Tag Archives: Internet

Things on the Internet that are Totally Cool

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I’ve come across a couple of things on the Internet lately that are, well, totally cool. Neither of these things is particularly new, but they are particularly awesome.

DropBox
I found DropBox through my brother; we used it to share audio files for Moonlight Sonata across nine time zones. He would put updates in his folder, and they would appear in mine shortly thereafter. Not bad, but only the beginning.

All my writing is backed up on multiple machines, and on a server somewhere ‘out there’. No matter what computer I sit down to, the latest versions of all my stories are there. Effort required: none. I work on a story, save, and it automagically is updated everywhere else. The scenarios in which I lose work are extreme and hard to imagine. New files? No problem, as long as I save them in my DropBox folder.

For the security-minded, DropBox encrypts all the data they store, so you’re safe from hackers getting your stuff. The DropBox people have the key to the encryption, however, so you are not safe from subpoenas and warrantless government searches (which are common). Fortunately there is nothing stopping you from using your own encryption on the files first, and you will be the only one holding the key. I’m looking for the perfectly transparent, free, multiple-computer solution for this; when I find it I’ll let you know. Currently I manually encrypt sensitive files.

Edited to add: On the mac, it is quite simple to create a strongly-encrypted disk image. If you use Disk Utility to create a sparse image that’s less than 2GB and put that into your DropBox folder, then you can mount that image and save all your sensitive stuff in there. Works like a charm. I made my image 663 MB, and used AES-256 encryption (stronger is better, I figure).

DropBox is free for a limited amount of storage (2 GB), which is plenty for important text documents; for a small fee your limit can be increased to 50 GB. So far there are no products this simple and slick that you can install on your own server (so you can store as much as you want and control your own security), but that is only a matter of time, I suspect.

Pandora
People have been telling me about Pandora for a long time (in Internet years), but I’ve only recently started using it. It’s sweet! For those even farther under the rock than I am, Pandora is an Internet radio service that decides which song to play for you based on how you’ve responded to the previous songs. You can maintain multiple “stations” that have different kinds of music, based on what you’re up to at the moment or what mood you’re in. Currently I’m listening to a station called “Nirvana”. I chose a band and Pandora took it from there. I rejected a couple of tunes, gave a hearty thumbs-up to others, and off I go.

I’m a little disappointed that there isn’t much music in this list that I’ve never heard before. It seems like this should be a service ideal for helping me discover new bands, but it’s not quite there yet. Pandora seems a little too hit-oriented for my taste, but I’m hoping that over time, if I take the time to give a thumbs-up to stronger but more obscure music, I can deepen the pool of tunes Pandora draws from.

Sure I have a big heapin’ pile of music on my hard drive, and I still use it regularly (in part because Pandora has such a popular leaning), but using Pandora is way easier than sorting all my music into thematic and stylistic playlists that provide variety without straying too far from the stuff I’m in the mood for.

Mac note: The Mac’s ability to turn any part of any Web page into a dashboard widget worked awesomely with Pandora’s player.

Something Else
This article feels like it really should have a third item, but at the moment I can’t come up with one. Sure, there are the Internet game-changers like email and Google, but those are hardly news anymore. What would you put in this spot?

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Hacked!

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Some of you may have noticed on this site a black-and-red screen with a self-congratulatory message from a bunch of assholes who are not me. Naturally this occurred when I was out in the middle of Nevada, so it took a while before I was able to effect repairs. Things are (mostly) working now. Actually, I had them fixed even before the hosting company became aware of the problem, apparently. The time they cite for the intrusion was 10pm July 3rd, but it was 10am or even earlier that the attack occurred. That fills me with confidence. (Maybe it’s just a typo in their message.)

My hosting company is setting up a new server and will be restoring this site from backups that are a few days old. Hopefully I’ll be able to update the database (no affected) to include episodes (like this one) and comments that have happened since the hack.

I assumed at first that the brand-new version of WordPress might have a security exploit, but then I discovered that jerssoftwarehut.com and all the sub-sites I have on that server (except paseeger.com, for reasons I can’t figure), were hacked. Then I tried to get into the control panel and it was hacked. That takes more access than even I have; the control panel code is off in some other place. No, my Web host was hacked.

