussion in the past. You don't click through a magazine ad. You don't click through a billboard. And for most of television's existence, you haven't clicked through a commercial. But yet those spots were paid for. Why should sites not be paid to simply have an ad appear? If there's an ad on Needcoffee that reminds you a movie is coming out this weekend you want to see, and you go snag a ticket without clicking through…I should provide that service to the advertiser for free? It makes no sense.

3. Online ads need to take a clue from television ads. When television advertising started realizing that nobody really needed it around anymore, it started to change. Television commercials wanted your attention but you were no longer, thanks to stuff like TiVo, bound to give it to them. So what did the smart companies do? Make amusing advertisements. Make commercials you would actually want to watch. How many viral videos in the last month you watched were actually just really good commercials? I've probably seen more commercials in the past year that I have in the last ten, because somebody sends it to me as a viral thing online.

Online ads need to be funny, weird, and engaging. I can't think of a single banner or square ad or anything that I've thought, "What the hell is this?" and clicked because it looked like something fun or entertaining. If anything it's just some product that I was interested in anyway, and so I clicked through. But the ad did nothing to sell me on the product. People don't have to look at ads on websites, much less click through. And if they have no incentive to, whether informative or entertaining, they simply won't.

And here's the thing as well, as a coda. I'm not saying I love having advertising on my sites. But until I get that dollar a month from a substantial number of my readers, I have to have something to pay the bills and keep the lights on. I encourage anybody with a bright idea to tell me about it.

Okay, another coda thing. We're all getting acclimated to craploads of distractions now. Your computer, your phone, your Facebook, your e-mail, your Twitter, your whatever-whatever. We're juggling all kinds of crap. This sort of mentality–easily distracted and expecting to be distracted–just seems to me to be ripe for some quality ads that catch the eye. We're all easily distracted by shiny objects and we've decided to pitch our tents in a shiny object factory.

When is somebody going to take advantage of this? Cough. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out once more that my rates are reasonable.

Of course, people are getting on Twitter and using it because it's achieved critical mass and it's Simply What You're Supposed To Do rather than understanding what it's good for. Like with Facebook. But unlike Facebook, which is basically good for finding out about your former high school classmates without actually going to the reunion and having that Awkward Moment where you've expended the five minutes of conversation you built up over the last couple of decades and NOW WHAT?, Twitter is quite good for lots of things.

You can promote your blogging on it, like our friend Miss Destructo. You can ponder the ins and outs of magic, like our friend Wolven. Or you can use it for some weird conglom of all of it, like when I was lucky enough the other day to have Graham Linehan, the creator of The IT Crowd, relate both my admiration and a question to author Alan Moore–and get me a response. (It was my admiration for Moore's spoken word albums and when will he be doing another one–Answer: maybe next year.) This via Twitter.

But back to the restaurant, if we assume we're talking about businesses. Do they have to get on Twitter? Yes. They do. Do they have to use Twitter? Well, no.

You want to get on Twitter and register your name. While I was lucky enough to get on board early and get "@Widgett," I was foolish and did not secure "@Needcoffee." As a result, the Needcoffee Feed for updates is, well, "@Needcoffeefeed." So get your name if for no other reason to keep someone else from getting it and also because it does give you a dofollow backlink. In fact, your website is the only dofollow link you're going to get out of the deal. And we can always use those.

If you can use Twitter appropriately, then go for it. I wish the restaurant in question would Twitter their lunch specials each day. I say that, but actually I don't, because their food is fantastic and I would end up even fatter than I already am and even poorer as well. But the majority of their clientele don't know Twitter from a hole in the ground, I'm thinking, so they're not up for it. And fine.

But for God's sake, at least secure your name.

Basically, if there is somebody that does this, they need to fire their SEO person, because I sure as hell can't find them through Google.

Here's the deal: in general, everybody's got way too much crap on their hard drives. You can buy a USB stick that's 400 times the size of the first hard drive I ever owned for $10. You can literally have a terabyte of storage on your desktop for relatively nothing. Hell, the new mondo desktop I bought has 750GB of storage on it. And I have a 500GB external drive just for my music and other backup purposes. Bottom line: storage has gotten stupid-silly and we're all now digital packrats.

I don't know about you, but I can't find my bloody car keys. So the prospect of 750GB of potential space in which to lose something is rather terrifying. And let's face it: the stuff is in a sort of quantum lost state–we know it's in there. It's not like it vanished. But we can't possibly tell you where. It might as well be etched on a rock off the coast of Malaysia unless you can lay hands upon it. (And I can't tell you how much I want some smartass with a smartphone to send me a pic of them standing on a rock off the coast of Malaysia.)

