Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those of you who have been here before may have noticed a small change in the appearance of this blog. Ok, a large change. For about five years, almost since I started blogging, I’ve been using a blogging host provider called Blog City. BC has served me very well over the years, but it was time I moved on.

I originally chose BC when there weren’t any really mature blogging platforms, and BC had just as many if not more features than many of its competitors. Also the idea of setting up my own blogging software and having to tweak it at that time, while not a big deal, seemed like enough of a nuisance to at least be a factor in my decision.

Over the years, BC came out with new functionality, new widgets, and whole new administrative platforms. The amount of personal attention was also great. They are still a good choice for a segment of the blogging or potentially-blogging community.

Still, there are a few things that have motivated me to move to Wordpress, and I finally made the jump, after lots of prep work on the back end over the last month or so. I am still a relative newbie at Wordpress and will be continuing to add new content and functionality, tweaking the look of things, etc., etc., over the next few weeks or even months. But I believe with this new blogging software will help motivate me to get back into the rhythm of blogging, even if it’s just to post a link and a short paragraph here and there as I come across something interesting and want to share my thoughts.

For those of you who don’t know much about blogging, Wordpress is an open-source application that one can install on a huge number of hosts out there. You can easily take your entire blog, save it to your local computer, then reimport all that content on a new host if you decide to go from one to another. The software stays the same. The software is also very easy to use, with lots of customization via “plugins” and “themes” to change the look and add functionality. There are lots of these available for free, plus you can program your own if you are so inclined, or just tweak the ones that are available. Some of these plugins are extremely powerful, adding very significant new functionality. Since the software is open-source, it will never go away due to a company going out of business or switching tactics, and becuase it is so popular, your data is in a format that can be imported into many other software platforms if you ever choose a different one. And if it isn’t now, chances are that some developer will create a migration tool for such a huge market.

Its popularity as well as the open-source nature of WordPress ensures many advantages, as well as a few small burdens which other blogging platforms, especially ones that do your hosting for you as well, do not. For anyone with technical savvy, such software is a pretty obvious choice, although like I did five years ago, you might decide on a solution that avoids the added work of installing and configuring such software simply due to time constraints and a busy life. WordPress does have a fully-hosted version as well, similar to Blogger and Blog-City, and like the others it comes in both free and paid, more premium versions. If you ever want to get a feel for these different software platforms, the best place to start would be to create one of these free accounts on the various choices and play to see which one fits your style best.

It seems like some people enjoy my in-depth reviews of gadgets and software and find them very useful. With this in mind I thought I’d remind those out there that might be developers or work in an electronics company that I’m very happy to review these but don’t have the budget to go out and buy gadgets willy-nilly. Sure software often comes with a trial-period, but often some of the features are crippled and/or the trial runs out in a matter of a week or two, and sometimes these things take a little longer, especially when I can’t devote my full attention to writing for a given period of time. I do have a day job after all!

So, if you your company has a product you would like to see reviewed, please let me know. I currently have a PC and a PalmOS device, so reviewing stuff that only works on other platforms (Mac, PocketPC, Symbian, Linux, etc.), is not possible.

Readers who find my reviews useful (or not!) I ask only for your feedback. Oh yes, and it wouldn’t hurt to get your support by hitting some links to my “sponsors” (aka advertisers) if that’s something you’re ok with.

In my relentless attempt to take over the world (as Dawn and Drew would say), I’ve started looking at this interesting Blogging tool called Blog Explosion. After signing up, you surf other people’s blogs and for each blog you can rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, add comments, bookmark it, or blacklist it. As you build up credits, they can be used to direct other Blog Explosion members to your blog - an exchange of eyeballs so to speak.

While good in theory, there are definitely loopholes. For example, while you have to do some manual stuff in order to surf to the next blog in line, and you have to wait 30 seconds in between blog viewings, there is nothing that forces you to actually read a blog. You could easily go do something else in a different browser window and then switch back.

That being said, I still think it’s useful. I have found a number of interesting blogs which I doubt I’d ever have noticed in my ordinary subscription to a handful of major (and a few minor) blogs. There are few if any “A-list” blogs, and hey, that’s a good thing, right? While it’s good to have a sense for those more popular blogs, part of the essence of blogging is getting to read stuff from people who are NOT major headline makers either in the blogosphere or in the mainstream press, and let’s face it, these two worlds are bound to start merging any day, if they haven’t already!

The other nice part of this is that it’s a pyramid scheme! Ok, maybe not quite that bad, but kinda. You can refer people and those people will contribute to your credits when they visit other blogs. Apparently there are five levels, so it’s not as bad as it could be, I suppose.

I’ve only been using this for a week or so, so I’m still not 100% sold on the idea, but it’s worth trying out at least. That’s what I’m doing for now – until the referrals come in and then I can just sit back and watch the profits roll in, yeah, baby! No, no, I don’t even expect to get any folks under me. But it is kind of cool that you can manually drive people to your site, even if they take one look at go off to play solitaire until my 30 seconds are up. Some people will actually find something of interest and may just stick around for longer – as I’ve done on not a small number of occasions…

In the spirit of the season, I thought I, like other non-profits, would ask for your support before the year ends. Ok, well, maybe a donation to help me buy a new gadget once in a while (I know this is VERY wishful thinking!) so I can review it for you may not be tax-deductible, but at least I’m not stuffing your mailboxes with paper and mailing labels that few of us use anymore now that there’s internet bill-pay. I can’t say I have huge expectations, but if you do find this blog useful and/or entertaining, and want to throw a few cents my way, I’d be might appreciative! I’ve set up a paypal donate button so if you have a paypal count already it will be a no-brainer.

