I’m done.
Figured I’d use this special date to call it a career.
Thanks for reading.
Archive for the 'Site Updates' Category
A quick perusal of my Contact page will show you the addition of this chat widget, for people who need to contact me, and don’t want to (or can’t) install something like, say, Google Talk. This is a good idea for people who are on ‘locked–down’ computers, such as in computer labs or in businesses with actual working security policies. My current state of online–ness is reflected here:
You can find out more from the Google announcement, or play with it after you log in to your Google Talk account or Gmail and start playing with it.
Limited usefulness
For those of use who can’t use the official Google Talk agent, when somebody clicks the widget, you’ll be alerted with this giganimus linked message:
That sends you to the same interface the the person who clicked the widget has, instead of moving you inside Gmail or letting you use your Jabber client. Thus, it’s really not that great of a help for people who want to use their own applications. But if you absolutely, positively have to chat with somebody — right now — this is as good a solution as any.
There are nights I wonder what it would be like, if I drank.
Just got done watching Monk.
Thinking about streams of consciousness.
Reevaluating Twitter.
Working on proper punctuation.
Realizing that most of my best stuff will sit, unread, in the archives, never seen by a human other than me. That really saddens me. I guess that’s why I don’t think about it much.
It could drive me to drink, if I was into that sort of thing.
MySpace will be deleted, soon.
Last.fm is kind of pointless.
Flickr sounded like a good idea at the time.
Six years of stuff, and I’m no closer to being an internet superstar than Adrian Monk is to solving the murder of his wife.
I’ve had some website or other for running on 8 years now. In that time, I’ve seen many a meme come and go, all sorts of bad ideas, and many good ideas. But mostly, it’s all been about the content.
Yes, that sweet, sweet content. Content is such a commodity these days that entire social networks are devoted to little more than getting you to create a profile (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook). In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been deleting profiles like that. I’m not a commodity maker.
How that translates to this site is that I strive to produce the best content I can. Link posts are not good content. Link posts are what happens when you’re out of ideas, and you need something to keep loyal followers coming back. It’s what we, in the blogging bidness, call ‘weak sauce.’
Past tense, I’m guilty of copious link posts. A plethora of posts with nothing but sweet, juicy, low–effort link–y goodness. I was part of the problem.
Somehow, I figured I needed some of that blog content if I wanted to keep the peeps coming back. It turned out to be a losing game, and seriously not worth the effort.
For example, I had the ‘feature’ I called [Flagged]. The concept was that I was going to take the most interesting posts from my feed reader and put them on a page. From all my statistical calculations and website data, they were the lowest–performing post I ever wrote.
Plus, you know, people come to this site — and, from what I can gather, your site — to read me (or you). If they wanted to be somewhere else, they’d go there instead. Not everybody’s Glenn Reynolds.
So yes, I’m serious — shoot me. Right in the face.
So yes, I’m serious — shoot me. Right in the face. I don’t want to be part of the problem when the solution is so obvious. There’s almost no reason to chunk out a bunch of links and call it blogworthy. It’s people like that (my former self included) that make it easy to turn off the internet (at least for a little while).
That’s not to say that some people can’t link things up on the internet quite well. Some people gain quite a bit of notoriety for it (e.g. Glenn Reynolds, John Gruber). But they are the exception, not the rule. And — let’s face it — the only reason you’re doing a link post is because you’re out of ideas, isn’t it?
That’s what I thought. So, yeah. Right in the face. Make with the shooting.
Aside on del.icio.us
I heart del.icio.us — but it’s just a service. If I didn’t care so little about the links, I’d serve them off my own page. But the value of the link tends to go down, dramatically, with time. What I found, over the past two years, is that link traffic from trackbacks and Google tends to bring you no useful traffic.
That’s why I decided to go with off–site storage of the links. Disposable links like this don’t have a lot of staying power, honestly. People click them, then they’re gone. No sense wasting a lot of my time rebuilding the wheel, just for the hopes of getting some ad revenue.
One of the most infuriating things about the New York Times website is how it gets so stingy with links. If there is a link, it will go either to itself, or another, high–authority website. For example, if the story is about Digg, they may or may not link to Digg, but they will surely link to other coverage from the New York Times in the story. This bugs me.
At first, I figured the reason it caused me consternation was that the editors at the Times were just a bunch of stuck–up sticky–beaks who didn’t want to spread the linky love. Then I came to realize that this very site is an excellent example of the New York Times policy in play. After many revisions (this being version 8), the prior five years of archives just disappeared. Any story linked from the New York Times website would then end up at an error page.
