Tag Archives: blog

Blog Week!

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I’ve been bad about posting here lately, for a variety of reasons. It’s not that I haven’t been writing at all; I’ve got some things in the hopper waiting for finishing touches and I’ve got a few other things queued up in my head. So this week I’m taking a little slice out of my Nethack time (more on that later), perhaps making an exception in my weight-loss plan (more on that later, too), to bring out a bevy of fascinating bon mots to cheer your evenings, at the astounding rate of one episode per day!

I’ll be starting tonight, with a rant about Mrs. Fields’ cookies. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

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Remember me?

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You would think that damn near forty-eight hours on a train would lead to a burst of blogging activity. I would have thought so myself. But no, I spent the time reading instead. It was pleasant. Then I got back to town and while I had collected some interesting stories on the road, I just wasn’t inspired to write about them.

Perhaps someday I’ll tell you about Charlie, the deep, gravelly-voiced dark-black (Barry White after 10,000 packs) man shorter than me from Louisiana who sat next to me from Los Angeles to San Jose, who was once stabbed in the neck by a random asshole and probably would have killed said asshole if he hadn’t passed out from blood loss first. That’s the way he tells it anyway. At the trial the prosecutor asked Charlie, “what do you think we should do with this man?” “Give him to me,” Charlie said. According to him, that broke up the courtroom. Charlie was all about making sure his grandchildren didn’t get into the same shit he did. He was all right. But man, he liked to talk.

I took refuge from Charlie in the window car (Lounge car? Observation car?) that sat atop the train bar. From Santa Barbara well north a pair of guides in forest green uniforms spoke through a makeshift little PA system, telling us about the history of the places we rolled through. It was pretty cool, actually. Figs, rockets, railroad lore, and pretty scenery. Between lectures I read a novel by a guy who is not afraid to kill people you like. Maybe more on that later.

But I’ve been back now a couple of weeks and then some, and I haven’t even checked in on my favorite blogs. I’m in a twilight place, with an intimidating literary to-do list, and I’m pretty much frozen. I check Facebook more than I ever have before, clearly a sign of the apocalypse. I even retweeted something yesterday. (Spelling checker does not object to retweeted. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)

So, now I feel the need to reconnect. I’ll start with my favorite comics, then go and read the blog episodes I’ve missed, and leave comments that are far past stale.

And here at MR&HBI, I’ve got some ideas. Not new ideas, but ideas. We’ll see.

Thanks!

Quick Note to Blogspot Folks

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Don’t know why it is, but when I try to post to your blogs using my OpenID, it doesn’t work. I’ve also failed with a couple other methods, and the remaining options are overly invasive. Tried two different blogs today (Dahveed, three times) without success.

Probably I’ll give in and use my fuckin’ Google credentials eventually, and hopefully that will work, but I’d really rather not. So, in the meantime, know that my silence is nothing personal.

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An Email I Just Sent – Updated!

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An email I just sent:

You guys left comment spam on my blog! Not the sort of behavior I expect from a hosting provider — probably against your own terms of service (which I suspect you don’t enforce). Ironically, since the topic of my blog episode was colocation, you could have left an honest message about your services, something like “we can beat the price of the company you endorsed.” (You can’t, though. Not even close.) Or maybe, “One thing your readers might want to consider is…” I would have welcomed that. All you had to do was be honest about who you were.

But you didn’t, so, stop it. If it happens again I shall shake my tiny fist in public, and have no negative impact on your business whatsoever because I’m just some obscure back-water blogger to whom exactly no one turns for colocation advice. But the next guy you annoy may not be.

Jerry Seeger
muddledramblings.com

So, yeah, I said I would shake my tiny fist if they did it again, and here I am tiny-fist-shaking anyway. I decided that by not giving the name of the hosting company I’m still within the spirit of the threat. (‘Threat’ used in the broadest sense of the word.)