My friend Eric at Off Wing mentions that he is getting more hits from Firefox. I’ve mentioned how much I love Firefox but hadn’t bothered to check my logs. So just now I went and, holy cow, 21.5% of my hits are coming from Firefox! Another 5.61% are coming from Safari, which is the Mac version of Firefox. IE is still #1 with 62%, but I remember checking just a few months ago, before I knew about Firefox, and IE was up at 90%! Way to go, Mozilla! At this rate FF will overtake IE in another few months.

Yesterday I wrote about the 2004 Weblog awards. There’s been some noise recently about this being organized by a conservative weblog WizBang. In an of itself this is not necessarily a bad thing. However, it just so happens that almost every single freaking winner of the 2004 Weblog awards has a very conservative bent. What this says to me is that this whole thing has been fixed, a sham. For Pete’s sakes, even the LBGT category winner is an avowed conservative, and this is from a group that leans heavily to the left. The only exceptions to this rule is the actual liberal blog category, the tech blog category winner Engadget, an the Photoblog category. Speaking of which it appears several of the nominees from the Photoblog category withdrew because they did not like Wizbang’s political affiliations. Frankly I don’t care about their political affiliations, but the fact that you can deduce a political slant going the same direction from 90% of the main “best of” blogs in these awards just does not sit well with me. I think part of it too is that I had not heard of any such complaints until today, a full day after the awards came out. I guess one may still get a decent varied list of blogs from the nominees, but at this point I’m loath to use this site for anything. Wizbang, when you hold the 2005 Weblog awards, you might want to make it a little less obvious by not making just about all your winners avowed conservatives. Yeesh!

Having only stumbled upon blogging less than two years ago, even then the number of blogs was overwhelming and so I picked and chose what I read carefully. My other two associated problems of being a slow reader and having a compulsion to keep up to date with everything I read, made it so that I was reluctant to look at lots of blogs. So I just don’t have the familiarity I should with some very popular blogs which, being a blogger, I probably should!

Luckily, there this is the second year that the Weblog Awards have been given out, based on votes from anyone. You can vote once per day from a given IP address, which doesn’t avoid cheating, but the ability to use bots theoretically hampers those who want to really stack the deck! Certainly it’s not a definitive list, and of course popularity doesn’t equal quality, but of course it’s a starting point and will probably be really helpful as a starting place for anyone new to the Blogosphere, and I for one am going to take this as an opportunity to expand the reading I do a bit, god help me!

On a personal note, I was not nominated for any of the categories that I might have fit in, like Best Tech Blog, Photo Blog, or even Best of the Rest of the Blogs. I do, though, want to congratulate Engadget for being the top Tech Blog, which I think it really deserves, but also the close runner up, Gizmodo, which is a very useful and quite humorous edition to your tech reading. My friend, Eric McErlain, whom I spoke with at a white elephant party just this weekend, was hoping for a win in the Sports Blog category for his Off Wing Opinion. Unfortunately he was denied the title by Baseball Crank, and Athletics Nation somehow managed to hold onto an incredibly small lead to make Off Wing third. Congratulations are due to Eric all the same, for even getting this far in the very crowded category of Sports Blogs.

I apologize to readers out there who’ve been tryin to get to the site over the last couple of days. Apparently my blog host, Blog City, has been dealing with Denial of Service (DOS) attacks because of the elections. They indicated that the sites that were being attacked specifically were pro-Bush, so I guess that means Kerry/Edwards has the hacker vote! Which could come in handy if those voting machines are as hackable as some suspect! But really, such attacks are completely idiotic if they are indeed substantiated. Blog City is based in Scotland, hardly a bastion of conservatism, and hosts blogs of all political leanings. Cutting them down is hearting everyone and goes against the whole idea of the internet – everyone should get their say, no matter how much you disagree with them.

Update: Well, it does seem that Blog City isn’t the only site having problems right now. I’ve had issues getting to Boing Boing for some time now. Boing Boing, although not completely political in its subject matter, does lean to the left when it does express political viewpoints. So I wonder if there is just some general traffic issues with the net on a day like today or if there is indeed a movement by partisan hackers to take down sites they don’t agree with. Blah!

A Domain Name, that is! Yes, I’ve finally decided to get my own domain name for this weblog. I figured it was time. I’m being syndicated by DU Project, developing relationships with companies as media entity, even getting linked to by some pretty popular weblogs. For those who subscribe to my feed, you shouldn’t have to do anything. The Blog-City address is still valid for feeds and for viewing the site directly, but now you have the option of saving a few keypresses and typing in just “twelveblackcodemonkeys.com.” Now all I have to do is come up with a logo!

I’ve been having a bit of difficulty with my RSS feed within the last several days. Bloglines is giving me the [!] error which means there’s either a problem with the xml file or it can’t find it, but when I go to the address, it comes up immediately. I had changed the description of my blog recently and I think the problem might be an apostrophy that Bloglines maybe tripping over (as scripting languages often need to have single and double quotes escaped). So, I just too the apostrophy/sing quote out and tried to ping a few aggragators and waited 30 minutes but nothing’s changed, so I’m posting this entry to see if that will force Bloglines to refresh and then be able to see my feed properly. Let’s hope this works.

Update: That fixed it!