I do not yet know whether the credit card fraud protection kicked in at about that time as a result of actual fraud or because I was traveling and some robot flagged the behavior as suspicious. It looks like there might be some bogus charges, but I won’t know for sure until I can talk to an actual human tomorrow. (I did talk to a human in India, but she was unable to access the information I need.

So now I have no credit card, and the ATM powers of the same card seem to be suspended as well (that or I’m misremembering my PIN). All the cash My sweetie thrust upon me for the trip, more than I would have taken otherwise, has proven a lifesaver.

Once I had a glowing recommendation for MM Hosting on this site. I really liked them at first; their service and responsiveness was fantastic. Things have been going downhill with them for a while, and I had already been investigating other options that gave me more control. Inertia has kept me here for the most part. No longer. Goodbye, MMHosting. I’ll be asking for a refund for the remainder of my contract.

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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and PHP

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Often when dealing with Cascading Style sheets, or CSS, I find myself wishing that the CSS mechanism included variables. This is especially true when dealing with colors, since you want the same color applied to lots of different things. It can be a real pain to go back through an old style sheet and find the code for the color you want. I was quietly surprised that no one making up how CSS worked had addressed something like this.

Then, a while back I was giving a buddy of mine a few exercises to introduce him to the exciting world of Web programming, touching on CSS, HTML, PHP and MySQL. I gave him pretty much no guidance; I just thought up plans that would introduce him to the concepts and gave him a list of my favorite references. (I’ll be posting those exercises here in the nearish future.)

Anyway, without me to tell him how to do things, he went and dug around and one of the first style sheets he sent me for evaluation had a .php extension rather than .css.

Bingo! Once you see it in action, it’s obvious. PHP can be used to generate CSS files just as easily as it can be used to generate HTML files. Now my style sheets can change based on external conditions or can simply define a set of colors that all the style definitions share. Why did it take me so long to figure this out? It seems like this technique should be a lot more common than it is.

Here’s a quick code snippet for those who want to try it for themselves:

<?php
	header('Content-Type: text/css');
 
	$header_back_color = '#dddddd';
?>
 
#corner_table th {
	background-color:<?php echo $header_back_color ?>;
	text-align: center;
}

A couple of notes: the <?php MUST be the very first thing in the file. No empty lines, no spaces. The reason is that the next line, with the header() function, has to be called before the server sends any page content. (Once the server starts sending content back to the browser, it’s too late to be fiddling with the headers. Any whitespace outside the <?php tag will be considered content.) The header line is necessary because you need to tell your browser that what you are sending really is a css file.

In the <head> of the html file, you call the style sheet just like normal, but of course the file you fetch will have a php extension:

<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="http://yourdomain.com/css-tables.php"
      type="text/css"
      media="screen" />

That’s all there is to it. Why have I not done this with every css file?

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Drupalcon Day 1 – notes from the floor

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I’m working on a project right now that is based on a Web development platform called Drupal. I have a long editorial episode building in my head concerning Drupal and competing platforms for Web development, but today I’m going to write this episode assuming you already know what Drupal is and how it works. (This is also how the documentation for Drupal is written.)

Once I arrived and registered, I looked over the program to decide which seminars I would attend. I looked down the list and realized I already knew what most of the seminars were discussing. Some of the seminars, I could have been the presenter. I realized that the cross-section of stuff I know about Drupal probably qualifies me as a Drupal expert now.

Still, there’s always new stuff to learn. I decided to dedicate my day to security. There are a lot of ways to break a Web site these days.

Before the security sessions there was the keynote address by the guy who invented Drupal in his dorm room in Antwerp ten years ago. He is still holder of the vision for the project, and hearing him speak I have to say that the project is in good hands. He knows there are challenges ahead, and he was an excellent cheerleader for open source, and for encouraging everyone who uses Drupal to give back to the community. Currently they are trying to release the next major upgrade, something they absolutely must have, and soon (more on that in a bit). “There are 114 critical bugs to fix,” he said (or something like this), “If we break into teams right now we can have them fixed by the end of the day. So, we’re locking the doors…”

There was a laugh, but his point was a good one. Rather than wait eagerly for the release, the Drupal community should be actively making it happen.