UPDATE:

I find that when I complain to companies about their spamming practices, I get one of two responses. Either I’m ignored, or I get a request for more information. Then there’s these guys, who both took my tiny-fist-shaking seriously, and flattered me in the process. Here’s the message I got in return for my above rant, in its entirety except for contact info redacted at the request of Mr. Welbourn:

Jerry,

Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. It was not I who “comment spammed” your blog but I suspect it was a company hired by me to provide search engine optimization services.

If possible, it would be greatly appreciated if you could forward me the comment. .

This is my first foray into the realm of SEO companies. In the past, I have been very hesitant to engage with these firms as they all claim to have some “secret sauce” and are reluctant to share their strategies and tactics. Unfortunately, while we are an extremely high quality colo provider in the Chicago area, we are somewhat of a well-kept secret amongst the Ubergeeks of the world and I really need to boost my web traffic. After some extensive research, follow up with several references and completing what I felt was substantial due-diligence, I entered into an agreement with a vendor who will remain nameless until I am able to get to the bottom of this.

Their services were described to me as a combination of on-site and off-site components. The on-site modifications were pretty simple text revisions to make the key words I am targeting more prevalent in the copy of our website. The off-site component, which is handled 100% by the vendor, consists of establishing external links to our website.

I assume this is where muddleramblings.com became involved.

If their off-site methodology includes “comment spamming” blogs then I imagine our relationship will be a short one. I spent an enormous amount of time with them explaining what we do, how we do it and how we would like to be represented. While I have not yet seen the content of the comment, since it annoyed you and prompted you to shake your fist, I am sure it must be obvious spam and the sort of thing I would not want to be associated with.

Any additional information you can provide would be helpful.

By the way, I spent some time reading some of the muddled ramblings. I like your style.

Regards,

Don Welbourn

Director of Sales / Account Relations
360 Technology Center Solutions

It’s interesting on a lot of levels. First, even people who try really hard to do the right thing have to trust the companies marketing their product. In his letter giving me permission to publish the above, Mr. Welbourn said he had clarified with his marketing company what was and was not acceptable. He also said that Munchies would make a great movie.

Pardon me while I pat myself on the back with my tiny fist — I helped a company maintain its ethics and microscopically reduced the amount of spam in the world. And hats off to Mr. Welbourn, for taking the issue so seriously. I like the way those guys conduct business. If you’re in the market for enterprise-level colocation services (and who isn’t?), maybe you should drop by 360tcs.com.

Thanks!

Return of a Feature

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You might have already noticed that when you look at individual episodes, there’s a list of similar posts at the bottom. I had this feature once before and now I have no recollection whatsoever why I turned it off. Maybe I’ll relearn something shortly.

So what the thing does is compare the text, titles, categories, tags, and whatnot of the episodes and comes up with the ones that match the best. The whole thing is tunable, for those inclined to do things right; I just chose some numbers that seemed reasonable. So far, I’d have to say that the code really likes episodes with exclamation points in the titles. I’m good with that.

I just spent about twenty minutes cruising through history, following one episode to the next (ostensibly) related one. It was pretty fun for me, but probably in a you-had-to-be-there way. To be honest, I think this feature is mostly for my entertainment. But you can use it too, if you want.

Thanks!

It’s Beer-Blogging Thursday, Dammit!

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I try to set aside an evening each week to go to a bar, relax, and write up a couple of blog episodes. Thing is, I’ve been completely crushed at work (it’s the end of the fiscal year, and I work in the finance department). Finding time to sleep has been a challenge for a couple of stretches lately.

Yesterday my team released not one, but two software tools. A big day! One of those tools is perennially caught in the confusion of fiscal-year shifts, and so today was about last-minute fixes.

Still, I got out of work at a reasonable time, and drove through unreasonable traffic to reach one of my chosen beer-blogging havens. (They’re playing AmeriFootball on a Thursday. Huh.) Anyway, I carved out some space and set up the ol’ bloggin’ box… and proceeded to extend the custom-search feature in one of my work projects. It’s an elegant solution to a problem that had been haunting me, so it’s by no means time wasted.