My problem is this–and this is what sparked this particular rant: I run Outlook 2007. Yes, I know, I shouldn't. I know Microsoft is Satan and Apple is oh so much better and whatever whatever yeah right okay. In Realitysburg, though, I know Thunderbird would make a great alternative, but after most of a day trying to get all the add-ins and plug-ins that it would take to get Thunderbird to work with my IMAP setup (if you don't know what that is, trust me, you don't want or need to know), I gave up. I'm not completely technically inept, I just have shit to do, you know?

So I'm sticking with Outlook. Trouble is, I can't search for my e-mails easily.

There's the built-in Windows Search, but it's terrible. And that's when it's working. My problem is that you let it index until the cows come home and it won't finish. This is a problem that affects many and the only responses I've seen to it are: have you waited long enough to let it finish or rebuild your Outlook file. So it might as well be a flash-frozen ferret in a bun for all the good it's doing me on finding this audiobook e-mail request I have filed somewhere.

There's Google Desktop. It's fantastic when it works–like most things from Google. But it opens the e-mail, once found, in Firefox. And when you click "View in Outlook," the damn thing just sits there. There's this fix, which doesn't work for me. And then there's just repairing Office, which doesn't fix it either. So that's even worse because it's teasing me with an e-mail that I can't do a damn thing with in Firefox. "Do you want to forward this? Reply to it? Even just view it in the program we pulled it from? Well, good luck with that."

(Sidebar: Yes, I could use Gmail. But Gmail needs to stop the whole forced threaded conversations nonsense. I'm tired of e-mails that I deleted or moved being attached to a new message just because Gmail thinks it's one conversation–and then I can't unattach them.)

There's Xobni. It looks friendly enough, but its privacy policy is vague enough to be scary and I uninstalled it pretty rapidly. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you," remember.

So my free idea is this: somebody figure out how to fix this crap. Seriously. I know that's easy for me to say, because while not technically inept I can't code my way out of a paper bag unless there's a way to do it in HTML or PHP. But I'm thinking there's got to be some open source Mozilla-esque search that will simply work, index everything and then not tell anybody what you've got on your machine. And I don't know about you, but I'd pay $5 a month or something just to get access to a plugin or program that would shave minutes off of me looking around for my e-mails. The car key plugin can come later.

But if you know of one already, please let me know. Because this combing through e-mails is getting silly. It's 2009 for God's sake.

So here's the shot: you might have noticed that the website went into a bit of hibernation there. And the reason was simple: I had no idea what to put on here. In an effort to boost content on Needcoffee and boost the audience for that content, most of my stuff has gone there.

However, in recent weeks it's become clear that not everything fits over there, even as free form and chaotic as Needcoffee is. Sure, I can rant and rave over there as long as it's aligned with the core mission of Needcoffee, which is to entertain.

One thing that's not very entertaining, though–or at least hard to make entertaining–is looking for work. And talking about the things that I work on. So while it's fine to talk about, for example, Twitter and how it's amazing in the context of something like Bad Movie Club, it's another thing to talk about Twitter and why you need it for your business. I mean, a lot of people will tell you their reasoning for that, but a lot of it's rehashed and isn't thought about from the standpoint of normal people.

Let's face it: I run websites and can think in HTML and PHP code and, if you gave me the chance, could crank out content all day long. That's not normal.

Normal people don't want to have to think about this crap, nor should they. Normal people have lives. They are busy running businesses in the real world. They, you know, sleep.

This blog is now going to be about all the stuff that I should be getting paid for. All the stuff that I had to learn in order to publish and run a website and even a server. And the stuff I've learned working for somebody else.

So if you have a question–and I do get them from time to time–e-mail me at widgett at one tusk dot com. Or send me a message via Twitter @widgett. And let's see what happens.

I would barter free DVDs with somebody who could write one. Or point me at one. Because I'm finding jack all when Googling for something.

As a P.S. to the coda, there was a booth at Comic-Con that was selling Exorcism Kits. "The Pope needs your help!" Priceless.

In other words, it's utter shite. So much so that I'm blogging this on my phone because it is faster. If I could hook the printer to my phone my boarding pass would have been sorted a half hour ago. It's a testament to how much I don't want to have to–

Oh, downloading the driver will take an hour. Fuck it, I'm finding a Kinkos.