I was reading about the recent Twitter DOS that also affected Facebook and particularly the comments posted on CNN about how not having Twitter made people feel naked. One person interviewed said that people knew everything about her life because of Twitter.

I have always been a little hesitant to post online status. After all, those really close to me already know what I’m doing, and those who are not so close to me could always fire off an email and/or ask to be put back onto my mailing list. Why does the public in general need to know if I’m heading to the grocery store, or even on vacation for two weeks.

Smart criminals are few and far between, however they do exist. It is not difficult to tie a twitter account or Facebook account to a physical address. If your schedule is half-way routine the smart criminal can take advantage of it, but if it is posted online the criminal doesn’t need to go very far to target your house, apartment, or vehicle. Even more concerning is personal safety and security. Do you twitter about when you are getting off work? Do you have a long walk to your car? Scary stuff.

What it comes down to is our desire as people to be popular and important, but the fact of the matter is that few of us are or ever will be. And if we suddenly were popular we probably wouldn’t be all that happy about it. There isn’t a lot of glamor in having news crews camp on your lawn day after day, and if someone is always around the corner looking for a photo opportunity, there’s little time to relax.

My suggestion to the die-hard Twitter and Facebook addicts: Be safe! Think about what information you post online and how it could be used against you both at your current stage in life and years into the future. Will your kids use it against you? Your relatives? A criminal? If you suddenly did become a public figure? Just think about it – and don’t get so attached to a single entity such as Facebook in particular. I know people who don’t use email much anymore because they can just message back and forth on Facebook’s mail. That’s all fine and good except for when Facebook disappears, suffers a DOS or decides to change their privacy policies. If you rely on Facebook for email, how would you contact your friends if it suddenly went away?

Since I am on vacation at  the moment, this touches close to home. Why is it nearly 2010 and we still do not have cheap ubiquitous internet access anywhere? I arrive at my in-laws house and they don’t have a wireless connection, but they do have a DSL “modem” directly connected to a laptop. Makes sense?

Lucky for me I carry a Pocket Router with me wherever I go. Hooked it up and set the laptop to connect wirelessly and the in-law (out-law) didn’t know the difference. In the mean time I have access anywhere in the house which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Next stop on my journey I actually have a cellular signal, so Verizon cell access is available to me at $15/24-hours. It is useful in an emergency, but at that cost I wouldn’t want to use it for days on end. I looked up AT&T since Verizon isn’t available in my home town and they don’t have a pay-as-you go plan for a data card. The same pocket router plugs into an available port on their wireless router. No need to configure a new access point on my computer (or my daughter’s) and there is built-in firewalling and segregation from their network just in case anything is crawling around on it.

The inbetween is where everything breaks down. Sure, almost every truck stop is now outfitted with “free wi-fi” and every cheap hotel has it, so you can just drive into the Super 8 parking lot and get online, but that certainly isn’t convenient when you just want to check your email before going to bed, or if your passenger wants to research hotels or attractions in that town that is 100 miles away while you drive.

So the United States is just too big for its own good. Either that or cell phone providers are afraid to provide affordable connectivity that is not attached to a 2-year contract. My suggestion to Verizon (or AT&T) is to change that $15 plan to $15 for 0.5 – 1GB of data but with a 1-week duration. AT&T’s $60/month plan caps at 5GB so this pay-as-you go would be close to being in line with that but without the commitment. When someone exceeds the limit they could start the week over. For everyone else who really just wants to browse the web or use email it would last a week and encourage that ubiquitous environment that everyone wants.

Now the new iPhone would actually tempt me if they allowed tethering at a reasonable price. Until that point I am 100% uninterested.

If you run a blog you’ve most likely come across spam comments like this: Submit your comments to millions of sites with the ***** submission tool. Generate backlinks, etc etc. Ok, two reasons why this is stupidly funny. First, if you have such a bad blog that you need to spam to get it viewed then you likely wouldn’t read comments on your blog to find this information. Second, the product doesn’t pass through the default Akismet install for WordPress. Why would you buy something that obviously doesn’t work?

While I’m on the subject of spam, I noticed another tactic recently. Generic reviews on services such as MyBlogLog. These reviews say “Great Site” and nothing more. Looking at the user shows they have reviewed dozens of sites in the space of a few minutes. Does this stuff actually work?

UPDATE: Ok, I posted this and viewed the page and the first thing that I saw was a Monty Python advertisement. Hilarious!

It took me less than 5 minutes to upgrade 4 blogs that I’m responsible for on the technical end. If you are a WordPress user who has shell access to your server and you aren’t using subversion to update, then you are just wasting your time.

I have been looking forward to this release for quite some time. The interface is nicer looking on the back end, and threaded comments are available without a plugin. As with any upgrade, please let me know if you experience any issues. I have tested most things on a test site, but there is always the chance something crazy will happen during a release.

