Geek

Earlier this week I was looking for space on my Laptop, and came across a very bloated Photobooth folder. When I reviewed the images contained I realized it’s not safe to leave your laptop unattended. My daughters forever the techno geek actors left my laptop full of images and movies like these …

LOL they made me laugh out loud. Thanks Girls

Well after less than a month with iPower I have moved web hosts due to their unreliability. I am sure this isn’t the way they are permanently but over the last week my site was down on a number of occasions for hours, and I have lost my confidence.

I am very sorry for the inconvenience caused … grrr.

One of the interesting observations is that they weren’t prepared to go into detail of what the technical issue was, just each time that “it was a router and it’s now fixed”. I guess companies do this due to being scared of looking bad, but left with no convincing information I was forced to move and protect myself. I wish them luck, but at least now I have some confidence that things will be even better than before.

Maybe they could have shown me that they care and there should have been a strategy to not made the situation worse.

Hopefully I have done my homework a little better this time, and have moved to Host Gator. I’ve read lots of positive reviews, they consistently rate high on “Best ISP” lists, and I love that they have an environment policy and plan.

I also really love how they present themselves giving a sense of size, combined with the promise of support from the owner … You can even chose for your support ticket to go to CEO Brent Oxley if you’re not satisfied with the help you’re getting. Anyway setup was easy, registration and getting started took less than 20 minutes, just like it should be.

Once again, thank you for your support of me, and I trust that all will be good now and in fact the site even feels a little faster.

I saw my blog traffic jump by a huge amount yesterday, with most traffic coming from Stumbleupon, and I wondered how I could check who had reviewed me, and what they had said. I found a webpage on Stumbleupon that links to this information. It doesn’t seem to be directly accessible from your user account but I found part of the answer in this post.

You need to build a URL using a base URL of:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=

plus the page URL, eg

http://www.stephenbaugh.com/blog/2008/09/the-guy-that-turns-her-light-off/

This means the full URL would be

http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://www.stephenbaugh.com/blog/2008/09/the-guy-that-turns-her-light-off/

This brings you to the referrer page on StumbleUpon, with the information you’re looking for. Just click on the “reviewed by” link, shown as “2 reviews” in this picture. (click image to see full size).

In an effort to make it even easier in the future I set up a script in my book marks.

The javascript is:

javascript:void(location.href=’http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=’+location.href)

Loaded in Safari like this (click image to see full size):

This shows up in my browser as below, meaning I can check the StumbleUpon status of any page right from my browser window.

UPDATE: Of course you could do what I did and change to Firefox, the Stumbledupon tools are amazing. I like the new Firefox, but miss Safari though

I’m new to blogging and although I have seen consistent and significant growth in unique visitors, I have been keen to find tips to grow my blog quickly. I’ve spent my spare time over the last few weeks researching and what I have found scares me.

There are lots of ways to grow visitor numbers and one of the most heavily promoted is back-links. The benefit of back links is that search engines give greater ranking to sites that have lots of back links as these links are seen as votes (endorsements) from other sites. Of course this makes sense and like everyone I will be doing my best to develop back links of my own.

My concern however is how some bloggers are going about this. What I have seen is the setting up of fake websites, commercial organizations doing the same and arrangements where a group of bloggers agree to swap “Digg nominations”, “Technorati Favs”, “Stumbleupon Recommendations” etc.

I understand the desire to build web traffic quickly, but if you use this method, at what cost?

My belief is this …

- If you make a recommendation without knowing what you are recommending you loose credibility and risk linking yourself to people who reflect badly on you.
- Quick traffic volumes don’t necessarily translate to longer term volumes.
- This is not building a network of friends that can support and help you.
- Most of these people don’t even visit your website, do you really want a recommendation from someone that doesn’t know you?
- To other bloggers and your readers you risk looking like a fake!

If you are in this for the long term, isn’t it better to put the work in and build a network of reliable links and develop your reputation as someone to be respected and listened to? In the long term I am certain this will yield dividends, especially if you hope to have your readers take advantage of recommendations you make.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you’re a bad person or dishonest … I also have tried this myself before I thought through what I was doing and stopped. I am just asking you to think carefully before you give away your valuable recomendations, favs and links.

Good luck and enjoy your time on line.

UPDATE : Here is a great post that offers lots of options for blog promotion

In addition to work, I get hundreds of personal emails a week, and have got myself into a situation again of “email overwhelm” on my personal account and Facebook.

Today I decided to catch up, and although I haven’t got through the 500 odd emails completely I am stunned by what I have come across so far.

- an email from an exchange student that lived with us over 20 years ago.
- 2 emails from old friends remaking contact.
- an email from an online friend telling me that her husband has passed away.
- a tirade of emails … first saying hello and then a number asking why I haven’t replied, escalating into abuse about me not caring
- an email to say I have a DVD over due
- lots of emails from friends
- and stunningly an email from a previous staff member telling me that her husband’s grandmother has been murdered.