Thus, the reason for my new linking policy. Before I get to the details of it, I’ll need to explain what is meant by ‘deep linking,’ why big authority sites avoid it, and why what they do a good idea.
Deep linking
Years ago, it was common for a website to only link to the home page of any other cited source. A site’s citation wouldn’t link to Yahoo.com/subdomain/source.html — a site would just link to Yahoo.com. As more people without formal training in writing etiquette started creating content on the internet, multiple versions of the rules appeared. The first formality to fall in this new era of citation was the courtesy of deep linking.
To ‘deep link,’ you need to have a target page, such as the above example. Instead of linking to the home page of Yahoo.com, you bypass that to get to the pertinent page. This is the same as going to a virtual back door to people you’ve never met. For some people, this is an intrusion of privacy, while other welcome it as a way to encourage interchanges.
Encouraging or discouraging deep–linking is more of a philosophical exercise than anything else. It is now such a standard practice that people think that discouraging deep–linking is the problem. While that (again) is more of a philosophical argument, the editorial argument is rather clear.
Stingy linkers
Going back to the New York Times, while I’ve a strong, negative opinion of their editorial policy, I can understand the logic. First of all, it is the newspaper of record, and what they print sure better be right or about 5 bajillion other sources will gleefully step up to take their shots. This is what happens when you are the market leader.
Besides the accuracy issue, there’s the stability issue. When nytimes.com sends a link your way, you’ve got to be sure the linked server can take it. It’s just not acceptable to send people somewhere that’s…not there. While I’m pretty sure the home page of Google can take a few links from me, the same could not be said from there to here.
You’ve ensured the accuracy of the link, and the strength of the linked server, are you sure you have the right page? That is the question that goes through the linker’s mind. Not to over–think this, but there’s a good possibility the objects of links may move. There’s no guarantee the linked will redirect your link to the correct place, or even tell you the page moved. Considering the scale of publishing at a national daily paper, they would need a full–time employee (at least) to stave off dead links.
Nuke ‘n Pave
Much like the accuracy, stability, and location, what about when a page just…disappears? Since there’s nothing old to look at, how can you ascertain what the linker was linking to? This is the problem for anyone linking to other sites.
A perfect example of a when a website completely clears its old content and starts anew is this site. It wasn’t a hard decision to clear five years of content, as the only remaining qualm I would have would be that I’d loses the residual search engine traffic. This approach brought in one–time readers, yes. But those one–time readers generally leave after they get the one thing they were looking for — like locust.
There’s many explanations of this phenomena, from the ‘long tail,’ ‘sith traffic,’ to my locust example. Since most of the search engine data will be out–of–date, they will continue to send people to dead links. That’s the same for old archived stories, linking to nothing. If I were an editor from a high–authority source (such as Salon.com, for instance), I would be hesitant to link to something I’m not perfectly sure will exist in a year, or even five–year’s time.
So my linking policy is made up of a few, good ideas. First, the idea is only link to things as general as possible. If it’s to another site, the link goes as high as possible. That means that if I can send you to the home page, I will. If it takes any deeper, I’ll try to keep it as high as possible.
Thus, a link that would go to a page like othersite.com/journal/index.php/page-name/#more would be worded in such a way as to send you to either that other site’s home page, or to as general a page as possible. In this example, since I needed to specify an individual, deep–linked post, I would have use the link to othersite.com/journal/index.php/page-name/. This should be a rare case, however.
I’m aware that people tend to read blogs and websites because they want to know what other people think. That’s why I watch television, why I read blogs, and why I like a good argument. So making the editorial policy here to keep it as much about what I think is really the best way to not have to worry about where I link. Thus, the linking policy would be that I am relatively sure the site I link to will exist, those links will be rare, and most of the content should be about what I think rather than profuse linking to what other people say.
Foooorever, Google’s FeedFetcher was trying to get some arcane RSS feed on this site. I don’t know why, but it was. Now, Yahoo is starting to do the same thing.
So, this morning I put this in the old .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Feedfetcher-Google [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^YahooFeedSeeker
RewriteRule ^(.*)?$ http://macstansbury.com/feed [R,L]
End of story, right? Well, because Google caches the feed, I have no idea if this works or not. Meaning, I have to wait about 30 minutes (or more) to find out if the updated feed works. I changed over from the FeedBurner to the native RSS feeds, so it won’t give that same message, telling you to update your feed.