But holy heck, here I am, at a time I’ve designated for doing pretty much anything but work, and I’m doing work. My head is completely over on the analytical side of my cranium, to the point that I’ve been dreaming about database queries. I’ve gotta unshackle the creative neurons, the ones that never fire the same way twice. Get out the heart-shock paddles! I need to reset my brain!

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Pardon the Dust – again

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A warning sign I saw between Calgary and Edmonton.

I’m putting in a new comment system that hopefully will answer a couple of annoyances I found with the old. It may look wonky compared to everything else. I’ll probably just turn it on, see how things look, and turn it off again in a few hours once I know the effort it’s going to take to get it looking right.

In the meantime, leave a comment and tell me what you think!

Thanks!

Silver Lining

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Traffic in the Muddleverse has been down lately, largely due to Google losing its love for my definitive treatise on over-easy eggs. (Seriously, though, there’s no better tract on that subject out there.) Another formerly-popular page has also sunk below the top-twenty fold: My episode titled ‘New York Sucks’. To be honest, I was surprised that my offering ever rose so high; surely there were plenty of other folk voicing the same sentiment.

Yet, for maybe two years, I was one of the top hits for the phrase ‘New York Sucks’. I learned during that time that idiot mouth-breathers occupied seats on both sides of the debate arena. There were some really cool responses as well, and I’m looking forward to my next venture into the hive. I think it’s going to be pretty awesome.

But now my little rant is off the radar, has been for some time, and I can breathe a sigh of relief.

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Idly Pondering Redesign

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I was staring blankly at my blog earlier and I thought maybe it’s time to redo the banner. I decided to mention my musings here on the off chance that someone out there cares at all, and has ideas I could mooch. Weighing the good and the bad of the current banner:

  • things move and fade in
  • there's a new haiku every fifteen seconds
  • there's a theme song for the clicking
  • it breaks out of its box
  • never got that wow factor
  • stylistically all over the place
  • Flash - doesn't work everywhere

The last one is the biggie. Flash does not now and never will work on some mobile devices. The number of devices where Flash works is declining now that Microsoft has decided to give up on Flash as well. So… time to move on. Eventually.

One impediment: I don’t know what I want the new header to look like. Something geeky. Gears turning? That would be cool, and could fall back to static gears on older browsers. Maybe some kind of machine that spits out the haiku? Or does a duck poop them out? What should the typesetting look like? How should it reveal?

Maybe a way to pop up a form and submit new guest poems?

Should there be an elevator? An ocelot? A rutabaga?

Frankly, I’m completely stumped.

These sorts of solicitations haven’t met with much response in the past, but if anyone out there has thoughts on the whole design thing, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks!

On the Success of Blogs, and I Don’t Mean This One

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One aspect of successful blogs is that they focus on a single topic. If you’re interested in conservative politics, you frequent blogs that speak exclusively about conservative politics. You’re not interested in what your favorite pundits had for dinner last night. You might tolerate the occasional post about some other passion of the blogger, as long as it didn’t get in the way.

I thought about this today as I finished my third episode this week concerning Internet security. I could become a blogger focused on that very important issue. After a while folks would start to look for me, to accept me as an authority, for better or for worse. That would be kind of cool.

Instead, I thought, “I have to break up all these techno-geek articles with something more fun.” I pushed publication of two of the security episodes into the future. (Whether the intervening episodes are actually fun is another story.) I now realize that it’s not merely that MR&HBI is poorly aligned for success, I’m actively working to keep it that way.

You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

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A Few Links of Note

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A buddy of mine sent me an email the other day wishing me a happy Squirrel Appreciation Day. That holiday has come and gone with a minimum of squirrel suicide, but here’s a squirrel video I actually can appreciate. (In case you’ve already seen the video, which has made it’s way around the world via email of all things, I found a long-play version with a little more info and footage of a second clever thief.) Apparently the perpetrator of the video added obstacles one at a time, with this as the final result.