This is not an online marketing blog, or anything of the sort, however my experience with promotion over the past few months has taught me a few things and given me the motive to try some new things. I thought I would share some experiences and get any advice that anyone might want to share. There are several things I have tried:

• Entrecard
• Adwords
• Adbrite
• ProjectWonderful
• Traffic Exchange
• Amazon Mechanical Turk

This is just a very informal and non-scientific review of what I’ve done and my perceived benefit to the blog. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate to make another post about Entrecard, but enough is happening there that I feel it justified. While browsing around recently I came across an article by impNERD about the problems with Entrecard. He has another post on the subject which describes many of the problems facing the community. In my opinion he is spot on with some of the problems identified, although I do not visit the Entrecard forums frequently enough to understand all the dissent that it sounds like there must be. Some of my suggestions are below.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a few small topics that I’d like to mention that aren’t big enough for their own post yet.

The presidential debate and DirecTV

Am I the only one who has glitches throughout the broadcast? Pieces of their words are missing as the system seems to lose the stream and has to rebuild it. Then near the end one such glitch ended up with the audio and video way out of sync. The HD picture is great, but its hard to believe it costs so much for such lousy total experience. Wait, am I talking about the candidates or the DirecTV service?

MagicJack

I’ve been curious about this for a long time. How can they provide a product at such a low initial cost with no monthly fee? Well I bought one to find out since I can’t find a review of one that doesn’t sound like a paid advertisement or a baseless bash. I’ll be keeping you up to date on how that is going. My initial reactions are that the voice quality is great, and it seems like they are subsidizing the calling with advertising on the screen. Also, about all the little “rush processing” and “last chance for savings” that they try to pressure you into during the purchase process? Ignore them. You have the same opportunities after you receive it, and I chose standard shipping and got it in just a couple days.

Entrecard

I’ve commented around a few places about the ups and downs of the service. I am still happy with it, but there is a serious problem with the ranking system. Still. Any time a blog with half a dozen total posts that hasn’t been updated in a month and a half is ranked ahead of people who are obviously trying, that is a problem. I’ve figured out the system myself and am ranking between position 4-6 in the Technology section, but there are a lot of people way down the list with high quality blogs.

Blogging

I saw a website of a guy who absolutely hates blogging and is quite vocal (wordy) about it. I found it ironic that while his tirade wasn’t in a blog format, it sounded just like the kind of spewing opinion that he finds offensive about blogs. There are a lot of bloggers out there trying to make a quick buck at the expense of quality, but it is so obvious when people do sponsored posts that I have no problem ignoring it and moving on to real opinion that is interesting and thought provoking. On the flip side, even his opinion was interesting enough for me to mention it here. The best thing about the Internet is that you don’t have to visit every page.

OpenDNS is an easy way to help protect you and your family on the Internet. Before you get turned off by something technical, let me assure you that you can make this simple change no matter what your technical expertise, and it will cost you nothing. If you have just one computer connected to the Internet at home, this change is simple. If you have more than one, then you will want to make this configuration change on your router, but it will still be easy. The OpenDNS team has done a great job documenting how to make such a change, so I am not going to duplicate that effort here. You should go to this page to learn how to make the change, but before you do please continue reading to learn why it will help you.

Please note that this information applies to business users as well. The small business without the budget for an IT department could benefit greatly from making these simple changes.

Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t been blogging about Entrecard or blogging because it really isn’t the type of thing I want my blog to be about, however I do use Entrecard to help bring in readers with the hope that some of them will stick around. Recently the owner decided to try to get VC money, then decided to sell it, and now has decided not to sell it again. This brings up several concerns for me and for many of my fellow bloggers. Mainly that whoever might end up with Entrecard would change it for the worse. I do think some changes need to be made though. Entrecard is unique in that it is both a traffic generator and an advertising mechanism. The traffic generation part, so far, has slid under the radar of Adsense et al. I imagine that it could eventually get noticed enough to kill adsense accounts if nothing changes in the way the traffic generation side works. The flip side of that is that many people who do hit my site also read and comment. I know that I comment on a good percentage of the sites that I read, and I have subscribed to several of them in a reader because their content is interesting. There are sites that I don’t comment on are because they haven’t updated their content since the last time I visited, which sometimes could be weeks or months.

Herein lies a problem for Entrecard and brings to my mind a good feature I think should be implemented. Advertisers should refund or discount the advertising rate based on when the site was last updated. Recently I felt bad for one of my advertisers when I didn’t update my blog in a 24-hour period. That person should have had his advertising bill discounted. In addition, after a set period of a week or two of no updates, blogs should no longer be listed in the campaign tab, nor should people be allowed to drop on them to earn credits. The whole point of visiting every day is to read fresh content, and the whole point of advertising is to help bring more readers to your own blog. If I advertise on a site for 5 days in the future and there are no posts between now and then, then it is a waste of advertising credits.

Here’s an analysis of the current (as of right now) top 5 blogs in the Technology section. I hope I don’t offend any of them, but you can visit them and see for yourself that I’m not saying anything that isn’t true.

