Just had to give a shout-out to the mysterious Dr Dave, developer of Spam Karma 2, a plug-in for the WordPress platform. The latest statistics for this site, representing about six months worth of traffic:

• Total Spam Caught: 19003 (average karma: -113007.61)
• Total Comments Approved: 1736 (average karma: 11.88)
• Total Comments Moderated: 254
• Current Version: 2.2 final r3

Seriously, if you use WordPress, this little bit of code is just amazing.

And to the many anonymous morons who think that polluting the Internets with comment spam is a legitimate way to make a living, well … I am confident there’s a special circle of Hell reserved just for you. And I hope you get to visit it real soon.

Well, sort of.

Sometime in the past week, the counter on this site passed over the 1 million mark in pageviews.

Thanks for all the visits!

Yes, I know I promised Part 2 of Changing web hosting companies next, but Dan Richman of the Seattle P-I asked a series of really good questions (as one would expect from a top-notch reporter) that deserve answers before I continue:

what do you mean by “own my own domain names”? versus “using an ISP’s domain name”?

i thought no one owns domain names — we simply lease them.

could you perhaps get a little more basic?

these postings have the potential to be extremely useful.

I sometimes forget that the Internet is still basically in its infancy, and some of the concepts I take for granted aren’t at all obvious. So let’s start with a brief tutorial on domain names here.

Continue reading “Mastering your own domain” →

[I know I promised this weeks ago, but the story turned out to be more complicated than I originally thought. So rather than delay the whole thing, I decided to publish it in several parts. Here’s Part 1.]

Last month I switched hosting companies. I had never done this before, so I approached the task with some trepidation. Everything seems to have turned out just fine (so far, anyway – knock on wood).

As promised, in this post I’ll share why web hosting matters and why I decided to switch. In Part 2, I’ll give you an idea of the decision-making process I went through. Finally, in Part 3 I’ll list the hosting companies I looked at and explain how I settled on my new hosting company, A2 Hosting.

First, a word about what web hosting is and why it matters. (Update: For some basic background information on domain names and hosting companies and how owning your own domain is different from being assigned an address by your Internet service provider, see the tutorial here.)

Continue reading “Changing web hosting companies, Part 1” →

Two years ago I noticed that Wired News was one of a handful of publishers starting to treat Internet-related terms as common nouns, not capitalized proper nouns. At the time, I wrote: “I suspect that the editors of Wired News are a few years ahead of their time, if not a few decades.”

I shoulda left off that last clause. It’s a couple years later, and I’m seeing more and more influential outlets beginning to lowercase the word web, for instance. This should be a source of never-ending fun for me over the next few months, as I work on a pair of new books: one for Microsoft Press, which capitalizes the Web, and Que, which doesn’t.

Me, I’m going to start using the lower-case when talking about the web. I’m not ready to make Internet generic, though.

NewsGator has had some hiccups today (acknowledged on their forum), so I fired up Bloglines for the first time in a few months. It seems to be faster than I remember from last year. Guess the long-awaited datacenter move is complete.

More than 400 people subscribe to this site in Bloglines. Are you happy with the service lately?

Greg Reinacker of NewsGator has hacked together aprototype of a visually based aggreagtor view:

I’m a visual person, and a lot of the feeds I subscribe to have images in the posts. If I could see all of those images together, I could make some quick decisions about what I want to read now, vs. what I will read later. …

[I]f you have unread stuff, you’ll see a compilation of all of the images in your unread posts. If you click on one, that post will get marked as read in NG/Online, and you’ll get linked out to the post.

If you have a NewsGator account, follow the links to Greg’s post, where you’ll find out how you can use this prototype for a quick visual view of your unread feeds.

No NewsGator account? Here’s a sample of what Greg’s account looked like:

I wouldn’t want to use this all the time, but it sure does offer a different view of my feeds.

Would you use something like this?

Fun from J-Walk:

What Do Your Clothes Say?

Examine the clothes you are wearing right now, and then tell us what words, if any, are printed on them. External words only (i.e., no need to transcribe the tag on your underwear).

The answers so far are in the comments, which are always pretty fun reading at J-Walk. Go add your own.

Well, it’s about time the Bloglines blog got updated. The new post acknowledges what any Bloglines user already knew:

We’re not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline).

So hang tight because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we’ll keep you posted.

Gee, that sounds great. Except that’s exactly what the people who run Bloglines were saying more than four months ago. Here’s the text of a post that appeared on the Bloglines announcement page on August 9:

Bloglines is experiencing some slowing in posting new blog and news feed articles during busy blogging hours. This is a temporary issue — we’ve simply outgrown our current facility. To fix it, we are moving our computer operations to a larger location that will give us plenty of room to grow. The slowdown doesn’t put any user accounts or subscriptions at risk, and everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process.

Sound familiar? (And don’t go looking for that August 9 post. It was deleted – “accidentally,” according to a response I got via e-mail from a Bloglines spokesperson.) I had a reasonably civil e-mail exchange with Bloglines’ media relations rep back in August, but when I asked how long the move to a new server center would take, my questions were pointedly ignored. I sent four separate e-mail messages to Bloglines representatives asking for an update. They ignored every one. I also sent e-mail messages to Bloglines founder and CEO General Manager Mark Fletcher. Apparently, he was too busy counting the shares of stock he received in the sale of Bloglines to respond.

Last August, Bloglines promised more “transparency” and committed itself to updating the Bloglines announcement page more frequently. (For the record, yesterday’s post was the first one since October 27. What other online business can get around to posting a progress report to their customers every seven weeks? CEO Fletcher hasn’t updated his personal blog since October 31, so I guess the Bloglines team is following their leader’s example.) Those were obviously empty promises. The company has apparently been unable to deal with technical issues and is either unwilling or unable to communicate with its customers honestly.

I used to recommend Bloglines enthusiastically. Today, I encourage people to use NewsGator, which blows its competitor away in every conceivable measure – most importantly, NewsGator knows how to communicate with its customers, offering frequent status updates, a lively discussion forum, and first-rate support.

Bye-bye, Bloglines.