It is purely coincidental that the next two links are by the last two people to comment on this blog as of this writing.*

My favorite climate scientist has given us all reason to fight global warming: the supply of chocolate is threatened! This is a must-read, kids.

And earlier today I popped over to a blog and read an article about… blogs. It’s an interesting read about the blog life-cycle, how they grow and why they die, to which I can add a few musings. Muddled Ramblings is an outlier in blog taxonomy, I think; it lies outside the regular life-cycle, in a place where many blogs die. It’s a blog without any clear theme, and without any real growth in readership. The bloggcomm is small but strong; the comments provide a huge lift in value for everyone. But gone are the days of the Millennial Office Holder and similar hijinks, and no insider silliness has grown to replace them. Still I blog along, more than eight years and 1800 episodes worth. It’s a blog that will not die — a blog zombie!

After reading that article I’m pondering ways to better foster community here at MR&HBI. I don’t want to lose what we already have going, or to diminish in any way the contributions of the faithful, but it seems like there’s more stuff we could do together. I think the collaborative writing experiment It Goes Without Saying was on the right track, but the barrier to participation was a little too high – you had to know what was going on. Something collaborative that people could just drop by and toss in a contribution without too much effort would be really cool. (The Fantasy Novelist’s Scoreboard awaits your input!)

The writers of Web comics often have events where they write episodes for each others’ strips. That would be fun, to have guest posts from other bloggers here, while I blog there. Fun for me, certainly, but would it be compelling for readers? In the comic world, the guest artist borrows the characters from the strip and puts a new twist on them. It would be pretty hard for someone to take such an unfocussed forum as this one and put any sort of twist on it. Then again, since when has ‘not fun for the readers’ stopped me before?

I enjoy writing challenges; Elephants of Doom was the most elaborate response to one such challenge, and just a few days ago I cranked out The Secret Life of Sporks. That was a hoot, and I wouldn’t mind a bit if there were more challenges like that. I’d formalize something (“Wacky prompt Thursday!”) but I’m petrified that no one would suggest anything and the sound of crickets chirping would be embarrassing.

Also, I need to get the Muddled Calendar back up and running. Maybe we can finally name all the holidays.

But now I’m rambling far, far off the “post a few links” intent of this episode, staggering around the blogosphere like a drunken beachcomber with a broken metal detector, looking for answers but really too lazy to find them.

You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

* Actually, that’s not strictly true.

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How This Blog Works

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Over the years, the technology behind this blog has gone from cave-dwelling stone-knives-and-bearskin static pages to cloud-city jet-packs-and-lightsaber dynamic yumminess. That transformation starts with WordPress but does not end there. Not by a long shot.

I started the Muddled Media Empire using a tool called iBlog, because it was free and worked with Apple’s hosting service, which I was already paying for. iBlog’s claim to fame was that it didn’t require a database – every time you made a change it went through and regenerated all pages that were affected. Toward the end, that was getting to be thousands of pages in some cases, each of which had to be uploaded individually. When iBlog’s support and development faltered, it was already past time for me to move on.

WordPress is an enormously popular Web-publishing platform. It comes in two flavors: you can host your blog on their super-duper servers and accept their terms of service and the slightly limited customization options, or you can install the code on your own server and go nuts. I chose the latter, mainly because I wanted to be able to touch the code. I’m a tinkerer.

So I signed up for a cheap Web host and set to work building what you see now. At first things were great, but after a while the host started having issues, and the once-great customer service withered up and vanished. So much for LiveRack. I think they just didn’t want to be in the hosting business anymore. I moved to iPage.

iPage was cheap, but I was crammed onto a server with a bunch of other people and sometimes my blog would take an agonizing time to load. Like, almost a minute. Then there was the time a very popular Geek site linked to my CSS border-radius table and iPage shut me down because the demand on the server was too much. Ouch! My moment in the sun became my moment at the bottom of a well.

