A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Attended part of the first day of this. Like many conferences, the audience was very bimodal — a minority of very knowledgeable industry people, and a majority of information seekers who are very new to blogs. Sometimes this made the presentations nonsensical — for instance a long discussion about trackback which the knowledgeable people already understood, but which confused the hell out of anyone else.

A lot of interest in how much money you can really make from a blog. How does google adsense work, how can you optimize for it, what can you really gross from adsense, what other kinds of sponsorship/affiliate dollars are available, etc etc etc. People are looking hard for the business model here. Honestly there was not much to chew on tho — the adsense license prevents people from talking in detail about their experiences. Personally I have to wonder about the viability of this cycle — fill a page with content to optimize your google rank, and then make money off of google ads placed on your page — Google sources you the traffic, and then pays you for the traffic. Kind of odd, isn’t Google someday going to figure out how to squeeze the guy in the middle?

For some reason, about two weeks ago, my IIS server (that this site resides on) quit being able to resolve DNS names. I’ve tried changing my DNS servers, no avail. I’ve tried turning off and turning on the DNS Client Resolver, no avail. The only config change I have made recently is to turn on the WebDAV extension in IIS, I turned that off, no avail.

This happened to me when I first installed XP Server 2003 and it was due to a 3rd-party socket filter that i had to remove. Going to investigate that next. Also going to look at ways to log the traffic at the IP level as i try to hit a named site to see what is happening.

Static pages on the site work fine obviously, but any kind of dynamic page tends to fall over.

Maybe it is time to move to a hosted solution. Not really having fun chasing this crap down.

UPDATE: used the Network Monitor utility in XP to see that, for whatever reason, the DNS servers I had been using were returning “name not found” to all my requests. Further dug in and found that our ISP had provided us new DNS servers to use for our DMZ boxes a couple weeks ago. All fixed up now. Don’t really understand why the old DNS servers were still operational and still responding to DNS requests at all, but onward and upward.

Things I’d like to add to the blog…

• From Windley, the blogboxes look cool.
• from the javascript weblog, Feedsplitter looks like a nice way to integrate RSS content. mt-rssfeed is another interesting tool…
• this filemanager thingee seems cool…always looking for something better than ftp…at the extreme end of the spectrum i could host a personal wiki for my files, twiki seems interesting
• lots of pointers and recos for log analysis tools in the comments here
• Converting to fluid styles in mt templates — good overview.
• Yet another color scheme generator — I’m a sucker for these. This one is pretty good.
• Fixing the sidebar to go all the way to the bottom
• A javascript image gallery — cool and simple.

I’ve had comments off for 4-5 days while i started to move towards typepad registration required … but i loved not having to deal with comments anymore since they have been 99% crap (either spam or “i need a product key”). i concluded i didn’t need them at all. send me mail, or send me a trackback (until trackback spam causes me to turn that off).

Comments busted while i disable anonymous and enable typekey. even with blacklisting and required approval, just too much crap to deal with. I may turn off comments completely as there hasn’t been anything interesting in them in weeks and weeks.

Found via LarryO’s blog — Jim Horne and Danny Glasser now blogging. From Lan Manager, Windows for Workgroups, Messenger days. Danny you need a feed…

Found via Winds of Change, 411blog.net seems like an interesting way to help the rest of the world find quality blog content.

Newsgator keeps pushing ahead with new partnerships, these guys seem serious about finding a business.

From Life of a one-man IT department, a pointer to RSS Digest, a nice way to integrate xml feeds on your page.

One man’s password algorithm — I use a variant of this and it seems to work pretty well.

Flexwiki open sourced — I like Flexwiki, using it for some private Wikis, a lot nicer visual look than some of the other wiki tools I played with.

From Geekman, the List of Lists — nice guide to utilities.

Rich likes Maxthon, I suppose I should try tho I am getting software install fatigue — too many machines on which I have to manage the software footprint.

Good basic tutorial on sidebars in MT — Learning Movable Type: Adding a Sidebar

Life of a one-man IT department

OK based on this reco — Movalog: Merging your blogs — i installed multiblog last nite. actually went on kind of a plugin install rampage. the install of multiblog and getxml were so easy i decided to try out some more from the mt3 tested library. i’ve slowed down tho, as the install of typemover hasn’t worked quite so well — some path problems.

Following up on my earlier post, I installed. Very simple to install, very clear doc. I’ve done my first stupid little trial use — my Halloween schedule in a sidebar on the right. Obviously need to work on formatting but this is very cool.

Note to self — try out the getxml plugin as a better way to integrate football scores, standings, etc.

OK I upgraded. Pardon any problems. The default stylesheet for the admin interface seems to be screwed in firefox and in ie.

UPDATE: ok i fixed the problem with the admin interface, config problem on my end.

UPDATE: i’ve substantially tightened up my comment acceptance practices to deal with spam, i was flooded over the weekend. i may loosen as i get comfortable with typekey, moderation features, etc.

Anxious to install the upgrade but per at least one user i maybe should wait just a few days…

Deep Green Crystals: Oh, and Trackback is broken too — latest in a series of posts from him about his troubles. Worth reading again when I do the conversion

Someone is using a new tool to get around my simple obfuscation techniques. I’ve deleted 30+ comments today. Time for new strategies. Probably time to upgrade to MT3.

Blog Software Breakdown via Scriptygoddess

In the context of a discussion about RSS use in place of newsletters, Jon Udell asks The obvious alternative is a personalized RSS feed. Does anyone have this already?
What a great idea. Now if feedster provided this service, that would be something special.

Love Gary Turner’s idea of a blog as a personal dashboard — memoria technica | Personal Dashboard. Despite what my huge reading audience might think, I basically do my blog for me. It is where I keep interesting pointers to things, things I might need in the future. I wish it was easy to keep track of all my favorite installed software on my blog, so i could easily move it all to the next machine. More importantly all my PIM data so I could access it from anywhere. Or all my current projects and documents.