Even without this type of thing, I feel real guilt that I can’t keep up with my email. I know I should spend more time catching up, but why is it that when people don’t hear from you they don’t try to make contact a different way?

Not replying in no way sums up how I feel about people, it is just a symptom of how busy the internet has got and how difficult it is to cope. What I am looking for is a way to seriously get my personal life out of my inbox … Facebook looked promising, but it doesn’t help with friends not on facebook … any ideas?

I used to give priority when choosing a new supplier to the one that used email, I might just start doing so if they use the phone.

Google is one of those companies I would like to avoid if I could. Not for any rational reason, just that they have become all pervasive and I want to slow them down. Like search, however, most if not all Google apps work really well and are hard to beat.

Google Reader is no exception.

To understand what it does, you first need an understanding of RSS; if you don’t have that, click here. I follow a lot of blogs as I am interested in a number of things, but visiting them directly is impractical and most other RSS clients just didn’t stack up. The reader works, so here is an introduction from an engineer at Google.

The easiest way to try it is to click this RSS link below, and select Google on the window that opens. When asked select Google Reader and join me on the feed … Thank you!

Subscribe in a reader

You can find Google reader here

To get the most out of Google Reader have a look here

LOL Ok somedays the internet makes … This guy on Twitter has 754 followers and he hasn’t yet said anything!!

I hope all those people aren’t holding their breath …

But just in case you to want to sit in anticipation too I have included the link here

Tell me below what makes you laugh as you travel the internet?

I talk with people a lot about website creation, online communities and blogging and I’m constantly surprised at the differing attitudes to what works, what’s trendy and often what’s affordable.

On one side of the room, the geeks say Web 2.0 is about the technology; on the other the marketing people and professors reckon it’s about the people.

But isn’t it about the purpose? Why are we doing this, and who is it for?

Restaurants are like this. You can build the most elegant dining room, back it with the best kitchen and staff, invite all the popular people – but they won’t come back unless you serve good food, project your style and find an audience to match it.

If you’re new to social media, here are a couple of excellent videos from a really cool site called www.commoncraft.com .

Enjoy.

Social Media

Social Networking

Well I have been waiting patiently for a week now to unlock my old Gen 1 iPhone that I prematurely upgraded to V2 for my sister. As previously mentioned I brought a 3G iPhone last week and thought I would experiment upgrading the old one and try using it on the Vodafone New Zealand network, of course without success.

Well, after checking almost hourly for a week, I was lucky enough to do so about 3 minutes after the dev team released their latest software, and became one of the fortunate ones able to download before the server crashed.

I had already upgraded to v2 through iTunes an iPhone that was previously running 1.1.4 unlocked with Ziphone.

It was not a perfect first run upgrade, as I got both 1600 and 6 errors from iTunes, but after a bit of experimenting I managed to get it to work.

Basically I had to do two things.

1, I used expert mode to force the upgrade to upgrade the firmware and do the bootneauter … this wasn’t happening before.

2, In regard to the (6) error in iTunes I think this was related to not being in DFU mode … I keep forgetting this is not the same as Recovery mode. If you see the picture of a cable and the iTunes logo you are in the wrong mode.

Get the update here

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/42858313/thanks-for-waiting

You will be asked for the boot loader files, look here

http://iphonefreakz.com/iphone-firmwares/

To put the phone in DFU mode

http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1034

Anyway, once I had a working iPhone1,1_2.0_5A347_Custom_Restore.ipsw file I was able to upgrade. In addition I was also able to upgrade a second working 1.1.4 Gen 1 iPhone, also unlocked previously with Ziphone just by connecting it to the mac, selecting restore in iTunes while holding the option key so I could select the file. I didn’t even need to put the phone in DFU mode.

This is all very cool.

Everything seems to work brilliantly from Wi-Fi to being unlocked on the Vodafone New Zealand network. Exchange works great.

Thanks again iPhone Dev Team … my heros of the day :-)

Following up from Friday’s post. I now have had a few minutes to get my iPhone with v2 software working directly with Exchange Server 2007.

As it turns out, having not used ActiveSync before it was not configured correctly on the server. That was easily fixed and the iPhone then connected first time. I love this functionality, and hope it’s development continues, hopefully including ActiveSync working with iCal and Mail.

Ok it cool, but here are the limitations that make it a little less than perfect, although better than previous IMAP options.

1, only one active sync account. I have 2 work accounts

2, if you sync exchange contacts you loose your address book contacts, meaning no work vs private address book. I wish it was a little more clever than this.

3, you can’t invite people to events from the phone (well not as far as i can see). This seems to be a real short coming and hope Apple fix this quickly.

Still I’m a happy camper :-)