I set out to find ways to make this blog more server-friendly and more user-friendly at the same time. Step 1: caching. WordPress doesn’t store Web pages, it stores data and the instructions on how to build a Web page. So, every time you ask to load a page here, WordPress fires up a program that reads from the database and assembles all the parts to the page. The thing is, that takes longer than just finding the requested file and sending it back, the way iBlog did. Caching is a way for the server to say, “hey, wait a minute – I just did this page and nothing’s changed. I’ll just send the same thing I did last time.” That can lead to big savings, both in time and server load.

I looked at a few WordPress cacheing programs and eventually chose W3 Total Cache, because it does far more than just cache data. For instance, it will minify scripts and css files (remove extra spaces and crunch them down) and combine the files together so the browser only has to make one request. It will zip the data, meaning fewer 1’s and 0’s moving down the pipe, and it does a few other things as well, one of which I will get to shortly.

I installed W3 Total Cache, and although some settings broke a couple of javascripts (for reasons I have yet to figure out – I’ll get to that someday), the features I could turn on definitely made a difference. Hooray!

But Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas was still way too slow. I continued my search for ways to speed things up. I also began a search for a host that sucked less than iPage. (iPage was also starting to have outages that lasted a day or more. Not acceptable.) I decided I was willing to pay extra to be sure I wasn’t on an overwhelmed machine.

I’m not sure which came first – new server or Amazon Simple Storage Service. S3 is a pretty basic concept – you put your stuff on their super-duper servers, and when people need it they will get it really quickly. Things that don’t change, like images and even some scripts, can live there and your server doesn’t have to worry about them.

This is where W3 Total Cache earned my donation to their cause. You see, you can sign up for Amazon S3, and then put your account info into the proper W3TC panel and Bob’s Your Uncle. W3TC goes through your site, finds images and whatnot, puts them in your S3 bucket, and automatically changes all the links in your Web pages to point to your bucket instead of your own server. (Sometimes I find I have to copy the image to my S3 bucket manually, but that’s a small price to pay.)

Now a lot of the stuff on my blog, like the picture of me with the Utahraptors the other day, sits on a different, high-performance server out there somewhere, and no matter how overwhelmed my server happens to be at the moment those parts will arrive to you lickety-split. Amazon S3 is not free, however – each month I get an invoice for two or three cents. Should Muddled Ramblings suddenly become wildly popular, that number would increase.

About that server – the next stop on my quest for a good host was a place called Green Geeks. I wanted to upgrade to a VPS, which means I get a dedicated slice of a server that acted just like it was my very own machine. There is a lot to like about those, but my blog just wouldn’t run in the base level of RAM they offered. I upgraded and reorganized so that different requests would not take up more ram than they needed. Still, I had outages. Sometimes the server would just stop freeing up memory and eventually choke and die. Since it was a virtual server in a standard configuration, logic says it was caused by something I was doing, but all my efforts to figure it out were fruitless, and Green Geeks ran out of patience trying to help me figure it out.

The server software itself is Apache. At this point I considered using nginx (rhymes with ‘bingin’ ex’) instead. It’s supposedly faster, lighter, and easier to configure. But, I already know Apache. I may move to nginx in the future, but it’s not urgent anymore.

During the GreenGeeks era I came across another service that improves the performance of Web sites while reducing the load on the servers. I recently wrote glowingly about CloudFlare, but I will repeat myself a bit here for completeness. CloudFlare is a service that has a network of servers all over the world, and they stand between you the viewer and my server. They stash bits of my site all around the world, and much of the time they will have a copy of what you need on hand, and won’t even need to trouble my server with a request. About half of all requests to muddledramblings.com are magically and speedily taken care of without troubling my server at all. They also block a couple thousand bogus requests to my server each day, so I don’t have to deal with them (or pay for the bandwidth). It’s sweet, and the base service is free.