He also mentioned that 1% of the Web is now powered by Drupal. That’s pretty dang impressive (until you compare it to WordPress). It’s difficult to call his methods for estimating that 1% as scientific, but whatever that number is, I can tell you that it could be a lot higher except for one thing: This software induces more WTF? moments than any other development platform I’ve ever used. Novices who come to the platform install the software, stare blankly at the screen, click things, and give up and move on to a more intuitive product. It would be impossible to measure how many adoptions they have lost because of that initial Now What? moment, but it’s significant I promise you.

On a related note, employment opportunities for Drupal experts is on the rise. People who have worked their way through the WTF to where they can be productive with the platform are in demand. I can now navigate and decode the documentation (I think some of the writers of the documentation are so steeped in the Drupal Way that they don’t even realize they are writing in code), and that puts me in good position to find work. When the out-of-box experience is improved (a major thrust of Drupal 7), my “expert” status will be less lucrative.

Speaking of the Drupal Way: At the risk of being overly general, these guys are more sensitive than even Mac people when it comes to hearing criticism about their platform. Also, there were easily more Macs in evidence than Windows laptops. Perhaps that is because we are on Apple’s home turf here, but I think that Mac, with its handy Unix underpinnings, is finding a sweet spot in the Web design world, with cachet among the designers as well as unix (the os of the Web) for the übergeeks. (The only apple I brought to the convention, I ate. I have Ol’ Pokey charging up, however, to see if it’s game for one last field trip before its ten-year-old video system gives up entirely.)

Back to the keynote: Mr. Buytaert, while talking about the future of Drupal, mentioned that as they got bigger, there would be people for whom using Drupal would be a day job! They wouldn’t be using it just for the love of it, they would think of it as just another tool to get their job done. Mr. Buytaert, welcome to 2008. Those people are now your market, if you want to meet your stated goals for growth.

One thing I’ll say for the guy, he really seems driven by the simple desire to make Drupal the best. He’s probably wealthy now, but commercial success just doesn’t seem to be what motivates him. He wants to make his baby better and better and world domination is simply a way to measure how well he’s doing. It’s refreshing to hear from someone like that.

As for the security sessions, I think this best sums it up (this link was given in one of the seminars):

xkcd 327

A note of explanation for the less-geeky (which you can skip): When a programmer is careless, people can put a string in any field on a site and cause database commands to be executed. In the comic, the name “Robert’); DROP TABLE Students;–” will cause the database the table named ‘Students’, obliterating their records. The ‘); tells the database that the command to add the name is finished, then the rest of the text is treated as a new command. Aren’t you glad you asked?

I also learned just what a risk it is to link to an image the way I just did. The owner of that site can now attack my blog. Ah, the irony.

I did learn some useful stuff in the seminars, and just in time, too. I’m really glad I went.

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Filling a Need

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I dragged my sorry butt out of bed just before 7 a.m. Big meeting. I put on my fuzzy bathrobe and plunked down in front of the computer while my sweetie made me tea. Then she went back to bed. We stayed up way too late last night.

Skype lit up and away we went. The meeting was more about my employer and the evolution of their corporate character than about technology, deadlines, or the transient issues of the day. How do you make a company run smoothly when you span from San Jose to Moscow? How do you make sure everyone is having a good time while you’re at it?

At one point in the conversation I was asked for bio data for my employer to put up on their Web site. I thought I would throw them a link to the bio page here here first, as a joke and also to let them learn a little more about who I am (or who I want to be, at least). I popped over here and saw… that this site had been suspended by my Web host. I checked my email. No notice. I checked my account on MMHosting’s site. Suspended, no reason given.

Some Mondays are Mondayer than others.

I sent off an urgent help request and spent the rest of the day bouncing between databases, php server code, and Flex client code, generally trying to be smart enough to deserve what they are paying me. Eventually I got a message back from MMHosting.

First, they said they had in fact sent an email. I searched everywhere I know how to search, and I couldn’t find it. No matter; they also turned the site back on. The guy said that some of my php files (code that runs on the server and builds these pages) was loading bazillions of times and slowing down the server. Uh, oh! Looks like some plugin I’m using ran amok. The people sharing the server with me probably weren’t happy.

That’s what I thought until I started looking at the numbers, anyway. Runaway software? Not at all! It turns out this table I wasted way too much time on got mentioned in a prominent place, and twitter and digg took care of the rest. When you look at the graph, remember that the site was down for much of the time during that traffic spike. Holy Schnikies!