1. What a bald guy told me about technology! That’s a great name for a site, by the way. Its last post was September 13 (16 days ago) about Photosynth. It looks like a cool tool, but that’s a long time to not say anything and still be considered the most popular blog in the Technology section.
2. verITableLIFE Another cool name for a site. Its last post was on September 18 (11 days ago) about “Be Nice to the IT Department.” Something I totally agree with, by the way. We don’t get the credit we deserve in many organizations.
3. Technically Easy. This site by another guy named Paul. Good concept for a blog – helping the less computer literate understand computers down to the technical level, not just surface information. This one is regularly updated and should be above the other two in my opinion. Last post was September 26 (3 days ago) about “What is a hard drive.” This reads like a “how stuff works” guide and is very comprehensive on the subject. A well done site with plenty of thought going into the posts.
4. Gadget Space. This one annoys me every time it shows up because it has never been updated since I’ve been a member of Entrecard. The last post was August 28 (32 days ago) on an expensive cell phone. How this one made it to number 4 makes no sense. I perpetuate the problem by dropping on it every day. At least the site isn’t filled with more advertisements than content. Still, looks like someone invested 20 days in a blog and it’s the 4th most popular technology blog on Entrecard. Not saying a whole lot.
5. LiNTEK. Life is Naturally TE(K)hnical. This is my favorite site of the top 5. It is updated multiple times per day recently and I have seen content there that I haven’t seen elsewhere. It looks like he took the weekend off. The last post was September 25 (4 days ago) about Skype for Asterisk but I suspect we’ll get a post today or soon.

So you see, if a limit was set to a week for posts, Technically Easy would be number 1 and then LiNTEK. The other three wouldn’t even display and they would start losing traffic and popularity which in turn should encourage them to post again. Sites that haven’t posted in that set amount of time should also be prevented from dropping on other sites or from being dropped upon.

I don’t know if every category is quite as bad as this one, but I think setting a limit of 2 weeks is probably a good compromise solution that would allow people that are blogging because they like to blog, not because they like to advertise, to get more exposure. Anyway, I hope I haven’t offended anyone, but what I’ve said is the truth, and people who are blogging in a serious way shouldn’t have to sit behind sites that are more there to generate cash than anything else. I know that many, if not all of these sites have other blogs that they write, some of which are updated much more frequently. I’m not doubting that they can blog or write about interesting things, I’m doubting that Entrecard has the best method for determining popularity.

It is much more than a webhost, but this post is about my hosting provider, Linode. Your typical webhost provides terabytes of transfer and hundreds of gigabytes of storage for a fraction of what it actually would cost them to provide all of that. They do it because they know you can’t use all of it, and if you do try they can just cancel your account for any reason or no reason.

I have tried many different hosts in the past but have never been satisfied with the speed or true capacity of the serivce. For example, many providers will provide your database on a separate host. Now in an ideal world this practice is very smart because the hosting provider can tune the database server for just servicing database activity. Overall capacity increases. Most hosting providers do not live in an ideal world and what this ends up introducing to your website is latency. The more ideal solution for most small sites is to run a database server on the same host as the webserver. Linode allows that, but I haven’t gotten to the best part about Linode yet.

The best part is that you get to run the popular Linux flavor of your choice and become root completely and utterly. I’m not talking about some kind of limited shell that you share with other people, and I’m not talking about a filesystem that your share with others either. This will look and perform just as if you had your own Linux server standing out on the Internet.

From the Linode website, here are some features:

• Full root access
• Deploy multiple Linux distributions
• Reimage at any time
• Dedicated IP address, premium providers
• Dedicated Resources
• Guaranteed CPU, burstable
• Xen instances with 4 cores for SMP
• Out of band Ajax and ssh based console shell
• Choose from four geographically diverse datacenters
• Bandwidth pooling between Linodes under an account
• Support for IP Failover, Private back-end networks, Linode cloning.
• Managed DNS
• Linode API

Some practical uses for Linode include:

• Host your web sites and blogs or other custom applications (Apache/WordPress)
• Host mail for your domain and filter spam
• Host Ruby on Rails applications (Mongrel, Lighttpd)
• Remotely back up your important data (rsync, rdiff-backup)
• Function as a primary or secondary domain name server (DNS)
• Host dedicated multi-player game servers
• Dedicated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server
• Use two Linodes for a complete Development / Production environment
• Use multiple Linodes to create virtual computer clusters

Potential downsides:

• You are root, so you have to know what you are doing or be willing to learn. This isn’t a host for everyone. You’ll need to concern yourself with security, web server configuration, database configuration and tuning, email and spam setup if desired, etc.
• Shared resources – this hasn’t bothered me too frequently, but occasionally something happens to another host running on the same piece of physical hardware as mine and it will affect my performance. I need to point out that this is much less likely to hurt you at Linode than it is at a normal hosting provider.

I encourage you to check them out. There is some competition in the field from others who have tried to emulate the business model, and Amazon’s cloud computing initiatives are similar in some ways to this, but I find Linode to be the most well rounded and versatile service of its type out there.