Unfortunately, it was not enough to keep my GreenGeeks server from crashing. Once more I began a search for a new host. I found through word of mouth a place called macminicolo. Apple employees get a discount, but I wasn’t an Apple employee yet. It was still a bargain. For what turned out to be the same monthly cost of sharing part of a machine at GreenGeeks, I get an entire server, all to myself, with plenty of RAM. I’ve set up several servers on Mac using MacPorts, and I knew just how to get things up and running well. It costs less than half what a co-located server costs anywhere else I have found (Mac, Windows, or Linux). (Co-location has up-front costs, but in the long term saves money.) So I have that going for me.

The only thing missing is that at GreenGeeks I had a fancy control panel that made it much simpler to share the machine with my friends. I do miss that, but I’m ready now to host friend and family sites at a very reasonable cost.

So there you have it! This is just your typical Apache/WordPress/W3 Total Cache/Amazon S3/CloudFlare site run off a Mac mini located somewhere in Nevada. Load times are less than 5% of what they were a year ago. Five percent! Conservatively. Typically it’s more like 1/50th of the load time. Traffic is up. Life is good.

Now I have no incentive at all to learn more about optimization.

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A Big Muddled Milestone Approaches

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Down near the bottom of the sidebar over there, you’ll see a few stats about this blog. There is one stat of which I’m really rather proud, even though it’s not really my accomplishment. The credit goes to you guys out there.

Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas will soon have its 10,000th comment.

That’s a big deal. All those comments represent a huge amount of content and, well, intelligence that this little media empire would not have had otherwise. The comments are the second layer, the extra reward for those who choose to dig a little deeper.

How should we reward comment 10,000? Certainly it should not go unmarked. My first thought is to offer the same prize I did in a previous contest: the winner provides the opening sentence and I write a silly story based on that. It was a fun prize, especially since Bob (Bill Bob’s brother’s brother) came up with an excellent opening that resulted in Elephants of Doom.

Is there a better prize? Leave your ideas in the comments!

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Harlean on the Move

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This is just a quick note to tell folks that Harlean Carpenter (who is a fiction) has moved her blog from MySpace (which is becoming a fiction) to Blogspot. Right now she’s moving her favorite posts from the old to the new, so you can get a nice ‘best-of’ album right now to introduce youself to her inimitable style. Check it out!

Thanks!

Appreciating Fonts

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The look of this blog when viewed on a Windows machine has always subtly annoyed me. I’ve been using the default font setup for WordPress, which uses Lucida Grande first, and if that is not available it uses Verdana. Verdana to me looks, I don’t know, thin or stretched or something. Loose. Unfortunately most Windows boxes don’t come with Lucida Grande, so Verdana is what most people experience. Today I decided to do something about it.

It’s possible now to tell a broswer to load a font from the Web when displaying a particular page. I could quite easily put @font-face directives in my files, load copies of Lucida Grande onto the server, and I’d be done (except for Internet Explorer, and those people can get by with Verdana). Unfortunately, although technically pretty simple, that course of action would not be legal.

There’s a font on Windows called Lucida Sans Unicode (or something like that) which is very similar to Lucida, but is not nearly as good for italics and bold face. This will be my fall-back solution.

For a while today, however, I thought I might go look for a new font, something that caught the spirit of this blog, yet was easy to read on a screen and had a nice ink density. On top of that, it had to be free or at least reasonably priced, and it had to include good italic and bold versions, and it had to include the wacky Czech diacriticals for those few episodes where I use them, plus the full range of punctuation including a variety of dashes, copyright symbols, and stuff like that.

I came up empty. Making a good font is not at all simple, and the people who make the great ones quite understandably want to be paid for their work. If I found one that measured up to Lucida Grande in usefulness and that would give this site a unique feel, I might be tempted to pony up.

The closest thing I could find was a font called Liberation, which is a favorite in the Linux world. At this writing, those without Lucida Grande will see that font (unless you’re using Internet Explorer). It’s OK, but the text is actually a little smaller for the same font size. That certainly is annoying. I haven’t looked at the text on enough different screens to know for sure, but I think right now the lettering is too small.

How’s it looking for you, my windows-using readers? Do you have any favorite fonts? I think with screen resolutions improving, it’s even possible to consider a serifed font these days.

Thanks!