Traffic for the last month. The bulge at the beginning is from Cyberspace Open traffic. Things have been slow since I started working - until today!

Traffic for the last month. The bulge at the beginning is from Cyberspace Open traffic. Things have been slow since I started working - until today!


I really did put a lot of work into that dang table, so I’m glad people are picking up on it. Maybe there are other CSS3 features I could tote up – transform and shadow come to mind.

Boy, I sure wish I had a killer episode at the top of the blog to hook some of these visitors. Oh, well.

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Speaking of Google and Microsoft…

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Now there’s Google Chrome Frame, or at least the glimmer of it in the future. Google’s spin: since Internet Explorer is holding back the Web; we’ll make a plugin so people can use our more standards-compliant browser technology from within Internet Explorer.

It seems nice on the surface and I’m happy that someone would go and fix Internet Explorer despite Microsoft, but I have to wonder how many people will actually install the plugin. The people who are using IE now are ones who either like IE as it is or who must use IE because their IT department says so. Will the first group see value in adding a plugin to make their browser work like another browser (which they just as easily could be using already), or will IT departments allow their ‘clients’ to install such a large unknown quantity on their machines?

The thing is designed so that the WebKit code (what Chrome is based on) will only be invoked on Web pages that specifically enable it. (This might help the IT guys relax a bit.) I will enable it for this site, although the differences Chrome Frame users will see are only cosmetic. It costs me nothing. Somewhere the Google minions will make note of my Chrome enabilization and use that as part of a marketing pitch.

My hope for the plugin is not that it converts a lot of Internet Explorer users, but that it spurs Microsoft to accelerate their own adoption of the next wave of standards. That would be the biggest win from where I’m sitting. It doesn’t seem likely, though, until HTML 5 becomes a valuable tool for its business customers.

Whether it’s Bing making Google Search better or Chrome making Internet Explorer better, in the end I’m glad these two companies don’t get along.

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Remember Bing?

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Yeah, Bing. The Google-killer. The Decision Engine. $100 million marketing budget.

Bing.

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The Worst Thing That Ever Happened to the Internet

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I mentioned in the last episode that Internet Explorer was the second-worst thing that ever happened to the Internet. Today I’ll talk about the absolute worst. It’s really a long technical rant that doesn’t matter, but it feels good to let it out. What follows is an underinformed ramble about the scourge that did the most harm to the developing computer network that went on to transform our lives — damage that we still live with today. Without this one corrupting influence, we would have had Internet applications that didn’t suck a decade ago, if not longer. In fact, it was because of this electronic plague that Microsoft was able to cause so much harm with Internet Explorer.

The culprit? The ball and chain that modern technology has dragged along despite its obvious flaws? Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML.

First, let’s start with the name. HTML is not a language. Not even close. It is a document format. That its inventors did not recognize the difference tells you that the wrong guys were doing it.

Second, it’s not a very good document format. At its heart, the inventors wanted a format that did three things: connect related documents, embed external resources (like images) and contain standard formatting information that would be interpreted by viewing software consistently. They were not the only ones developing systems like this; Josten’s Learning invented a similar system when they built the first multimedia encyclopedia for Compton’s New Media. Where Berners-Lee and friends had URL’s, Josten’s engineers created BRU’s, but beyond the initials the function was the same.

I don’t want to be too harsh on Berners-Lee, Cailliau, and the others who grew HTML, but I wish they’d been a little more far-sighted. I say ‘grew’ rather than ‘invented’ because it’s clear that they never sat back and asked themselves “What is a tag? What roles do they perform?” Even now, XHTML, the supposedly more rigorous (if still misnamed) descendant of HTML has fundamental inconsistencies.

For a simple example, take the <br /> tag. It exists because in HTML all whitespace (tabs, spaces, and returns) are mushed together and presented on the screen as a single space. Thus

<p>this markup</p>

and

<p>this
 
        markup</p>

come out the same on the screen. That’s fine if you know what’s going on. But what if you want to put in a line break or a space? Well, for a space you add a special character code &nbsp; and for break you add a tag <br />. Why is one a character and one a tag? Because on the day HTML’s inventors decided they needed line breaks, a tag seemed like a good way to go, even though semantically it had nothing to do with the roles of other tags. It could just as easily been &br; or something like that. That’s how HTML grew up. And thus the World Wide Web was born.

