Turns out that’s not so easy to do – see earlier post. I’m trying to be more disciplined, but surely I can give myself a fifteen minute break every day or so – as long as it’s just fifteen minutes. This blogging thing can be addictive.

I noticed recently that 2006 is the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Australia by Europeans (the people who have gotten to write most of our history.) I was fourteen when I emigrated from Australia, so I never got the high school history, and a lot of details escape me. Of course, if you Google australia 1606 you get a Dutch site – I just can’t get away from them! Interestingly enough, I ran into a business associate just recently who said the same thing.

I’m no longer living in Australia, so I won’t get to see the reaction of the indigenous population to any celebrations of the event. If it’s anything like 1992 was in the Americas, I would expect some disgust and loud protest. But how can you blame them? After all, they still haven’t gotten credit for being the first people to discover America. Not to mention, of course, the abysmal treatment the Aborigines received at the hands of the Europeans – well into the twentieth century.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Posts About Me, Society at 18:53 PST

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I need to take a break from the website, so don’t expect to see much new stuff going up in the near future. I have important IRL stuff to attend to. I can still be reached via email if you have any questions about previous technical stuff I’ve posted or about my experience fighting cancer.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 07:44 PST

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I saw the 2.0 Release Candidate come out 19 days ago, but I totally missed the stable version release 8 days ago. Beta testing in 11 days? I dunno… but I went ahead and upgraded to WordPress 2.0.

It went very smoothly – this time I remembered to disable all my plugins first, plus I backed up all the files and the database, as usual. Turning the plugins back on was fun because my disabled admin toolbar generated a fatal error. I’ll have to check that – I’m betting that the command to check for administrative privileges and launching the toolbar is missing the crucial “if function_exists” syntax that I harped on GamerZ about with his UserOnline plugin.

There doesn’t appear to be any changes in the front end – what you see when you come here – but there are quite a few in the back end, where I write my posts and manage all the details. I had hacked a few settings, mostly on the appearance of the interface, but so far it doesn’t look like I need to do it again. The immediate difference I see is that they’ve incorporated TinyMCE as the editor when you’re writing a post. I can’t say that I’m thriled about that; but then, I’ve only used TinyMCE before in Mambo, and its clunkiness may have been Mambo’s fault. Now that I’ve upgraded, I suppose I’ll have to actually go read the release notes to find out what underlying changes have been made. Most of my plugins worked under the new release, including my hacked UserOnline – which was rereleased for 2.0. I’m guessing my hacks prevented any failure, but I’m going to update that one anyway to get the benefit of the detecting registered users feature. I’m still working on my own version. My recently installed Text Control plugin didn’t seem to work, but then, when I tried using it recently, it wasn’t doing what I expected it to do, anyway.

The new installation came with a couple of included plugins for automatic backing up of the database where all my settings and content are actually stored, and for improved filtering against comment spam. The last one I’m very interested in – recently my comment spam has been getting worse, about a dozen every two or three days. It got bad enough that I turned off my email notification of comments waiting for review, and some have even been leaking through the fabled WordPress safeguards.

Still, I’m missing that hoped-for OpenID login incorporation. There’s a plugin available, but since the author admits it’s buggy and he hasn’t updated it, I haven’t installed it myself. Since it cuts to the core of the DisplayOnline plugin I’m writing, I just might have to write the functionality in myself. Just another thing to slow me down.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 15:38 PST

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Lately it seems like I’ve been pretty obsessed with my own traffic. I’ve got to rein that in a little.

I started this website because I wanted to learn about how to set up a website, and it’s gone pretty well. I started the blog just because it accomplished several things at once. I learned how to install and setup content management software; in this case, WordPress. At the same time I was trying to set up another CMS system – Mambo – which I have now officially abandoned, mostly because the beauty of WordPress taught me to recognize what a bear Mambo is. I started learning about dynamic web pages, which is way better than editing in raw HTML or XHTML. I started learning PHP and MySQL so I could get the thing to do exactly what I wanted. I’ve even started getting into the fine details of Cascading Style Sheets. And I started writing about what I was learning, which gave me content.

I think the pleasure I got from the website in general and the blog in particular encouraged me to tackle other computer-related issues that I had been wanting to address. I finally knuckled down and got a version of Linux to recognize and use a wireless network card, which allowed me to use Linux and connect to the Internet. If you’re trying to switch over to Linux but can’t connect, you might as well forget it. It was just too necessary too many times to reboot into Windows just to find out how to do something in Linux.

While doing so I learned other new things. I wrote about it in my blog, which gave me even more content.

And suddenly I started getting traffic. But since my website project started because I wanted to learn how to set up a website, inevitably the traffic became a major focal point – learning how to monitor it, what things attracted it, how to promote it, and the whole search engine optimization thing.

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that content is what generates traffic. After all, if you don’t have anything to write that’s worth reading, no one will come to see it. Although I had thought that writing about what I’d learned in regards to generating traffic might be interesting to other people who want to set up small websites, going through the traffic reports doesn’t show anybody coming here from a search engine using those sorts of terms. And if you think about it, how would they find my little nook? Search engine optimization has major commercial value, so people writing about it want to attract customers, and they’re the experts at getting their sites positioned much higher than my puny efforts. No one who comes here is going to be interested in how I rank on Google using certain search words, my PageRank, or how many other visitors I’ve had looking for the same thing. They’re looking for information, and if I have it, they’ll read on, and they’ll come back or pass a link to others.