My problem was I forgot to change the referrer, so even if you wanted to change your feed, FeedFetcher would still take you to the FeedBurner version, regardless of what you put in. Hopefully, now it’ll work.
UPDATE: So, no, Google FeedFetcher refuses to get the correct feed. Therefore, I now have one feed that’s just copying the same freaking stuff the regular feed does, only much, much slower. And no, I don’t worry about any of the people who actually use Google Reader getting offended by my ranting, as they won’t be able to see it.
Tell me again, what’s so great about that thing?
Or, The Introduction of the MacStansbury Icon
That, folks, is a real piece of history. I say that, because for a long time, I’ve been celebrating December 17th as the birth of MacStansbury.com. And, in the spirit of the festive occasion, I was going to show off the fancy new icon.
And that’s where the idea fell apart.
You see, as I was going through my old files from the past 11 years, I found something troubling; not only was December 19th not the birth of MacStansbury.com, it wasn’t even December. I first posted something on MacStansbury.com on November 1st. It wasn’t all that great. See it as it was back then:
However, just because I posted it then doesn’t mean that’s when I started the site. No, I registered the domain back in October, around the 15th. It finally got to the registrar around the 20th, for some reason, and the DNS propagated so the world could see the carnage by the 28th, when I hurriedly put up some text to hold people’s interest until I could get an artist to put up something that looked nice.
While I was waiting for somebody with talent to show up, I found out how to create a favicon. The favicon is that thing you see in the address bar or on your favorites bar, with the tiny picture. I say “found out how to create” rather than “created” a favicon, because my first attempt wasn’t very favicon-y:
I used GraphicConverter, and I messed it up entirely. For no apparent reason, I left the thing stand, a messed up version of the MacStansbury.com Official Logo. In 2005, while coming up with The Blorg group-blog, I figured out how to make it, and created this thing:
It’s not exactly standard, but if Blogger can get away with a gigantic favicon, so can I. There were the ever-so-subtle orange edges, the color The Blorg was originally designed in, then darkened to make it more legible. Seeing as how I was back to singularity, I decided to dump that, and figure out a new favicon idea.
For that matter, I wanted something I could use for my Gravatar, Favatar, or anywhere else I need a unique icon that sold my image. I’ve been using either a customized version of the Ein avatar from the [adult swim] message board, or just the plain avatar, or a squared version of my about page picture. Since I’m not into copyright infringement, and I’m not an artist, I had to figure out something rather simple.
After a grand total of 10 minutes, I’d created the icon above. The idea I had was simple, I needed an icon that accomplished three things:
1. Kept up the motif of black and white from MacStansbury.com
2. Needed at least two letters from MacStansbury, since that’s sorta what I do
3. Had to be a “woodcut,” meaning you could cut it out into one piece of wood
After thinking about it for a couple of days, I thought I’d look at just what the ‘M’ would look like in the brackets. The background was just a couple of rounded boxes when I first made it up, and it was just to make the original “MacStansbury.com” stand out from the first design’s brushed-metal background.
The font is, and has always been, Gadget, introduced in the old Mac OS 8 days. I keep holding on to those fonts, since they were just so well-designed, and they make really nice title fonts. I created the outline of the M, and made it fit inside the brackets. And then saved it. And that was that.
I toyed with the idea of a ‘MSN’ or even ‘MS,’ but that was just like a certain large software company, and I think they have some sort of legal precedence or something. Besides, the ‘M’ looks nice enough on its own, and it’s easy on the eyes. Look for the logo wherever MacStansbury is sold.
And give the gift of making me rich by clicking that affiliate link in the ad up there. I’m getting double the commission of anything you buy in the iTunes Store from that link.
Plus, this is the debut of the affiliate tag. Now all posts with some form of advertising (meaning I could make money off it, thus I care about you clicking) will use the advertising tag. Feel safe about my unbiasedness now?
In a conversation I had last night with one of my internet friends, again, she said how she didn’t like the “RSS people.” The RSS people don’t come by your site and leave comments, you see. They just look at your posts. Unlike the non-RSS people who don’t leave comments, and just look at your site.
Not that she wanted people to interact, she just wanted people to come by the site. I don’t understand, either.
This site, however, is not like that. In fact, it’s even easier if your read it in an RSS reader or aggregator. Simply grab the feed and look at it there. It’ll look like you expect a blog to look, not like how I’ve set up this site. Plus, you get all the nifty extras.
Then, when you’re addicted to RSS, you too will have 800 feeds you check obsessively-compulsively every 15 minutes, just like me!