Another fundamental flaw is that the content (what to display) is all mixed up with the presentation (how to display it). What if you want to show the same document in different formats? Nope. While some tags were geared toward identifying the type of content that they enclosed (like the <p> tag), others were direct formatting instructions (like the <i> tag). This inconsistency in the role of tags in a document is a reflection of the organic (and sloppy) way that HTML was grown.

I really can’t blame the inventors of HTML for what came next. Everyone started using it. Everyone. The flaws and inadequacies of the format quickly became apparent. Different document viewers (browsers) rendered things differently. Formatting options were extremely limited. The systems were vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous people. Right then, there was a chance for people to say, “hold on a second! Let’s take the idea of HTML and apply the lessons we’ve already learned in other branches of computing, and make something that doesn’t suck.”

Rather than scrap HTML, browser makers and others set out to fix it. That was the Big Mistake. After twenty years of tweaking and bickering and incompatible extensions introduced by browser manufacturers and squabbles and lawsuits, HTML has been upgraded from awful to poor. Along the way, companies like Adobe and Macromedia thought to get their technology adopted as a replacement to HTML (the Web in pdf? Interesting…) but those efforts were doomed from the start because they did not provide free, simple tools to create the content.

HTML’s greatest shining virtue (and it’s an awesome one) is that it’s accessible to anyone who can type. Anyone. No special tools required.

So, now we have style sheets to help separate content and presentation, XHTML to fix some of the semantic craziness of HTML, and browsers are finally starting to agree on what all the formatting instructions actually mean. We could have had that fifteen years ago if people had just let go of HTML, but here we are now, with an almost-functional system. There are still plenty of flaws, however. Things that seem so normal now that we don’t even think about how dumb they are.

Take this blog, for instance. It’s a pretty well-built Web application, based on reasonably up-to-date practices. Yet were you to click the comment link at the bottom of this episode, you would go to a new page. On that new page the browser would reload the same header and the same sidebar it just erased. What a waste! Why does it do it? Because that’s how HTML (and HTTP, the underlying part that communicates with servers) works. There have been abortive attempts to fix that over the years, but they have all been flawed. Now, at long last, techniques have been developed to overcome that problem, but they are not quite ready for prime time yet. For one thing, they are very complicated, and for another they rely on browsers working just right. Why was it so hard to implement? Because at its core the Web was not made that way.

Even in the days when almost everyone was on dialup (except the people inventing HTML), no one stopped to say, “hey, let’s make a way to only update the content that changes.” That problem has now been ‘solved’ by adding a new layer of complexity on Web sites. By adding this layer (on top of CSS and so forth), we get sensible Web applications at last, but we take away the one super-cool thing about HTML. It is no longer a simple format that can be harnessed by anyone with a text editor. We have lost the attribute that was the only reason to keep HTML around in the first place.

So now we have a system that is both inaccessibly arcane and flawed. Yay!

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The Ghost of Projects Past

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I couldn’t sleep last night, and on nights like that it is natural to think of things that might have been. One of the thoughts that grabbed hold of my too-active brain was the memory of PeoplePost, an Internet-based photo-sharing application that allowed groups of people to build scrapbooks together. We called it a virtual refrigerator door. It was pretty slick.

The project failed for a number of reasons. First, we tried to ‘roll our own’ instead of springing for sophisticated Web development tools. (Back then, the tools were very expensive.) To save the cash we added months to the development, and in the meantime something fundamentally changed on the Internet. People began to expect everything to be free. You remember the two-year span when Web services stopped trying to make money and figured they would find some way to be profitable in the future? Probably not, but those were the years we were working on PeoplePost.

This happened as the dot-com boom was just getting started, before Google had finished making the Web a useful place. WordPress did not exist then. No MySpace, no Facebook, no Friendster. Geocities was around, but had PeoplePost taken off, we would have had to invent modern social networking as the next logical step. At the time, our networks were closed communities with no way to discover what other groups were up to.

Another thing that killed us was a dead-wrong prediction I made way back then. I said that the browser was the Swiss Army Knife of the Internet, and that soon people would turn to specific applications to perform specific tasks. “Swiss knife is good,” I said, “but soon people are going to want cutlery.” Boy, was I wrong about that. Instead of using applications designed for a specific purpose, people worked with really crappy applications that worked through the browser. People tolerated crap that worked in some browsers and not others, and they tolerated bad aesthetics, wasted bandwidth (on their modems!), and wretched user interfaces that left them cursing the screen. Why? I still don’t get it.