So when I sat down tonight, tired of updating my listings of visitors who came looking for a specific thing, and noticing that my recent posts were sort of listless, empty, meandering, or the ultimate in gauche – self important, I wanted to get back to writing about what I was doing, or learning, or trying to accomplish. And this post is what I came up with, mainly because this is the thing that was staring me in the face: write about what you enjoy, or are interested in, or better yet, feel compelled to write about, not what you think will give you an audience. People who are interested in the same things may find it, and if you write well about it, more of them will come. But even if they don’t, the experience of writing is cathartic in itself. After twenty-five years, I am finally doing something I have always wanted to do – writing.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Posts About Me at 22:26 PST

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Wonder who he is? My locator says Ocean City, New Jersey, but that could be off by quite a bit. I don’t normally get paranoid about my visitors, but when the posts are about my employer, they get bookmarked right away, and there’s another office in OC…

Referrer: www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/search/web/corrpro%2Bmessage%2Bboard

Posted by Greg as My Website at 10:20 PST

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It’s this sort of stuff that makes me so interested in Linux. Microsoft has revealed that viewing WMF graphics on the Internet can allow sites to remotely execute code. CERT – the US Government’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, has issued an alert. In other words, just by going to a site you can get infected with a trojan or worm. No clicking or agreeing to software installation required. In Internet Explorer there’s no indication that anything happened; in Firefox or Mozilla it will at least ask you if you want to execute the code.

Posted by Greg as OS at 07:58 PST

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The San Diego Chargers know their opponents for 2006. Next year we play the AFC North and the NFC West, as well as the third-ranked teams from AFC East and South. (And, of course, six games in our division.) Here they are:

Home:
Denver (13-3)
Kansas City (10-6)
Oakland (4-12)
Cleveland (6-10)
Pittsburgh (11-5)
Arizona (5-11)
St. Louis (6-10
Tennessee (4-12)

Away:
Denver (13-3)
Kansas City (10-6)
Oakland (4-12)
Baltimore (6-10)
Cincinnati (11-5)
San Francisco (4-12)
Seattle (13-3)
Buffalo (5-11)

It looks good for a killer year. Three non-divisional games stand out – Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Seattle – but the rest are against weak opponents. We better remember the lessons of Miami. We have the makings of anywhere from a 12-4 to a 14-2 season!

Posted by Greg as Football at 18:42 PST

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Sometimes I’m still amazed that I have an impact on the Internet. It’s not a big one, granted, but it’s there. I get a solid 25 hits a day on my postings about hooking up a certain model of wireless network card under Linux, and even though hardly anyone posts a comment about it, it makes me feel good thinking that I’m helping someone switch over to Linux. Getting my various wireless cards to work after I installed Linux (I went through three before finally determining to keep trying until I succeeded) was a huge problem that kept me from using Linux for literally years. Now that I can use Linux and connect to the Internet, I keep finding myself rebooting when I sit down at my computer and see that Windows login screen. I want to use my Fedora instead. And I want to share that feeling.

What’s more, some of those hits are coming without referrals, which I can only interpret as either someone bookmarking my site, or emailing a link to someone else. Either one says I’m making a difference.

Some of my hits are from people looking up my brother’s comic strip. (I’m going to give him a boost in Google PageRank by linking to his site – even though he doesn’t link back to me.) So I’ve got the old family pride cred, too.

Speaking of family, I had a great day today up in LALALand visiting my brother, sister-in-law, nephews and parents. We were sitting around talking about my father’s impending retirement, and the consensus was that he needed to find an activity that kept him busy and happy. I mentioned that I would always have my computer and Internet tinkering, and that it was a most fulfilling hobby for me. I guess that since the subject matter had been covering activities that could also produce income, I was asked if I could make money off of blogging. I had to laugh – if I could figure out how to do that, I’d have a million opinionated schmoes beating a path to my door! But some bloggers have, particularly through Google’s AdSense, but I don’t know whether it would be enough to even cover the hosting expenses.

Which brings me around to the inspiration for this post. (Yes, there’s a good reason why I picked the title “Ramblings“.) As I said before, I got a positive response to my feedback from GamerZ, the author of the WordPress plugin UserOnline. The latest version of his download includes all the things he said he would do. He added the GPL, he removed the core WP files hack, and he gave me credit for adding bot definitions. You just can’t get more responsive than that. Isn’t the Internet and the open source community great? I use stuff written by a someone 14,000 km away, talk to him, and it gets better. Next time I’m in Singapore (which, hopefully, will be in a few months – I have job in Diego Garcia coming up, and I’ll have to pick up a C-17 at Paya Lebar), I’m going to have to look him up. Perhaps I can persuade him to give me a better tour of the place than I gave myself with a guidebook when I was last there in 1999. I love Asia, and it’s always better to see it through the eyes of locals. Especially if you’re a 195 cm white guy who can’t speak the local lingo.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, My Website, People, Programming at 01:37 PST

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In private I whine about religious holidays, so I guess I should at least acknowledge the secular ones. Happy New Year!

I got up early, so I’m checking out my site, looking at visitors, clearing out the spam comments (thankfully, WordPress flags and holds in moderation about 98% of them), responding to the one real one, etc. Then I came upon an unsual referrer (hotbot – I guess I’m still amazed that anyone uses anything other than Google or Yahoo) that pointed my visitor to an old post about Rodd’s Brevity comic (today’s, by the way, was pretty funny). I followed the footsteps back to a June 28 post, reread it, and groaned.

You see, what I should be doing right now is getting my ass in gear to go up north to visit my brother’s family and my parents, who are visiting from the east coast. And in this six-month old post I made reference to the fact that I should get around to sending my bro his birthday present, which I had bought eight months before then, and I realized that it was still sitting in my office.

I’m such a dweeb. I could go on about how much of one I am and in how many ways, but I need to get up and get ready.

Oh – but I have to mention it sometime – I finally knocked that stupid old Ishbabiddle post down a notch and have taken the fourth ranking in Google searches for brevity comic.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Posts About Me at 07:45 PST

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