Category: Blogs

Volunteer Firemen have a tradition of raising money by asking passing motorists at stoplights to make a donation by holding out their fire boots. Bloggers have a similar tradition of the tip jar, and sometimes a blogger runs into some difficulty, and we pass the tip jar around. View from the Porch is a daily read for me. She has unfortunately run into a medical issue thats starts with “c,” ends with “F*ck!,” and has a bunch of doctors in the middle that cost money. Even if, as Tam puts it, that skin cancer is more like cancer’s farm team, it’s still a horrible thing to go through.

So if you like her work, “hit the friggin tip jar,” as another blogger is fond of saying. Help her get well and not worry about expenses.

Since Sandy went through, Comcast is having issues communicating with Verizon. If you have Comcast, you may have trouble getting to the blog. Comcast and Verizon peer with each other through a third party called Tata Communications, which has its data center in North Jersey, which of course is without power and suffering in the aftermath of a hurricane.

We are on a 25Mbit/25Mbit Verizon FiOS connection here with the blog. My employer is on Comcast, so that means I have been unable to work from home, and have been in the office. When in the office, I have either no communication or unreliable communication to home, so blogging suffers. We will return to a more regular schedule once things get back to normal.

Blogads had caused performance issues on the blog before, and today it was taking the blog down for periods of time, meaning it’s time to say goodbye to Blogads. Taking my blog down is not something I tolerate, and it was very seldom we sold an ad through them. When we did, my rate of return was less than it is with Google Adsense. So I have now just embedded the Google AdSense ads directly, instead of running them through BlogAds. Sorry if that was causing problems for you all today.

UPDATE: Seems it’s related to Hurricane Sandy. If your business is dependent on reliability 24/7, you really need to have redundant sites, so if one goes down you still have continuity.

Blogging is light today. Lots going on. This week was quite hectic. Normally I’m in the office once or twice a week. This week it was 3 times. I’m replacing some of our infrastructure, while trying not to get too bogged down with it to hinder our major project. My cousin is also getting married tomorrow, so that’s another schedule element to deal with. When I’m working most of my waking hours, blogging suffers. That’s just how it is.

UPDATE: We all have to earn our pay, I suppose, even when your industry is lunacy.

After an upgrade failed to fix the problem with my router/Firewall/WiFi Access point, I have decided to order one of these to serve the blog. This will allow me to put the blog server on a DMZ nework, and handle all the VPNs I need to connect my network to our offices. The little Buffalo WAP unit does a fine job of servicing the blog and most other things, but I’m now at the point I need a Firewall with a more professional feature set, and the Buffalo running dd-wrt isn’t cutting the mustard.

The truth about The Truth About Guns, or the 95 Theses against Robert Farago. Get a drink and pull up a chair. It’s long reading. In truth, I’m with Bob Owens in that I don’t mind the occasional lifted photo or post. I’m more concerned about boorish behavior toward people like Emily Miller and Alan Gura, and the general lack of ethics and sensationalism. Like I said before, many of us took to blogging in order to start a conversation without having to deal with that nonsense.

Robb Birthday is coming up in a few days, and he’s asking as a present for some kindness for your fellow man. If it were up to me, and I had godlike powers, I’d make it so Robb doesn’t have to turn 40, and hope that maybe that kindness will be returned when it’s my turn in, err… a year and a half (that soon? Ugh).

Caleb relays some of his experience and advice. His experience is different from mine, because I never really concerned myself very much with trying to be popular, and still don’t, really. But I did find there was a certain threshold, once you start to build an audience and people start to take you seriously. When you cross that threshold, things you used to be able to get away with as an up-and-coming blogger you can no longer get away with. The best advice I could offer is that if you’re going to provoke an argument with another blog, always attack up the food chain. Never attack down. If you attack up, you’re just trying to get noticed, and larger blogs generally have developed pretty thick skin when it comes to those kinds of things. Additionally if they think they can use your provoking an argument to generate content, they will. They get content, and you get traffic. It’s a fair trade. But attacking upstart blogs from higher up will be taken badly, and half the battle is realizing you’re not an upstart anymore. It’s not your perception that determines what you are, it’s everyone else’s.