Nevertheless, we made PeoplePost a downloadable application (with a really slick self-updating scheme), and when people downloaded and installed it, they would then go back to the browser and wonder what to do next. It’s the Internet! It must be in the browser!

The application was written in Java (not Swing, but that’s another post), so we managed to get the whole thing shoehorned into the browser — suddenly dealing with four different security systems and a host of other issues, like Microsoft’s passive-aggressive antipathy toward the language. What a pain. Still, a few people started to use it.

What we really needed at that stage was widespread broadband. We were diligent about saving bandwidth (all graphic elements preinstalled, for instance), but with advertising banners now harshing the lovely fridge door environment and eating up precious pipe, the user experience on a slow modem was not so great. Pictures are big. Still, we got Compaq and HP excited (shared photos become printed photos, which moves paper), and they helped get the product out there.

But we couldn’t charge for it, and we weren’t making money on advertising. It was going to be a long haul to make the product a financial success. An expensive haul. We couldn’t do it.

Skip forward to today. Finally, browsers are getting consistent enough and powerful enough that it’s almost (but not really) possible to make a decent application that runs in the browser. Meanwhile we’ve all been trained to put up with shitty software while online, so actual good software on the Web is big news. Now Internet Explorer (the second-worst thing to happen to the Internet) is finally close enough to the standards that people can write sophisticated user interfaces, using techniques that are often bundled under the term AJAX.

In the intervening years, galleries of many stripes have popped up on the Web, but nothing like PeoplePost. There are places people can share pictures, but they boil down to “here’s a big pile of my pictures; now post a big pile of your pictures.” Nice, but it could be better. A lot better. I was reminded of how cool PeoplePost would be this summer when the family was looking for a place to share photos from the eclipse cruise. There is nothing that allows people to collaborate, to build an album with text and photos and comments, and to allow everyone to contribute to the same album and build a true group identity. Combine that with modern social networking and you’ve got something.

Maybe it’s time to dust off the old failure. Maybe the world is ready for it now.

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Shake It Up, Baby!

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This morning at 2:47 local time (my sweetie made a point of remembering the time), a mild shaking made its way through my dozing, sleep-fogged brain and brought me to full wakefulness. The window was rattling softly and I knew that we were having an earthquake, albeit a very mild one. The shaking soon subsided and I resumed my quest for slumber.

No big deal really, earthquakes happen every day around here — literally. Most go unnoticed, and considering the alternative to lots of little earthquakes is one large one, I’ll take all the mild temblors the shifting plates want to throw at me.

As a bonus, this was my first time using this site to report my experience. (USGS – Science for a changing world!) Reporting only took a moment (Did things move? What did you do?), but then of course I had to poke around the maps checking out all the other recent earthquakes around the world. Big fun!

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The Spam Index of Popularity

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If the popularity of figures in the entertainment industry is proportional to the number of times a person appears in Internet spam, then Megan Fox and Miley Cyrus are currently at the top of the heap. I’m not sure who either of those people is, but their names appear before the word “nude” more than any others who appear in the (pre-filtered) spam comments for this blog.

Their agents should be right on top of this trend, and get them the big bucks.

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Blogs and Bloggers

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A Facebook friend of mine posted a link to a NY Times article about the high failure rate of blogs. I couldn’t read the article without registering (so I didn’t), but that won’t stop me from commenting on it! You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.

As I pondered the short life span of the typical blog, I decided that bloggers fall into a few categories, and failure can (usually) be predicted just by identifying what class the blogger is a member of:

  1. People with nothing to say. Unscientifically, I’d say this is the vast majority of blogs. Many of these blogs might better be described as journals; the content is really meant for the consumption of the writer, not any audience. After a few weeks, anecdotes about the crazy antics of Fluffy the cat get old. After a few months these stories get old even for the blogger and he quits. Some people have a treasury of a few really good stories, and those will keep them going for a while, but when the well runs dry the blog fades away.
  2. People who lack the skill to say what they want. I suspect that this group is fairly small, as most people who lack language skills probably don’t start blogging in the first place. The exceptions to this rule, I suspect (having done no research) are found in sport blogs and political blogs, where passionately held beliefs are undermined by the complete inability of the writer to express himself.
  3. Interesting, articulate people with unrealistic expectations. When the blog doesn’t become famous overnight and the blogger realizes she must devote time to it almost every day for months for it to have even a remote chance of catching on, they quit.
  4. Interesting, articulate people who embrace the medium and do it for the pleasure of doing it. They produce what we in the industry call “good blogs.”
  5. People who, despite having traits from categories 1-3, continue to blog, rehashing old material and catering to a microscopic audience. Even as readership remains constant for several years these writers delude themselves into thinking that their blog sucks less than most blogs.

On a purely unrelated note, as Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas celebrates its fifth year of contributing to the noise of the blogosphere, the MuddledRamblings.com business cards I designed say at the bottom, “Sucks less than most blogs!”

Fundamentally, I think most bloggers want to be read. A growing audience is the payoff — more people reading, more people commenting, lively discussions triggered by the words of the blogger. It seems obvious, but when it comes right down to it, most blogs are not read. Personally, I don’t read that many blogs, and comment on fewer still. There are just too many of the damn things. Blogs that don’t produce consistently excellent posts, with some thematic connection between posts, are not going to grow big audiences. (The exception to this is the celebrity blog, where people read just for the name.) I’d have a much better chance at a large readership if I wrote a blog strictly about software engineering on a particular platform rather than just posting whatever drivel pops into my head.

I just like writing drivel, is all.

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The Scourge of Weblessness Seems to be Spreading

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I am without Internet in my home, and am likely to be for my remaining two weeks here. I have come to rely on the connection at Little Café Near Home for most of my connectedness needs. Mornings are definitely a better time to get things done and chat with That Girl and so forth. The only problem: mornings have an ugly habit of coming before noon. Nevertheless, I dragged my butt out of bed this morning and staggered down here through the rain (fat, heavy drops but far apart), plopped down and accepted my tea gratefully, and fired up Ol’ Pokey, my laptop.

The WiFi signal is strong, and my computer connected to the base station without a problem. That’s as far as I got, however; the world is not responding to my entreaties. Perhaps there is no Internet any more. Maybe it broke. Maybe the terrorists got it and no one has realized it’s a global problem yet because people don’t have any way to communicate. Everybody’s just assuming that it’s only their connection that’s down. Man, it would suck if the Internet broke.

Of course, since you’re reading this now, the Internet must not be completely broken. This time.

Thanks!

Blogging Without a Net

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I woke up early this morning, which is even more surprising than usual because apparently this weekend everyone around here decided to set their clocks ahead an hour. Many mornings I wake up to the sound of my Yahoo! chat thingie announcing that it’s time for a little morning dialog with That Girl. Not this morning; my Internet has been down more than up lately and this morning it wasn’t even pretending to try to connect. Not a good sign. I thought maybe I was behind on paying, but I just got a bill and it’s not due yet. It mentions nothing of previous unpaid debts.

Out of habit I sat in front of my computer and stared at it for a little while. It seems my only morning ritual that doesn’t involve the Internet is making tea, which I drink while reading Web comics and checking for comments here. This morning I didn’t even make tea.

Sure, I could have picked up a book, or fired up Jer’s Novel Writer to do a little creative work of my own. I could have used my telephone to communicate with friends and contacts for “Moonlight Sonata”. I could have packed up my stuff, walked down the hill, and reacquainted myself with Café Fuzzy’s breakfast sandwich.

I did none of those things. Instead I fiddled with wires and the DSL box and whatnot, hoping for some magic combination that would bring the Internet back. I did not succeed. After two hours of alternating fiddling and staring blankly at the screen I had to admit to myself that Plan B was called for. A mere three hours after I woke up I stumbled into Little Café Near Home, just so I could tell you this little story.

Thanks!

Is the Hut running?

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Hey, can someone test these links for me?

From where I’m sitting right now, I can’t access Jer’s Software Hut or the blog construction site. I can reach everything else on the Web, so I’m wondering if my server is down or if my IP address has been blocked by my host’s security robots (again). I went to sleep with an open connection to my WordPress database and that might have triggered something. Can anyone out there load those pages and let me know? Thanks!

Thanks!